pantryslut

Thanks to Mike Honda, transgender kids are in the news. I caught a KTVU segment on a child at North Oakland Charter School today. (Link here.) The segment was nice, respectful, and hopefully enlightening to some folks.

However, the first question after the segment was, to paraphrase, "how can you tell when this is real and how can you tell when it's just a phase?"

And here is where I would like to clear my throat a little.

When last we discussed the gender identification of my children here, Simone was mostly a boy. April was entirely a girl. The school was coping, we were coping, people on the bus were coping, and overall life was going as smoothly as it could.

Things have changed a little.

Simone is deep into exploring her femme side. Whether she is a femme boy or a femme girl depends on when you ask her, but she's wearing dresses and accessorizing her hair and she is totally OK with being perceived as a girl in these moments. This year she is using the girls' bathroom at school (after discovering it's cleaner). She asks her class to use "he" as a pronoun but it OK now if they forget, and she is still OK if I call her "she." She is still a boy and a girl, but right now anyway, girl is ascendant. Sometimes she is a boy in a dress -- because that happens in our world, after all -- but she's much less insistent on that point in general than she was even last year.

Meanwhile, April has decided she is a boy, although she does not care about pronouns. She will occasionally wear a dress or a skirt but mostly prefers pants, which is a radical change from last year when she was all about skirts and dresses and sparkly. (She still kind of likes sparkly.) She wants her hair pulled back every day because it looks more boyish that way. She is very frustrated that people have not instantly switched over to treating her like the boy she is. She is not a girl and a boy; she is all boy.

(She also signs all her homework "Bruce Wayne" unless she is wearing a bat-signal t-shirt, in which case she signs it "Batman.")

And so let's return to the question, "is it a phase? How can you tell?"

My answer is, you can't tell. Nobody can predict the future. You only have right now. Take them seriously *right now*, because *right now*, it's real. It's real even if it's a phase. It's real either way. It was real when Simone was getting into verbal altercations at preschool about her gender identity, and when she was learning to pee standing up. It was real when April wore nothing but skirts and dresses for several years in a row, and I finally started telling people who couldn't tell my kids apart (eh?) "if she's wearing a dress, that's April. If she's wearing pants, it's Simone." How this rule of thumb has blown back in my face! Oh well. We'll adjust.

So right now, it's complicated. And that's hard for people who like one simple rule and one set of pronouns for all occasions and one state of being, please. But just as before, I am letting the kids lead, and I am following and making adjustments accordingly. Phase or no phase. I suppose as we get closer to puberty we will have to have some discussions beyond the "right now." But we're not rushing it. We'll wait. We'll see.