~I have NPR on my car radio all the time, but I have to confess that I am half listening most of the time. But Wednesday afternoon as I was coming back from a service at a retirement home, thinking about all sorts of things, something about the story being broadcast caught my attention--a mom, talking about her son's fascination with all things girly, and his desire to have a dress. When she finally took him to Tarjay to pick out a dress, she says, she had never seen him so happy.
~The story shifted then to talk about another family with a son who also was fascinated with girl things. This family, however, on the advice of their therapist, no longer allowed their son any contact with "girl things"--no Barbies, no little ponies, no stuffed animals, nothing pink, not even drawing pictures of girls. He was adjusting, his mother said, but he was quieter, more subdued than before.
~You can read or listen to this piece on gender identity here. And the second installment is here. It was both fascinating and troubling. I've never liked the label "gender identity disorder" with its implications that preferring something outside the norm (a boy wanting to play with Barbies for example) is something that needs to be labeled, something pathological even. Of course the children featured in this piece wanted more than to play with "girl toys"--they wanted to dress like girls and play with girls, to BE girls.
~The therapists featured had wildly divergent opinions about these children and others like then. One therapist refuses to use the term "gender identity disorder" and believes that children should be supported in their efforts to determine their own identity. The other believes that children should be trained to accept who they REALLY are (i.e., the biological gender they were born with--penis=male and no questions allowed). This therapist advocates what feels to me like fairly punitive therapy--strict restrictions on who and what the child can play with, teaching boys to be more "manly"and so forth. What made me really sad was the way the child undergoing this therapy was portrayed--he's adjusting, he draws boys now and says to his mom that he has to stay away from pink--but at what cost? Even his mother who believes she is doing the right thing sees her child as subdued and conflicted. Does being "well adjusted" mean denying some part of yourself to fit into other people's norms? I don't think I've ever come across a case study that raise this issue more poignantly for me.
~Of course there are all sorts of physical issues to address if one accepts the notion that a child can consider him or herself transgendered, and the second installment of this piece addresses this (including a pretty controversial therapy that delays puberty). But beyond those concerns and beyond all the issues this pieces raises about our conceptions of "normal" (which other people have written about far better than I can elsewhere in the blogosphere) are the underlying assumptions being made about gender--the very notions that only one gender is "allowed" to like certain categories of things, that little boys (toddlers even) need to be "manly." I'm old enough to have grown up when these ideas were mainstream, but naively perhaps I'd thought that we'd moved on a bit.
~Really, what does it mean to be born male or female? When I was teaching I emphasized how much gender was a social construct, and talked about the many ways parents "gender" their children even before they are born. The children in this piece had very strong notions at a very young age (1-2 years) that the gender labels placed on them didn't fit. If our gender categories were more fluid would these children have felt more comfortable in their bodies? More importantly perhaps would their parents have felt more comfortable with their children's choices?
5 comments:
very interesting post and links, on a lot of levels. i think you are right, that it is healthier to not be so rigid about gender identity.
my first reaction was that little kids experiment and try on identities all the time. i think it is pretty normal for boys to like pink, or try nailpolish, and girls to want to do "boy" things, etc. i don't like the horrible, highly gendered marketing for kids -- think it is bad for every kid.
when i read the pieces, the part on the therapist who recommended cutting all "girly" things out of a young boy's life seemed cruel and condemning -- like forcing a left-hander to use his/her right hand, but far worse. that is a child who will be struggling about being "bad" for a long time.
i have a lot of gay friends, and think that things have become much better over the last 20-30 years, with families, schools, workplaces accepting and embracing people despite whom they love. transgender issues seem much more complicated. but perhaps in time, it will seem less like everyone else's business, how a person views him or herself.
I think 60 minutes had a piece on this once--and I remember a set of fraternal boy twins, one of whom was into all things pink and sparkly. His parents were letting him be who he was, despite being "at risk" (or whatever) for turning out gay or transgender. I think it's going to be hard for such a kid somewhere--either at home or out in the world.
Although my particular religious stripe has pretty ingrained ideas about what women and men do/don't do and how they dress/don't dress, I try to keep it toned down in my own house. Pink is just a color! Whenever Miss M says that boys don't wear dresses, I point out that in other parts of the world, people wear different kinds of clothes and it doesn't break down by boy/girl.
I am tickled when AM "nurses" his stuffed animals, but at the same time he has a love for trucks and trains (and busses! and bulldozers!) far more passionate than his sister (who reserves such enthusiasm only for art supplies). I am still unsure what to do with that.
Why can't everyone just view themselves and their kids as works in progress?
I heard one of the installments of that story and found it so moving that I sat in front of the house in my car to listen to the rest of it.
I felt really conflicted about the piece because I do think that gender is a social construct, and I find "gender identity disorder" to fly in the face of that conviction. I wanted to say to the little boys, "The clothes you wear and the toys you play with and the friends you want to have and all the rest of it aren't about being a boy or a girl." But at the same time, I find compelling the experience of the family who has decided that they have a daughter rather than a son; a 2-year-old who is screaming about his/her gender identity and who finally blossoms as a 10-year-old once accepted as a girl is for me a real testimonial that there may be something more to gender identity than social construct.
From what little I know of the topic, GID is diagnosed more in boys than girls. I think it's interesting that girls can be tomboys and we've worked hard to break the glass ceiling for girls (let them play with trucks and tools etc). But we have much more rigid and less flexible ideas about boys.
I also heard the stories on NPR and found them really fascinating/disturbing.
my point of view was solidly in the "social construct" camp until i had children. i'm sure this was because so many gender expectations when i was growing up ['60's and early '70's] were ridiculous and discriminatory social practices, and i resented feeling bound by them.
i did not want to raise my children with such rigid expectatons. but to some extent, my son seemed "hardwired" to certain behaviors anyway -- for example, he rejected a soft doll that i hoped would help him practice nurturing when his sister was born [he was only 19 months], made guns out of ANYTHING [legos, banana, etc.] although we kept him from anything violent and we were socially isolated in japan, etc. and my daughter spent several years in a dressing-girly phase [skirts were musts, even in snow, etc.] despite being something of a tomboy. granted, this is a limited sample, but even at young ages my own kids had ideas of themselves that were not mine.
the social construct also just does not work well when i think of my gay friends. to a person, they knew they were different at very young ages. the years they spent trying to conform were painful, and they were afraid the world would fall apart if they told the truth about themselves.
i've been thinking more about transgender issues lately, since a colleague became a woman in her fifties, having a very solid career in place. it was rather startling to see her in her new identity, but the more i think about it, the more i think it was a very brave thing to do. i personally cannot imagine making all the choices and sacrifices she must have made -- but have to believe this was something of huge importance to her, and that each choice was made carefully.
and maybe that is why these pieces are so disturbing -- it is one thing for a 50-something to choose life in an unassigned gender, and something else for a 4 year old. we all transform over time in various ways. but perhaps the key is that no child should be shamed and punished for being who he/she is, so long as they are not hurting themselves or others and are otherwise healthy, growing, learning.
lot of food for thought here.
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