Girls and Boys

Yesterday, I taught my daughters what it means to be transgender.

The conversation started simply enough. They walked into my bedroom as I was watching a short video made up of snippets of interviews with people who faced various life challenges and still lived in joy and gratitude. They started asking me questions. What’s wrong with that girl? With that man?

I did my best, with my limited knowledge, to explain the things that weren’t clear to them. The little girl has something wrong with her chromosomes. She needs extra help being taken care of, and life is harder for her. That man still has the brain of a baby. That’s why his dad has to take care of him even though he’s an adult. But there was one woman who stood out as seeming very normal. Unlike the schizophrenic, whose vivid descriptions of her inner turmoil made up for her seemingly normal countenance, this woman would seem out of place to anyone who didn’t hear or know the meaning of a single word that she used: trans.

So I decided that I wouldn’t let her slip by unnoticed. I paused the video on her image, and gave the girls a brief explanation, as I had with several of the other interviewees, of her unique life challenge. They seemed mildly interested, and I realized in that moment that I could either let this opportunity slip away, or I could engage them. The answer was obvious, as was the best method to go about it. I’d already used this method to teach the girls about other life challenges, such as cystic fibrosis and congenital deafness. I would use online videos to teach them about transgender children!

It was NPR’s broadcast of the story of a transgender child – a little girl named Violet, born a boy named Armand – that helped me to understand that Gender Identity Disorder is not a perversion or even a mental illness, but rather a tragic mismatch of body and mind. Violet’s story made real to me the idea that a person could be completely convinced of their gender – as certain of theirs as I am of mine, if not more so – even as their anatomy contradicts them. Violet’s mother talked about how her daughter struggled with the nightmare of waking up every morning to find that she still had a penis, finding it as repulsive and foreign as most girls would to discover such a thing on their own bodies for the first time.

And so, we watched the story of a little girl named Josie. It was a long story, made up of 4 separate segments, but Ariel clung to every word, even as her little sister began begging her to play in the other room after the second segment. She was fascinated, and asked a lot of questions. Did that little girl really have a penis? Why couldn’t the doctors take it off for her, if she wanted them to so badly? Why did the other kids not want to play with her? After that story was finally over, she wanted to watch another, so we viewed the story of a girl named Jackie.

I was amazed at Ariel’s compassion as she watched the videos with me. I know for a fact that she’s being taught homophobia by her father, and I assumed that, even if he had not specifically taught her transphobia (yet), objections about “natural” gender and “the way God made people” would follow. But instead, I saw empathy. Ariel wanted to understand how it felt to be these girls, and she cared about their struggles. She was on the edge of her seat as one of the girls waited to hear whether she would be getting the hormone blockers and estrogen injections that she wanted so badly. When one of the stories involved rejection and bullying by classmates, Ariel declared that if that girl was at her school, she would be her friend.

I don’t know how to wrap this little story up, and I think that’s largely because the story isn’t over. Time will tell how Ariel reacts to trans people whom she encounters in her own life, just as it will tell whether Felicity will share her sister’s empathy when her attention span improves. But I am hopeful. I hope that, in my small way, I am helping create a better future for those who have these struggles, by preparing my children to be better, kinder, more compassionate citizens of the world. And I hope that love and equality will continue to have victory over hate and bigotry in the hearts of my babes.