My Fear

On creating fragile children

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash

*This essay was published, in slightly different form, in The Daily Scroll last year. I decided to republish it with some edits now that it’s back in my domain.

Once, when she was younger, my daughter ran screaming from the women’s bathroom at the playground. She arrived, breathless, trying to explain what had happened. “Lady—yelled—boy—.” She couldn’t finish, but I understood. A woman was upset that “a boy” was using the girls’ bathroom, and then enraged when my daughter explained that she was actually a girl. The woman in the bathroom couldn’t process that the short-haired child in gym shorts standing before her was female. I rubbed my child’s back and repeated one of our family mottos: “Recover quickly.” But inside, I was shaking. It took me longer to compose myself then it took her.

That would become a recurring theme—the misunderstandings and the need to handle them. The need to make my children better at handling them than I am.

It’s easy for people on the sidelines of this battle, or people who feel dragged into it unwillingly, to be dismayed about the intensity of cultural focus on bathrooms. There are so many real and pressing problems, housing shortages and inflation and guns and a massive mental health crisis, especially among teens. And yet because of our cultural expectation of sex-segregated bathrooms, they are often the locus of discomfort and misunderstanding, the place where tempers flare around gender issues. Ask any butch woman and she’ll tell you of being treated the way my kid was in the women’s restroom.

Once a kindergartner tried to crawl under the door while my daughter was in the stall at school, to see if she was “really a girl.” It wasn’t the young child’s fault. Like most kids today, she’d had no models of gender nonconformity. She didn’t know that masculine girls and feminine boys existed.

I don’t believe that our current gender revolution has created more space for these naturally gender nonconforming children. The conflation of gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria has ironically—or frighteningly—led to the idea that children who don’t conform to stereotypes should be set on a path toward medicalization that ultimately makes them conform, even if they’re not distressed over their differences. I believe this is happening for many reasons, including our national zeitgeist shift toward snowplow parenting, in which parents believe their job is to clear obstacles out of their children’s way rather than teach them to navigate them. We are terrified of our children’s discomfort and teach them to be terrified of it, too.

I worry that what children are learning about gender from our culture, social media and school continues that new tradition in a way that leaves them fragile and thin-skinned, unprepared to withstand pain and conflict and confusion. I worry that we are teaching children to view the world though a filter of victimization. I worry that they’re learning the path to power is through competitive oppression: a race to the bottom to get to the top.

Take, for instance, misgendering—in the alterworld of Twitter, until recently, a worse crime than, say, libeling someone, which is actually the lifeblood that powers the algorithm. Children are learning that misgendering is violence, or that we each have the right to control what pronouns people use for us, and that every person must be treated exactly as he, she (or they) wish to by others or else they’ve experienced discrimination, or even violence. Children are learning that discriminators must be punished, whatever their intent.

Most of the time, misgendering means correctly sexing—identifying someone by their biological sex and not their gender identity, and using the pronouns that were, until so recently, associated with sex. We have evolved to recognize one another by sex for reproductive purposes. It’s not an instinct that can be extinguished easily because of a modern culture war.

That instinct can cause a very small percentage of people with intense gender dysphoria deep distress, and I’m sensitive to that. Yet children are learning that everyone should feel deeply offended by others who are exercising their natural human instincts. Children are learning that they must accept one, very new, meaning of words like man and woman: social, not biological categories. If they don’t, they’ve hurt—no, harmed—someone. Children are learning that sex and sex stereotypes are interchangeable, that rejecting stereotypes means rejecting your body.

Or they are not learning about sex stereotypes; the popular gender teaching tool, the Genderbread Person, makes no mention of them. I don’t want children to be disrespectful, but if they’re disrespected, I don’t want them to melt into a puddle and demand vengeance. I don’t want them to need to weaken others to feel strong.

Once, I took my daughter to a concert and the woman sitting next to us leaned over, smiling, and said, “I used to take my son to concerts when he was little, too. Isn’t it fun?”

“Oh, this is my daughter,” I said. “But yes, it’s fun.” Her posture changed. She zipped up with discomfort. It wasn’t her fault. People are discomfited by a person they can’t slot neatly into a box because their brains are designed to categorize. She suffered an attack of cognitive dissonance and couldn’t recover. She made a lot of bird-like noises and then moved.

After that, we made a policy not to correct any strangers. If someone gets it wrong, you shrug, or laugh to yourself. If the person is going to be part of our lives, we gently correct them, while smiling. It’s a little extra work, but it’s not that big a deal. I am trying to change the world to better understand gender nonconforming children, but I am also trying to teach children to navigate the world as it is, not the world as I want it to or think it should be.

There are cultures that do understand gender nonconformity, cultures with categories for those who are of one sex and behaving more like the other. In most of those cultures, there’s a tacit acknowledgement that the behavior is related to same-sex attraction, but there are not necessarily acceptable categories for gay people, and thus this new category creates a kind of safety bubble where difference is understood and unremarkable, if not celebrated. Perhaps the nonbinary category is doing some of that work, but even nonbinary children—the vast majority of them female and identifying out of their sex—are digging into and reifying stereotypes, rejecting names or pronouns because of their cultural association with femininity, treating objects or ideas or words as if they have a sex instead of a cultural imposition of meaning. Some nonbinary kids I interviewed would never have worn anything pink or purple when they identified as girls, but once they’d opted out of the category, once they weren’t associating those colors with femininity, they felt free to partake of them.

Is this progress, or is this continuing the lengthy cultural project of devaluing the feminine? Is this teaching children to withstand pain, to tolerate difficulty, or is it teaching them that they must change themselves to be themselves, that the authentic can only be attained by artificial interventions? These are my worries. These are my fears. And I fear not just for the organically nonconforming children who emerge this way early in childhood, but for the teenagers with no such history who are so desperate to wriggle free from their pain and discomfort that they’ll do anything. Anything. I fear for an entire generation, dysphoric or not.

I know how that desperation feels. I myself was so unprepared even for the most luxurious of problems, having spent the vast majority of my life, until I had children myself, wishing I’d never been born. If there is one thing I’ve learned after a lifetime of trying to avoid emotional pain, it’s that the only release from suffering comes from facing it. I have viewed the world through the lens of victimization that my children are learning at school to perfect, a lens I am desperate to discard. I want us to stop trying to make children feel safe—a project that relies on controlling the behaviors of others—and instead start trying to make them feel fortified.

Once, I decided that I would just sit at the dining room table and confront my loneliness, the thing I had done every conceivable bad thing to avoid. I breathed in and out and I cried for a few minutes and I let the loneliness course through me. The strangest thing happened. I felt it lift right out of me, a starling taking flight to join the murmuration in the sky, the place where pain becomes beauty. The loneliness transformed from poison into fuel.

When I interviewed dozens of women who’d been tomboys for my book, the vast majority of them had what seemed to me a startling amount of self-confidence—a feeling that has eluded me my entire life. I chalked this up to a) being reared with or as boys, who are socialized to believe in themselves, and/or b) getting used to following their own paths and being different from the others. That is, they developed a strong sense of themselves and, accordingly, thick skin. They had to keep marching in the direction of their own true north in a world that tried to pull them toward a different pole.

These women all had such similar origin stories and such diverse adulthoods—a few transitioned, many came out as lesbians, some were straight women. The more wiggle room we leave for these kids who are different than the vast majority of their peers, and the more we teach them to navigate difficult terrain, the more chance that they will grow up to be adults who are resilient and confident. But today’s gender messages make that harder.

Even though in my family we are atheists and are able to love and respect our theist friends, children are learning that those who think differently about gender are bigots, to be canceled rather than consulted. Children are learning that feelings are facts. They are learning that “kill TERFs” is a reasonable response to “biological sex is real,” because that latter sentence feels like violence to some people, even if it isn’t. Children are learning that figurative violence is literal violence. Children are learning that puberty is an aesthetic choice they can make based on their level of discomfort; they are learning that discomfort cannot be withstood.

I don’t want children to suffer, of course not. But I think avoiding suffering causes more of it. I want us to teach children to accept suffering as a condition of being alive (I realize this idea is 2,000 years old—I’m not taking credit for it), to normalize pain and struggle, telling them that it’s okay to feel terrible without needing to fix it immediately. I am trying, and often failing, to practice this every day.

I am not claiming to be good at parenting, or unsympathetic to pain. I am claiming to have been mostly bad at being alive on the planet, and desperately wanting my children to be better at it.