Little kids and gender seems to be a bit of a hot topic du jour, having been covered recently in Salon (“Is that my son wearing a dress?”) and the Chicago Tribune. A transgendered character has recently popped up on Degrassi: The Next Generation, two male-to-female grade-schoolers appeared on This American Life, and this Wednesday, Northern California public radio station KQED hosted a beautiful call-in talk show on the matter.
The radio talk show whipped through some of the typical issues, like bullying from classmates, the need for progressive education for and from schools on gender, therapeutic modalities for treatment of any issues arising from gender issues, and some parsing of what, exactly, defines gender: clothing? playing with trucks instead of dolls? But unlike most media takes on transgender children, the KQED show included the perspective of a parent who sounds like she’s had to work terribly hard to accept her new-daughter-former-son:
“We went to see the Nutcracker at Christmas, and she just fell in love with Clara and she came home and put on her princess dress,” says Rachel Beckert, whose daughter is 7. “And from that point on she never took a dress off.”
“I just couldn’t think of a good reason to say no,” says Beckert, who sounds like an exceptionally open-minded mom. “Because our society doesn’t allow it? That didn’t seem like a great reason. Because it would be embarrassing? To whom? To me? I just couldn’t think of a great reason to say no. And so we just let her go.”
Soon enough, problems arose over which bathroom was appropriate, and which dressing room the child should use for sports. The girl was so distressed over such issues that she came home repeatedly from school covered in urine. “Especially in hindsight I can say we were in crisis. I met with the teacher and she said ‘Can’t you just make him wear pants?’ And I just knew that I couldn’t.”
What would you do if your child expressed a wish to be the opposite gender, insisted on wearing “boy” or “girl” clothing, or felt he or she was born with the wrong body?
ok how is this supposedto mean?
September 13th, 2010 at 5:17 pmAt last, somneoe comes up with the “right” answer!
May 27th, 2011 at 5:41 pm