“So, gender dysphoria,” Mr. Tongo began. “Congratulations to you both! Mazel tov! How exciting!” Mr. Tongo was the hospital handyman Rosie called late in a shift when she was otherwise out of options for a patient. He wasn’t really a handyman, of course, though he wasn’t a doctor either. Technically, he was some kind of multi-degreed social-working therapist-magician. It wasn’t that he made miracle diagnoses or magic cures. It wasn’t that he could pull secret strings or unglue red tape. It was that he had an entirely different way of looking at things.
And a different way of looking at things was what they needed. Rosie didn’t think there was anything wrong with Claude physically. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with Claude emotionally or psychologically either. He was already worried his teacher and his classmates thought he was weird. The third to last thing Rosie wanted to do was make him think his parents thought so too. The second to last thing she wanted to do was make him self-conscious about what he wanted to wear and who he was. But the last thing she wanted to do was ignore her baby as he slipped away from her and disappeared.
In Mr. Tongo’s office, they all three sat on giant colored balls like they were in some kind of exercise class, Mr. Tongo bouncing up and down on his and rubbing his hands together like a kid who’d been promised ice cream after a dinner of French fries. Penn was prepared to defend Claude against people who thought boys in dresses were sick. He was prepared to defend against people who thought his son was repulsive or deviant. He was prepared to defend Claude’s right to be Claude in any of his many wonderful manifestations. But he was not prepared for congratulations. “Uh … thanks?”
“Yes! Yes! You should both be very proud.”
“We should?” Penn glanced at Rosie for guidance but found her smiling unquestioningly at Mr. Tongo.
“Certainly you should. What an interesting child you’re raising—not that gender dysphoria, if that’s what this turns out to be, is caused by parenting, good or bad. But you must be doing a fine job if he’s come to you and said, ‘Mother, Dad, I must wear a dress,’ instead of hiding in shame—not that there’s anything to be ashamed of, you understand. And you’ve said yes to the dress, as they say, the dress and the heels and the pink bikini. What fun! I’m so pleased for you all.”
Rosie put a hand on Penn’s arm but did not take her eyes off the bouncing social worker. “Thank you, Mr. Tongo.” Penn could not imagine why she wasn’t on a first-name basis with this man. “We’re glad too. But the drawings, the lack of friends, the worry, his changing clothes all the time, his inability to just be himself. Our first concern is his happiness, of course. But not just today.” Because it wasn’t that simple, was it? Raising children was the longest of long games. It would make her kids ecstatically happy if she replaced all meals for the next month with Halloween candy consumed in front of the television and then let them skip showers until Thanksgiving, but in the long run, one imagined they’d miss school, their teeth, and not smelling like feet. “We want him to be happy next week, next year, the years to come too. It’s hard to make out this path, but it’s even harder to see where it leads. We want him to be happy and comfortable of course, but we’re not sure how best to make that happen.”
While Rosie talked, Penn tried to decide what to make of Mr. Tongo and found nothing to hang on to. He imagined writing him into the DN and couldn’t think how he’d describe him. Mr. Tongo might have been sixty-five with good skin or thirty-five and prematurely gray, his smoky hair alternately patted down and sticking out in all directions. He might have had a trace of an accent Penn didn’t recognize or the remnants of an old, overcome speech impediment, or it may have been simply that he spoke with an odd quizzical deliberateness at once welcoming and unsettling. Any race or nationality at all you cared to name, Penn could believe Mr. Tongo was at least half a member of it. He wore scrubs, in case any of his patients had to vomit or bleed, Penn supposed, though on the wall behind him he had a drawing of a bear, also in scrubs, holding up a sign that read REMEMBER: I AM YOUR FRIEND, BUT I AM NOT A DOCTOR.
He was fiddling with a magnifying glass he picked up off his desk. “As you may know, gender dysphoria is a condition wherein the patient’s assigned sex—their anatomy, their genitalia—does not match their—some say preferred, some say affirmed, some say true—gender identity.” He closed one eye and peered through the glass at them. “It’s the Case of the Mistaken Genitalia.” Then, just when Penn was about to write Mr. Tongo off as too quirky to address the gravity of their situation, he stopped bouncing and sleuthing and congratulating. “Now, who knows? Maybe he’ll grow out of this, or maybe it’s here to stay. Maybe he’ll be trans and maybe he’ll be she, or maybe he’ll be something we haven’t thought of yet. There’s no need to settle on a label at the moment. The important thing is this: prepubertal children suffer from gender dysphoria in direct proportion to attitudes and expectations they encounter at home, at school, and in their communities. If the parents are sending negative messages—even silent ones—that what a child does and who a child is are not okay, those are very powerful for a young person. Even though your intentions might be only to protect him from a hard, often intolerant society by helping him fit into prescribed gender molds, you may unwittingly be telling him, ‘Act this way, behave this way, deny yourself, or you’ll lose my love.’”
“But we haven’t made a big deal about the dresses or the barrettes or anything,” said Penn. “We don’t made a big deal about any of the weird stuff any of our boys wear. We’ve barely mentioned it.”
“And that’s very enlightened and generous, I’m sure.” Mr. Tongo’s hands waved in all directions. “Wonderful! Brilliant! But the rest of the world won’t agree, I’m afraid. It may be okay with you if he wears a dress, but it will be less okay with the kids at school. Or their parents. It may be okay with you if he wears earrings and heels, but it’s not always going to be okay at camp or soccer or the park. You’re not raising this child in isolation. Perhaps you’ve been approving, but it’s been hard at school?”
“He hasn’t been engaging in this behavior at school,” said Rosie.
“He hasn’t been dressing up at school,” Mr. Tongo corrected. “Maybe during free choice, though, he’s playing with dolls when the other boys are playing with trucks. Maybe during lunch he sits with the girls instead of the boys. Maybe when the teacher says boys line up on the right, girls on the left, he stands in the middle looking confused. Perhaps his desire to disappear or his sense that he is disappearing has to do not with you but with everyone else in his world telling him to stop acting like a girl.”
Penn was holding his head with his hands and his elbows with his knees. He did not look up. “What does that mean—acting like a girl?”
“Oooh, good question. Well, it means any number of things, doesn’t it? Cultural expectations and proscriptions touch nearly every aspect of our lives but vary, also, for each individual, not to mention the usual social determinates such as—”
“I understand that,” Penn interrupted, “but if it’s so culturally determined and individually experienced, what do you mean when you say ‘dysphoric’? We’ve never said to him that he can’t play with his dolls or bake or wear a dress because only girls do those things. Absent any other influences, it’s obvious to me that any five-year-old faced with the choice of toe-colored toes or rainbow-colored toes would choose the latter. That’s normal. That’s not dysphoric. That doesn’t make him a girl. That makes him a kid.”
“Hear, hear!” The man was starting to bounce again. “Bravo!”
“Isn’t it also,” Rosie added, “what we’re all striving for? Or should be? A wider range of normal and acceptable? Kids who can wear what’s comfortable and play however they like?”
“Yes, oh yes!” Mr. Tongo cheered.
“Then what’s going on here?” The bees behind Penn’s ribs were back. “What’s making this kid feel so … lost?”
“He wore a pink bikini all summer long,” Rosie added, “with great enthusiasm. But now suddenly—”
“Out in public?” Mr. Tongo interrupted. “Or just at home with his family?”
“Mostly at home,” Rosie admitted, “but he wore it to the end-of-summer pool party. The whole neighborhood was there. People were pointing and laughing and whispering, and he didn’t even seem to notice. He was so proud. What’s changed?”
“What has changed?” Mr. Tongo asked quietly.
“School,” Rosie and Penn knew together.
Mr. Tongo nodded. “Children learn many wonderful things in kindergarten. How to line up for lunch. How to use inside voices. How to not push people. Important life skills for sure. I use them every day myself. But they learn other things too: you have to conform, or people might not like you; you have to be the same because different doesn’t feel good. At home, Claude’s loved no matter what. At school, it sometimes feels the opposite: you are not loved no matter what.”
“So we should homeschool.” Rosie was already rearranging her work schedule in her mind. Penn could teach reading and writing. She could do biology and anatomy. Surely, those were mainstays of the kindergarten curriculum? Maybe her mother could—
“Of course not.” Mr. Tongo laughed. “These are not bad things for Claude to understand. These are things we all have grapple with. A five-year-old has much to learn. When people are annoying, it feels good to push them but we mustn’t. Even though it’s often pleasant to shout, others are trying to concentrate. Though we’d always like to be first, sometimes it’s someone else’s turn. And when we behave in a manner other people don’t expect, there will be consequences.”
“How do we teach him that?” said Penn’s bees.
“You don’t!” Mr. Tongo clapped his hands, delighted. “He’s already learned that. You have to help him unlearn it. You have to help him see that if he’s disappearing from the world, that’s too high a price to pay for fitting in. He has to see how ‘You shouldn’t push even though you want to’ isn’t the same as ‘You shouldn’t wear a dress even though you want to.’ None of that’s any different for Claude than for anybody else. It’s all part of growing up.”
Rosie nodded and tried to believe this and ventured to ask, since he’d brought it up, “What will he be? When he grows up?”
“Who knows?” Mr. Tongo smiled. And though Rosie had to admit that of course that was the right answer, the only honest answer there was, the only answer there could be, the question itself was starting to take over her sleepless middle-of-the-night ruminations.
“We’ll have to wait and see.” Mr. Tongo shrugged but not unhappily. “Exciting! But wherever it goes from here, the best thing about gender dysphoria is this. Ready? Claude’s not sick! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Yes, but—”
“We don’t have to worry yet about who he’ll be when he grows up. He’s only five! But since he’s only five, he can’t fight the entire weight of his culture alone. You know who has to do that?”
“Who?” Penn asked, though he knew.
“You must pave his way in his world. And that’s very hard, I’m afraid.”
“It’s not hard,” said Penn. “It’s parenting.”
“Or it is hard,” Rosie clarified. “But so is all parenting.”
“At which you’re more experienced than most”—they felt worse than when they arrived, but Mr. Tongo seemed overjoyed—“so you’re perfect for the job. Let’s start with journaling. Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”
* * *
Penn did not imagine it was going to be fun. But of the directives with which one left a child’s doctor’s appointment, journaling was more palatable—and more firmly in his skill set—than most. Every day, they were to write down Claude’s boy behaviors and his girl behaviors. That’s all they had to do for now, Mr. Tongo promised. Step one was gather information. Step one was waiting and seeing but with an emphasis on the seeing. Since in this case, seeing looked a lot like writing and waiting looked a lot like parenting, gender journaling was something Penn felt equipped to do.
But he was wrong. When Claude came down to breakfast that Saturday in a dress made from a belted nightgown of Rosie’s, Penn understood that this went in the girl column. When he spent the hour following breakfast driving trains around the track in the opposite direction Rigel and Orion were driving trains around the track so that they crashed into each other and both trains exploded off the track and all three children collapsed in giggles then did it again, he understood that this was meant for the boy column. But then they moved on to LEGOs. Then Rigel and Orion’s friend—girl friend—Frieda came over wearing jeans and a T-shirt to help crash trains for an hour. Penn was not prepared to say that LEGOs were male or female. Penn was not prepared to say that playing with a friend was male or female. Penn was gratified to see a little girl in pants crashing trains whom no one, so far as he knew, was accusing of gender dysphoria. Penn made a third column …
Other
Both
Unsure
Unclear
Unfair
None of Your Fucking Business
Ways in Which This Exercise Is Asinine
… before he finally landed on:
Maybe.
Maybe what, he could not say. But that was the beauty of it.
After dinner, after storytime and bedtime, Rosie and Penn opened a bottle of wine and compared lists. Penn had kept his only halfheartedly. The list of maybes was long. The list of maybes was nearly everything. Rosie’s list was more revealing, broken into two columns, not three, and seeing much of what Penn missed. Nearly everything fell into her girl column. While Rigel and Orion built LEGO cars and LEGO trucks and used LEGO Batman to smash LEGO police stations, Claude built LEGO vacation homes and pony ranches and populated them with LEGO mamas and babies. While Rigel and Orion set the trains back up for their recurring race toward inevitable doom, Claude tended to the victims.
“I don’t understand your list,” said Penn.
“I understand yours,” said Rosie.
“What does that mean?”
“Same thing. You don’t understand my list because you don’t see how someone like me could have made it.”
“That’s true.”
“I know.”
“You’re a scientist, Rosie. Women aren’t scientists. So that goes in the boy column. You’re a doctor—an ER doctor, not a girly one like pediatrician or gynecology. So that goes in the boy column too. Your so-called husband is a writer, an artist, and not the kind who makes money. The other kind. He cooks dinner—”
“I cook dinner some nights.”
“Not that well. He folds laundry—”
“And puts it away.”
“And puts it away. He does homework duty. He does bedtime duty.”
“He is very girly,” Rosie agreed, kissing his neck.
“It’s very boy-column to be married to such a girly fellow as this.”
“It’s very girl-column to use the term ‘fellow.’”
“It’s very boy-column even to be attracted to such a girly fellow as this.”
“Who says I’m attracted to him?” Rosie asked, sucking his earlobe.
“You initiate sex”—Penn was unbuttoning her shirt—“which is hardly ladylike.”
“Who said anything about sex?”
“Though these,” Penn admitted, undoing her bra, “make a pretty compelling case for your feminine nature.”
“They are persuasive,” Rosie agreed.
“You’re willing—nay, eager—to have sex on the sofa while your kids are upstairs sleeping. A more canonically feminine mother would never risk their walking in on us and imperil her children’s emotional equilibrium in this way.”
“It’s cute you think they’re sleeping.” She slipped off her skirt then her underwear while she half listened to what she guessed was Rigel and Orion pounding what she guessed was modeling clay into what she guessed was the upstairs rug. “Plus, a real woman is always available to her husband to fulfill his sexual urges.”
“But has no sexual urges of her own.” Penn slid his pants off. “And she only does it in the bed. In the dark.”
“On the bottom,” Rosie added, climbing on top of him.
“So you see where I think this list is bullshit.” Though Penn was having some trouble concentrating on his argument, he was still pretty confident he was right. “Even if we’re willing to grant identifiably male behavior and identifiably female behavior—”
“Well, maybe in some cases—”
“—we don’t embody it anyway.”
“Tell me about our embodies.”
“You are not a traditionally feminine woman—”
“I will show you how wrong you are.”
“And I’m not a traditionally masculine man.”
“Let me see.”
“He hasn’t learned traditional gender roles at home. He’s not failing to conform—there’s nothing to conform to. He’s not subverting sex-based expectations because we don’t have any sex-based expectations.”
“I have a few.”
“We might not be good role models,” Penn breathed.
“We’re very good role models,” said Rosie.
“We might not be the right people for this exercise.”
“We are exactly the right people for this exercise.”
“We might be thinking of different exercises,” said Penn.
“We might be speaking of different exercises,” Rosie murmured, “but I bet we’re thinking about the same one.”
At that point, Penn found he could not disagree.
* * *
The waiting part of waiting and seeing looked like it always looks: doing something else, worrying, going on with your life, raising your little boys and bigger boys and boys who might be something else or something more. Rosie and Penn could not imagine a child understanding something as complex as the thing they needed to explain to their youngest son. Wearing a dress did not make him a girl, but neither did bearing a penis indelibly make him a boy if that’s not what he was or wanted to be, though if it was what he was and wanted to be, he was welcome to be it and still wear a dress if he liked. Or to put it another way: wear whatever the hell you want and who cares what anyone else thinks. Though everyone else will have thoughts. And they’re unlikely to keep those thoughts to themselves or be entirely kind. Though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do whatever you want, just that you should be forewarned that if you do, there will be consequences. Not that that’s not true of everything—all actions have consequences. Not that the consequences in this case suggested he should not do what he wanted to do and be who he was. None of which was to say that all decisions could be made without regard for consequences. If Roo dared him to stuff leftover Halloween candy into the Thanksgiving turkey, as he had dared Orion the year before, Claude would do well to consider the consequences of his actions. If his teacher told him it was inappropriate to talk to his neighbor during Math Trays, that was different than if his teacher told him it was inappropriate to bring his lunch to school in a purse. If his school friends didn’t like his choice of clothes, then maybe they were being mean or maybe they just needed educating or maybe—
“I don’t have any school friends,” Claude interrupted.
“You must,” his parents insisted. Claude was funny and bright, loving and lovable. He knew how to share. He didn’t pick his nose. He was potty trained. What more would a kindergartener want in a friend?
“But I don’t,” Claude said.
“How is that possible?” They meant it as if Claude had claimed gravity did not exist in his kindergarten classroom. As if he claimed the cafeteria were staffed by trained penguins. It seemed just that impossible that anyone could not like baby Claude.
“They think I’m weird.”
“Because you dress like a girl?” said Penn, and Rosie shot him a look. Of course not. He didn’t dress like a girl at school. “Because you bring a purse to lunch?” he amended.
“I don’t know. They think I talk weird.”
“How?”
“It’s enigmatic.” Claude shrugged. “Or I am.” Rosie considered that his youngest-of-five vocabulary must confuse most kindergarteners. Many fifth graders. Lots of high school students.
“What would make things easier?” Penn got down on his knees so he could meet his son eye to eye.
“What would make things easier?” Rosie got down on her knees to offer something close to prayer.
“Should we talk to Miss Appleton?”
“Could you spend recess with Orion and Rigel?”
“Should we get you a different lunch tote?”
“Should we set up lots of playdates?”
“Should you join a club or a sport or a band?”
“It’s okay.” Tears crawled out of Claude’s eyes and nose, and besides he was only five, but he tried to comfort his parents anyway. “I just feel a little bit sad. Sad isn’t bleeding. Sad is okay.”
He was wrong about that though because his happiness was his parents’ first concern. Rosie took a bottomless breath and whispered, “Do you want to be a girl, baby?”
To which Penn, Tongo-tutored, appended, “Do you think you are a girl?”
They waited, fathomless breath held, fathomless fear held, just barely, at bay.
Claude only cried. “I don’t know.”
And his parents had to admit the question was hard. And his parents had to admit relief that the answer wasn’t yes, at least not yet. And his parents had to admit fear because if he didn’t know, who did, and if the answer wasn’t that, what was it?
“Do you want to be a boy who wears dresses?” Penn tried.
“Do you want to be a boy who wears dresses only on some days?” Rosie added.
“Do you want to go to school naked?” Penn offered to make him laugh.
But Claude did not laugh, so Rosie pulled him into her lap and cradled his head in the bend of one elbow and his knees in the other and rocked him like she had when he was a baby. He fit better then, but he fit pretty well still. “What would make you happy?” She smiled down at him and shone love deep into his eyes from the depths of her own. “You can be anyone you want.”
Claude looked love back at his parents and whispered, “I want to be a night fairy.”