Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Jenny had come out to her sister, who was living in England, six months after telling her mother. “She was the last major, important figure in my life that I came out to,” Jenny said. “I mailed her this lengthy letter, and she wrote back basically, ‘I don’t want to get to know this Jennifer.’ A year later I got a letter from her daughter Eliza, who’s ten, saying, ‘I don’t understand this, I’m scared of this.’ I wrote her back, ‘I’m sorry you’re scared. I know it’s confusing. My love for you hasn’t changed and I hope, in time, you’ll get used to me.’ My sister called a week later, furious. How dare I write her daughter a letter like that? Finally she said, ‘What we would like is to be left alone.’ I said, ‘I’ll always love you.’ That was seven years ago now. I remember thinking, ‘Well, now it’s going to be as hard for Cindy as it used to be for me.’ She and all the people I loved would have to go through years of learning how to talk about this. That fear I carried all those years—the shame, the secrecy, the inability to tell someone else—is what I gave to my mother and sister.”

  In her Jim days, Jenny had hoped that she could fall in love with a woman and learn to be happy being a man. “We are who we are as a result of who we love,” Jenny said. She smiled her bright smile. “I’d always prayed for love to save me, and in a weird way, it was love that saved me, although not in the way I expected. The love of Dede as well as the love of my family didn’t keep me a boy, but it gave me the courage to know that if I did come out, it would be okay. Love didn’t enable me to stay a man. It was love that enabled me finally to tell the truth.”

  • • •

  Responding to advocates for allowing children with persistent gender dysphoria to transition, the bioethicist Alice Domurat Dreger wrote, “Changing a kid’s name and gender identification at the age of five or six? This approach takes gender claims of little children so seriously that it’s actually beholden to a ridiculously strict notion of gender. The great majority of young children who declare they are a gender that doesn’t match their birth sex grow out of the mismatch. Young girls who declare in word or behavior that they are boys end up all over the place, which at some level proves to me most really are females. Sex-changing interventions are nontrivial. They involve substantial physical risk, including major risk to sexual sensation, and a lifelong commitment to trying to manage hormone replacement. The problem is us and the way we demand certainty from them, the way we insist on conformation to a two-sex model as early as possible.”

  Josie Romero and Tony Ferraiolo were adamant about who they were almost from infancy; Jenny Boylan knew but tried to repress the knowledge; but many others are deeply confused. Parents must determine whether such children are in a transient obsession or expressing a fundamental identity; they must guess what will make their child happy when he or she is grown, and how best to accomplish this. These balances are hard for parents to achieve: to supervise without presiding over, to caution but not demand, to impel but not insist, to protect but not throttle. Parents must take care not to squash their child’s identity, nor to build it up so much that they create the truth to which they intend to respond. In Mom, I Need to Be a Girl, Just Evelyn wrote of her child, “I knew his life would be difficult and sad. How could a mother help, and would a mother’s love be enough?” Many parents are willing to do what it takes for their children to be happy, but it isn’t always possible to know what it takes.

  Abrupt, decisive transformation occurs regularly in fairy tales, fantasy literature, and comic books, but not in most real lives, where change tends to be gradual and incomplete. In her memoir The Woman I Was Born to Be, transwoman Aleshia Brevard writes, “I consciously tried to create a boy child who might be worthy of love. Painstakingly, I tried to mimic the acceptable traits of other males around me. I knew, and so did my daddy, that the mimicry was a sham.” In her poignant book Transparent, Cris Beam writes about a Latino transgirl who named herself Ariel after the heroine of The Little Mermaid. “Ariel had to go talk to her father, who turned her into a human being for real,” the girl explained. “I want to go through the story just the way Ariel did it, turning into a real girl and getting the guy.” But struggling to become who you’ve always been and be loved anyway is a continuous process, usually marked with ambivalence.

  • • •

  Hendrik and Alexia Koos grew up in South Africa and emigrated to Canada shortly before the end of apartheid, choosing a fairly small community where Hendrik’s abilities as a GP might prove valuable. Both parents knew that their eldest daughter, Sari, was unhappy; she’d been diagnosed with ADD, a learning disability, and an anxiety disorder. When she announced, at fourteen, that she had “the wrong body,” Hendrik was terribly upset; it seemed like just another stab in the dark.

  When we spoke, a little more than a year had passed since Sari had become Bill, and Hendrik seemed to be holding his feelings just in check. “We started reading, and we found out that there were guidelines and ages, and he was younger than these guidelines, and he was really pressuring us,” Hendrik said. “I almost felt impotent as a parent. What was I supposed to do? I could say, ‘You’re a kid; you have to be patient.’ Or I could listen to my child. I’ve never wanted to pressure my children; my best dream for them is to be themselves. But I was so worried, I was exhausted by it.” Bill himself was anxious and ambivalent, and that made everything harder. I had become interested in interviewing Hendrik after hearing him question the adult trans people on a panel. “They were so self-confident, so full of ‘I am who I am,’” he said to me. “People said, ‘Once your child can be who he is, you’ll see a new person.’” Hendrik laughed. “No. It was a few steps forward, a few back. Overall the steps forward are more, but it’s an ongoing fight to gain good ground.”

  Hendrik said he derived resilience from being a doctor. “From medicine, I learned to understand that life has challenges without always understanding where they come from. I felt, ‘I’m not going to try to remedy my child’s mind.’” Hendrik’s second source of strength was even more striking. “As a white person coming of age in apartheid, I wanted to get rid of racism in my life, and sexism, and genderism, too. My South African experience was a preparation for learning to say, ‘I accept you for everything.’”

  • • •

  Although Hendrik Koos’s kind openness was different from Rex and Karen Butt’s visceral enthusiasm, their children experienced similar ambivalence. Rex and Karen didn’t believe in gendering childhood; they brought up their two sons with a toy kitchen and read to them from Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s Stories for Free Children. “When I had a baby shower, I didn’t want blue or pink,” Karen said. “We had yellow and green.” They told their sons that women could do anything men could do.

  Elementary school was lonely for their son Jared, high school was rocky, and Haverford College was not the revelation he had hoped for. One of his friends set him up on a blind date with a girl from Bryn Mawr, with whom he had his first kiss and his first relationship. The relationship entailed sexual expectations that were alien to Jared, and one night his girlfriend walked in on him wearing her clothes. He said, “I think life would be a lot easier for me if I was a girl.” She replied, “Oh, honey, you can’t be a girl. Not with that nose.” It was said in a tone of fun, but Jared sank into a severe depression. He had won every academic prize at his high school and was valedictorian; now, he was flunking. He had no sex life, and almost no social life. He dropped out and moved home.

  Three months later, he said to his parents, “I think I’m gay.” He went out on his first date with a guy and he realized he wasn’t gay. He nonetheless decided to attend an LGBT conference for high school kids, partly because he felt as though he had stopped growing up and was in effect still a high school student, even at twenty-two. He dropped into the Transgender 101 panel. Two days later, he and his mother were out shopping, and he asked her to pull over so he could tell her something. “It’s something big, isn’t it?” she said. He told her he was trans, that that was his li
fe path. She said, “Oh, why would anybody want to be a woman? It can be so hard being a woman.” Later that day, he asked his family to gather so he could tell them; he said he was willing to lose people in his life over it. His younger brother, Chad, said, “That’s bullshit. Anybody who would leave your life over this never was really in your life in the first place.” Rex said, “I’ve been so worried about your being depressed. I don’t know what the hell trans means, but at least you’re not irretrievable to me.” Jared became Cadence Case. She explained to me, “It’s a measure of how supportive my parents were that my father’s first question was ‘Are you going to be okay if we have to save up to pay for this?’”

  When I met Cadence, eight years after she began transition, she was thirty, and lingering in an intermediate territory. She had long hair, male-typical fat distribution, a tall, lanky body, and no breasts. She wore earrings and gender-neutral clothes. She had endured months of electrolysis but had more to go. Her only surgery was a nose job. I asked how she had seemed before transition. “I was intelligent, compassionate, and not macho,” she said. “I never came off as feminine, and I doubt I ever will. And I don’t really have a problem with that. I’ve reached an accommodation where I don’t hate myself. If you have a spectrum of gender, I’m sixty, maybe sixty-five percent towards female.”

  Outsiders tend to think of the urgent surgery as being genital, but that is often not the feeling of trans people. “Facial surgery is the gateway to living full-time,” Cadence said. Rex and Karen had found surgeons for genital procedures, but Cadence didn’t call them. Her parents interpreted her delay not as reluctance, but as unhappiness. “For a long time, she was too depressed to deal with it,” her mother explained. Rex said wryly, “We’re more in a hurry than she is sometimes.”

  Karen was reprimanded by the head of the school where she taught for talking about Cadence’s transition where she could be overheard, and she was furious. “No one tells me not to talk about my kid,” she said. Rex said, “I’m more activist about this than I’ve been about anything. It really is how I identify myself.” Rex and Karen cofounded a local chapter of PFLAG—Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a group that now includes families of trans people. When I last saw them, they had just been invited to be grand marshals of the 2009 Mid-Hudson Gay Pride Parade. Rex asked the board president why they would want them in such a role, and she wrote back, “Because you love your child.” Cadence said, “I think they’re more comfortable with my being trans now than I am. They’re just far left, while I’m radically farther left. But I don’t do as much about it.”

  • • •

  Parents such as Rex and Karen encourage their children to use therapy to explore gender issues; others, though, turn to therapy in the hope of deterring such exploration. The choice of approach will depend not only on the child’s needs, but also on the parents’. Reparative therapies—psychological, religious, sometimes biological—remain ubiquitous, and the parents who seek such treatment for their children are generally motivated by sincere conviction. Stephanie Brill said, “Everybody loves their children, but they have different ideas of how to help them.” She encourages parents to meet other parents and find a new normal that includes their experience. “They don’t have to condone their child’s wearing nail polish; it’s not about arguing about what’s appropriate in church,” she said. “It’s about expressing love, which is reassuring to the child, and also, actually, to the parent.” People whose lives have been bound by strong gender conventions, however, often believe that hewing to social norms will protect their children from abuse in the world. That very notion can constitute abuse inside the family.

  • • •

  Jonah and Lily Marx live in New Jersey, within commuting distance of New York, but said that they did not know anyone who was gay, much less anyone who was trans. Nothing they said indicated that their son, Caleb, wanted to be a girl; he did not insist on wearing dresses, did not hate his body, had never said he was female. When I suggested a therapist who could help Caleb figure himself out, Lily said, “I need to find someone who persuades people not to have a sex change operation. That’s all I can think about. Now it’s third grade. The boys get tougher. The girls don’t really want to play with boys anymore.” But then Lily recounted, “One of the moms said, ‘When we got the class list, my daughter put a thumbs-down for every boy except Caleb.’ So he’s not weird enough that no one likes him.”

  Occasional teasing seemed not to bother Caleb much; it bothered his parents, who were challenged imagining a happiness so different from their own. “He hates team sports,” Lily said. “But he loves to boogieboard, ice-skate, and swim, and he dives competitively.” Jonah said, “He’s a very happy boy, very comfortable in his own skin. He likes ceramics and photography, but he won’t do Little League or use a urinal.” Lily said, “He has almost no male friendships. Middle school could only be worse. My daughter torments him: ‘You’re acting like a girl.’ ‘Stop acting weird.’ Constantly.” Lily and Jonah had decided to get their children a puppy and described how Caleb had responded by jumping up and down gleefully and “effeminately.” Jonah said, “He’s not familiar with how to be excited because he’s never been in an environment with other boys who have won a game together.”

  Caleb went to sleepaway camp and loved it. He had starring roles in both musicals that summer. He loved the counselor who directed them. “When we met the counselor, he had on a tight, purple T-shirt, skinny jeans, and purple Converse sneakers,” Lily said. “Definitely out-of-the-box. Caleb came home asking for these clothes. I was not buying him purple sneakers. I have to protect him.” I wondered about enrolling him in a local theater program. “I will not play into that,” Lily said. Jonah added, “He’s got a tremendous physique. He could excel at whatever sport, but he just doesn’t have the interest. There’s only so much that Lily and I can do to shelter him from what will inevitably be broader ridicule for how he is.”

  Both parents showed considerable anxiety about a future that they viewed as nearly inevitable. “I mean, he likes one boy,” Lily said, shortly after telling me that all his friends were girls. “If you looked at this kid, you would think football player. He’s big and tall. But he’s very much like Caleb, doesn’t play sports. Then there’s this one other boy that he’s very good friends with. His name is Karl, and he’s very athletic. But when’s he going to ditch Caleb? Because he’s a cool kid, Karl. We love him. So I’m just wondering when it’s not going to be okay to be friends with the weird kid.” Lily wondered if Caleb’s unwillingness to play catch or shoot baskets with his father was connected to his awareness that he’s not living up to Jonah’s expectations. “I personally think that he knows he’s disappointed Jonah,” Lily said. “If I asked him to go have a catch, he would. If I asked him to shoot baskets, he would.” Jonah said, “Which begs the question as to why you don’t.” Lily said, with the dignity of her gender and no touch of irony, “Because I don’t shoot baskets and play catch.”

  Caleb had never been trans, but he was mildly gender variant. He came out as gay at thirteen, and almost immediately made a suicide attempt. Sometimes, one becomes fully visible only through catastrophe: Caleb’s adolescent despair spurred his parents to renounce efforts to resolve his childhood aberrance. They acknowledged clearly that he was always lovable and loved, and began the steep climb toward rebuilding his battered ego—and their own.

  • • •

  Reparative therapies for gay people are now deemed unethical by most professionals, but whether reparative therapies for trans people should be regarded the same way is widely debated. Among the most controversial figures in the field is Kenneth J. Zucker, psychologist in chief and head of the Gender Identity Service at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, who continues to hold considerable sway and was appointed in 2008 to lead the DSM-5 task force on GID. Zucker contends that natal girls who are trans see their mothers as disenfranchised and therefore wish to be men, whi
le natal boys wish to draw close to detached mothers by becoming girls. Activists believe that the high rate of depression in children denied the right to transition is the result of their struggle to conform; Zucker believes that the wish to switch genders is a symptom of underlying depression. The hypothesis that GID sometimes has social and family origins can be defended. Zucker’s views on how to treat GID are much less robust. The conservative Catholic Education Resource Center and the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) are both indebted to Zucker’s work, though they overlay it with Christian ideology.

  Using techniques derived from the models Phyllis Burke criticizes in Gender Shock, Zucker instructs parents to model gender roles, pushing these mothers and fathers into behavior consistent with midcentury gender stereotypes. He then asks that they impound cross-gender toys and prevent cross-dressing. Friendships with members of the same gender are to be encouraged, and cross-gender friendships are to be halted. One mother described confiscating Barbies and unicorns from a child who, when given trucks, simply refused to play. When he reverted to drawing, his parents were to take away the pink and purple crayons and insist that he draw boys; in the end, his mother said, he was living a “double life,” acting like a boy in front of her, and escaping into a girl world whenever he could.