Category Archives: Parenting

National Gender Creative Kids Workshop

I just got back from Montreal (try the bagels), where I attended the National Workshop for Gender Creative Kids, hosted by Concordia University. It. Was. Amazing. There’s a lot I’d like to share, a lot I learned, a lot of discussions and debates about which I have Things to Say, but much of that will have to be saved for other times, and possibly other venues.

I was honored to be the first presenter on the opening panel, in which I talked about gender diverse parenting, the what and the why. Fifteen minutes was wholly inadequate for more than a too-brief introduction; when I sat down to write my talk, over 3000 words rolled out of my fingers almost without trying, and I ended up having to remove rather more nuance and complexities than I’d hoped, but for all that, I’m pretty proud of what remained.

I can’t share it in full here — it wouldn’t be anything particularly new to regular readers of this blog anyway — but you can read Dr Elizabeth Meyer’s write up of mine and other parents’ talks: Gender Diverse Parenting: Creating Space for Kids (in which she calls it brilliant).

Because the workshop was hosted by a research project, there is no “next year” currently scheduled, but many of us (which is to say, nearly every one of the 70 or so parents, educators, activists, artists, doctors, therapists, and general rabble-rousers — many trans or former gender creative kids themselves) are hoping and working toward having a similar conference again in the future. I for one already have ideas for my next proposal.

Leave a comment | Posted on 1 November 2012 by Arwyn | Category: Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: Gender, gender creative kids, gender diverse parenting, gender neutral parenting, trans

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On gender diverse parenting versus parenting a gender creative kid

So, apparently something I wrote on a lark for an online youth magazine in Brazil got picked up by a major print magazine. Because surreal is a far too accurate description of my life.

From this, I’ve been getting requests for interviews. Which, see aforementioned re “surreal”. And one thing I’m noticing is a confusion between “gender diverse parenting” and parenting of a kid who, it turns out, is pretty creative when it comes to his gender expression (also known as “gender nonconforming”, though that implies an expectation TO conform).

Here’s the thing: I didn’t set out to have a kid who sometimes likes dresses and whose favorite colors are pink and “anything bright”, who loves long hair (though he doesn’t love brushing it), is willing to stand in line and follow instructions in order to take pre-ballet, who would rather correct strangers every day with semi-patient iterations of “I’m a boy” than change how he dresses and discard the purple shoes he loves to wear. I love him. I love everything about him, including his love of one of my least favorite colors, including his insistence on having hair we have struggles to take care of every day, including the conversations we have at least weekly about how rude it is when people don’t believe that he’s a boy. But I don’t love him any more this way than if he were any other sort of boy. And, contrary to the implications of the questions I’ve been getting, I didn’t set out to make him this way.

We don’t parent gender diversely in order to have kids like the Boychick — we tried that in the 70s and early 80s, and, to many straight white feminists’ chagrin, it didn’t work. No, we parent with gender diversity because children like the Boychick exist. Because they exist, with their love of unexpected colors and uninhibited hair and boundary-breaking affinities, whether or not we expect them. Whether or not we “allow” them, welcome them, make space for them, honor them.

Maybe the Boychick would have been more gender typical in his clothing and hair and preferences in a more gender strict household. And maybe, maybe, that would have even been authentic, and not a survival strategy in an unfriendly environment. Even if that were so, something would have been lost, some spark that makes him him. He would be some other him, with some other spark, and while he would be just as beautiful, the world would be a slightly less colorful place. But more likely, he would be exactly who he is, but would have a much harder life.

Every day, in homes all over the world, children who are told “no, you can’t have that, no, that’s for boys, no, that’s only for girls, no, you can’t be yourself, no, you aren’t okay” still sneak silky shirts to wear as wigs, still run to the “wrong” side of the store, still stuff self-made penises into their pants, still do the work of playing with gender, of figuring out who they are, of forcing us to confront the failure of forced gender conformity. Every day, streets all over the world are filled with the teens old enough to run away from their hostile families, toward their real selves. Gender diverse parenting doesn’t create gender creative kids: it creates a world that tells them “yes”.

16 Comments | Posted on 27 September 2012 by Arwyn | Category: Parenting | Tags: Gender, gender creative kids, gender diverse parenting, gender neutral parenting, gender non-conforming

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What makes a baby (dragon), as told by the Boychick

Once upon a time there was a blue boy bird and a blue boy dragon. They were really good friends and liked to fly together. Only one day the blue boy bird discovered he wasn’t a bird, he was really a blue boy dragon. And the two blue boy dragons loved each other and got married. One of the blue boy dragons had sperm and one of them had eggs, so they had seventy five hundred and two hundred and twenty five hundred babies. Half of them were girls and half of them were boys, and one of them was both and one of them was neither. The one who was both POOPED out of its shell and started dancing.

And then it was bedtime.

***

In related news, I enthusiastically recommend the book What Makes a Baby; very basic baby-making and where-did-I-come-from sex ed for very young children; I’d say ages 2-6, and not any younger just because it is a paper and not board book. It very skillfully avoids cissexism and heterocentricism while providing opportunities for kids to hear all about THEIR birth and family stories — which is what children this age are usually most interested in — and doesn’t overload with extraneous information about sex, orgasms, and so on. (Although I will say I’m looking forward to the next in the series that, I hope, will start addressing those issues more.)

The book is currently self-published — and very, very well done at that — with a limited supply remaining until it is re-issued by an independent publishing house, which a little bird hinted will happen in mid-2013. So if your kids are of an age, get it now; if not, make a note of the site for next year, because if you have or work with kids, you need to have this book.

3 Comments | Posted on 11 August 2012 by Arwyn | Category: Parenting, The Boychick's Bookshelf | Tags: book review, books, sex ed, Sexuality, trans

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Childrearing v. Parenting

There are two ways of talking about the work of caring for a child. One is childrearing: the daily acts of keeping the child alive, keeping them and their environment relatively clean and whole, getting them to bed and school or the fields or what-have-you. The individual tasks of childrearing can, for the most part, be done by anyone willing (or perhaps anyone the child is willing to allow). This is the work that is discussed, and disparaged, as unworthy of an educated woman’s time, and really, it doesn’t take a lot to know how to wipe up yet another cup of spilled water-broccoli-and-half-chewed-food-bits.

And then there is parenting. Parenting is the work of doing childrearing without killing the child, yourself, or random judgmental strangers (or not so random judgmental relatives). Parenting is the internal, invisible work it takes to show up to the overtired screaming baby, the trying-to-kill-hirself cruiser, the tantruming toddler, the never-stops-chattering preschooler. Parenting is handing a self-centric, swiss-cheese-brained, immature primate every single one of your triggers, most of which you’ve managed to not realize you even have, and then trying, trying, to deactivate the ones the monkey is stomping all over — before they grow just a little more and find a whole new set. Parenting is the work that is never discussed except in hyperbolic terms — effusive praise for those of us who do it, horror at the thought of it, demonization of those whose failures are made public. Parenting also can and is done by anyone willing, but is a commitment of years, not moments; it is built of moments over years, and once commenced, is only interchangeable from one set to another with wrenching consequence.

Childrearing can be tedious, or easy, or challenging — usually each or all in turns. But the kicker is, the key and secret that those who denigrate childrearing never acknowledge, is that what children most need, more than organized playrooms or clean tables or even getting to schools, is to have adults who love them so deeply and broadly and fiercely that we’ll do the reflexive work of parenting. They need us not merely to be centered, but to center ourselves: they need to see how we wobble and return and be broken and yet thrive and be triggered and move on. They need us, us, whole and human and damaged and glorious, they need us bodies and breasts and arms and laps and minds and souls and they will eat us down and leave us drained and that is what they are supposed to do. It is what we did, what I did, what you did, and we can see this as a horror, or we can see it as a gift, or we can see it, we can know it, as life. Life. Just life.

Choose it, or decline it, make it your vocation, or something you do on the side. But don’t ever, ever deride it. Not around me.

11 Comments | Posted on 2 June 2012 by Arwyn | Category: Parenting | Tags: "mommy wars", attachment parenting, breastfeeding, fathering, Mental Health, mother blame, motherhood

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You will never be him; please don’t be them

Dear Boychick,

Last week was your fifth birthday. We made carrot cake and sang you happy birthday just the once like you wanted and opened so many presents from family who love you fiercely despite being so far away. We bought you a bike and a raincoat and I cooked breakfast and lunch and dinner (and did I mention the cake?) just like you asked for and I marvelled at how very fast you are growing up.

There’s someone I’d like you to meet. I don’t know if you’d like him, or vice versa. He was born twelve years before you, which is too much of an age gap to be peers, but maybe he was the type to like kids. I don’t know, and we will never find out. I would like you to meet him, but you won’t, because eighteen days before your birthday, he was shot and killed by a man who looked at a black kid in a sweat shirt and saw a threat. He was killed by a man who is walking free still, nearly a month later — after your presents are losing their luster, after your bike is no longer quite so new — because of racist gun laws and racist police departments. He was killed by a man who mistook vigilantism for protection, violence for justice, and a kid walking with candy in his pocket for a no-good criminal.

Millions of parents across our country are holding their sons closer now, with this one thought echoing in their heads: that could have been my son.

You’ll forgive me I hope if I hold you tighter tonight, if I snuggle you just a little longer, kiss your hair just that bit stronger. But the thought in my head is: that will never be you.

You will never be seen as suspicious because of your skin color. You will never be coded as a violent criminal because of your race and your gender. You may one day know persecution, may one day be subject to epithets and violence simply walking down the street — you may be a fag or a tranny or a crip — but this, this will never be your fate.

But I am aware, I am so very, painfully aware that you might be on the other side of this. You might be the one wielding the gun¹. You might be the one looking at the dead kid and seeing a corpse, a criminal, a cause for gunfire and “self-defense”. You might be the one letting the killer go without testing him for drugs or alcohol. You might be the one lobbying to pass laws that are disproportionately harmful to black and brown communities. You might be the one opining that it’s all so tragic but the kid did look like a thug after all and he shouldn’t have been out walking where he didn’t look like belonged.

When I hold you tight, I am thinking, praying, begging: don’t be them. Don’t be them, please, child, my beautiful boy: don’t be them. Don’t be the one that black mothers are afraid of tonight more than usual. Don’t be the one that lets this happen without trying to make it better. Don’t be the one that cracks a joke, that thinks of it as their problem, that doesn’t bother to care. Don’t. Be. Them.

You are, no matter how much I wish it otherwise or how much I work to prevent it, going to be infected by racism. It will — is, has already — pervert you, damage your ability to see others’ wholeness and humanity and (says your theist parent) holiness. You live in this society, in kyriarchy; it cannot not touch you and make you rougher.

But you don’t have to let it make you them. You don’t have to let it turn you into Trayvon’s murderer and his family’s misery. You have to not. You have to resist. You have to find a new way.

I’ll help you child, as much as I am able — how can I do else when there is a family without a son and without justice for their loss? — but as much as I want, I cannot shape you as I will, cannot fill your tabula with my anti-racist scripts (nor would I know the right things to write there, even if I could). I can only whisper in your hair, pray to whatever gods are there, write to a you I hope will be ready to listen: don’t be them. Don’t inflict this pain. Remember a boy you will never meet, and for him, for his family, for every family knowing it could be them: please, be better.

For Trayvon Martin. For so many others. Please.

Yours always,
Arwyn

George Zimmerman — per Mother Jones — is Latino, but the point stands: white men might kill a black boy, but they will never be killed for being black. ↩