On Belonging and How We Got Here

“...but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.”                                                                          
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

I care about my child’s gender about as much as I care about the Super Bowl, which is to say, not in the least. It isn’t some kind of feminist political posture, more of a genuine lack of interest. In fact, my feelings about the NFL and the Super Bowl, and how appallingly awful both are for players and spectators alike, are far more strident than anything I have ever felt about how my kid dresses or whether you can tell if Olive is a boy or a girl. I suppose I am indifferent about a lot of things concerning my children that most parents probably find to be virtues, or at least remarkable (athletic ability, special talents, attractiveness, early childhood signs of intelligence, etc.) but I think my children benefit, on balance, from my interest in other aspects of their identity—senses of humor, favorite pastries, kindness, manners, ability to meet the gaze of a homeless person passing by, and whether they can remember sitting on my father’s lap watching an old John Ford movie with him. I am bored by the fact that Olive likes to play ninja in a pink dress and Jonah likes to play ninja in almost anything. I don’t know how else to say it, these things just do not go to the core of who my kids are as humans, and I’d recognize them as Olive and Jonah if tomorrow everything about their gender changed, as it well might, precisely because they are being raised by people who simply do not care. There is a kind of freedom in that for them, I would guess, as they know they can never let us down, at least on that score. Perhaps not coincidentally, my parents showed about the same level of interest in my own sexuality. It was one of the greatest gifts they gave me, not caring whether I slept with women or men. I belonged to them and with them, and nothing would change that. In the end, all they wanted was for me to be happy. And so with that came the invitation to figure that out for myself, while they concerned themselves with what they took to be more important elements of my development. I’m still doing that work, discovering what makes me happy, what my me-ness is all about. That work is always unfolding against a backdrop of belonging, thanks to my parents, and for that I am deeply grateful.

I am a feminist, of course, and I happen to be a lesbian, too. But my children’s gender expression is not a particular point of pride for me, at least not in the first instance. In fact, I find it bizarre to speak of Olive’s identity in those terms at all, and I always cringe a bit when perfectly nice people approach me to tell me how proud I must be of her. I am, of course, and I get the impulse to praise her (and me) for just being herself. She is walking a brave path at the tender age of nine; braver, still, because she is acutely aware that she does not fit neatly into our familiar gender boxes. And it’s hard enough to be yourself in this world, no matter how old you are or where you fall on a gender spectrum. But gender non-conformity is not in and of itself a virtue, and I am no prouder of her than of Jonah, even if sympathetic allies want to see Olive as a kind of martyr. I have known a lot of assholes in my lifetime, and some of them were even queer.

I am proud of my kids’ kindness, though they do not always hit the mark; of their effort and hard work, though they can be awfully lazy too; of the good human beings I believe them to be, though some days I have to really squint to see it, as do all parents. But whether they are boys or girls, or something in between, is not something I think about when I consider what makes me proud as a parent, or even what excites me about them. I am not a #boymom or a #girlmom, or even a #proudparentofatranskid, and I would never want them to feel the pressure of being a certain kind of any one of those things. I care far more about whether she made her bed this morning (she definitely did not!) than whether she transgressed traditional gender norms when she left the house, and I don’t especially like it when either of my kids spend too much time in front of a mirror, irrespective of how much “gender play” is involved. I didn’t do a big gender reveal when I was pregnant but neither did I do the typical liberal expectant parent thing and forbid well-meaning family members from asking about the baby’s sex and giving gifts they felt appropriate (even if I didn’t). The only thought I have ever given to the appropriateness of toys, beyond my children’s level of interest in them, was whether I found them aesthetically pleasing and could live with their presence in my house. Does it have a battery? Does it make too much noise? Can it be construed as a weapon? Does it have a screen? These are all no-go’s in my house, with few exceptions from those well-meaning family members again! The question of gender and toys doesn’t come up for me in either direction. I make no effort to map toys onto gender, but also don’t put any thought into creating some kind of conceptually bizarre (and impossible) gender-neutral space for my kids. I just attach very little value to what they gravitate to, allow them to play in ways that make them happy so long as they aren’t ugly, and pick up whatever my kids put down with their self-expression from the get-go. Our house is not a queer utopia where we all announce our pronouns on the reg and talk opening about how disruptive to heteronormativity our queerness and constellations of gender and sexuality are. On any given night, we are far more likely to discuss whether to play Scrabble or Poop Bingo than how we felt in our “gendered bodies” that day. We are kind of a normal family, for better or worse, and not too terribly avant-garde.

And, yet, for as long as we can remember and from the moment Olive became a little person—that is, when she was no longer a baby but capable of expressing individuality and the sort of radical uniqueness that marks a human life, making actual choices, showing signs of a moral imagination, developing an understanding of right and wrong, grasping what it is to live in a complex and shared world—she has moved through that world as if she were a girl; or at least as if she believes she is so. And, so, we did her the small kindness of believing her.

Maybe it is precisely because of Olive’s quirky personality, but we have always found her gender expression to be the least interesting thing about her. I count that as a blessing. She is a deeply mysterious child (in another time, we might have called her weird and maybe sometimes we still lovingly do). She has a sense of humor that manages to be both sophisticated and silly at once. She is fiercely intelligent and knows how to work any situation to her advantage, which usually turns out to be okay for everyone else, too. She is either really into something or could not care less, there is no in-between. She will not feign interest in something she finds boring, and she cannot be easily compelled to do something the point of which she can’t quite work out. She is kind but never saccharine, and I think most people are initially drawn to her but quickly encounter a kind of wall it can sometimes seem impossible to penetrate. She possesses an impressive moral compass for a nine-year-old but keeps us guessing most days about whether she will follow it. She understands what it is to be respectful but does not easily bend to the will of authority, mine included. We find it is best to try to reason with Olive, as she is generally responsive to being treated like an equal, whereas her brother is perfectly happy to do what we say simply because he trusts that we know what we’re talking about. Olive, on the other hand, is more inclined to trust herself more than anyone else, which is not always so fun for a parent. We hear quite a lot from her teachers, and can see plainly for ourselves, that she is almost always “in her own world,” lacks important executive functioning and social skills, and struggles mightily to get with any sort of program that isn’t hers. She tends to wander off—literally and figuratively—and sometimes it is a while before we can find her. There have been diagnoses, and she is on more than one spectrum, and we take all of this seriously when warranted. Her neurodiversity is absolutely the thing that makes her feel like magic, but it creates challenges for her at school and other places outside the walls of our funky little family. As parents, we face those challenges with a lot of shoulder shrugging (that is, after all, a necessary part of keeping one’s sanity in parenthood), patience, meeting her where she is, normalizing her normal, helping her to understand how others might experience her, reminders and enticements to “pay attention” and complete tasks, giving consequences when she fails to do so, begging and pleading with her to put her book down, and, in the end and most often, throwing up our hands and letting her and everyone else just figure it out. Out of desperation, we tried medication for a while but couldn’t stomach it; drugs just seemed to snuff out her light. The truth about Olive is this: She is always at home in the world. Wherever she goes, there she is.

Despite all of these things that go into making Olive the magical creature she is, much still gets made about her gender and how it impacts our lives and decisions we make as a family. Will she be okay, friends asks, and how are we safeguarding her rights? Will she, indeed, I wonder, and how can we ever really know? Does she have all of the resources she needs? Another unanswerable question we often get. We have no great answers to these, except to say that she is happy for now and we are keeping a close eye but remain busy with life. Many friends have wondered why in the world we chose to move back to the south when her rights as a gender expansive child are daily threatened here and the outlook doesn’t look so good in states like Virginia for families like ours. 12 anti-trans bills were introduced in the VA General Assembly in 2023 (none passed, but it’s safe to say that they are definitely more worried about where Olive pees than the brutality of the Super Bowl, so we’re different); Governor Younkin recently issued an edict that rolled back protections and accommodations for trans children in public schools, and which, as far as I can tell, administrators in the City of Richmond ignore, which makes sense since they are busy educating children, dealing with the collective trauma of a global pandemic, and making sure they are safe during the school day; and the GA is poised this year to debate whether or not to place major restrictions on gender-affirming health care in the state. None of these things are good, and all of this and more has kept me up at night since our family put down roots here last summer.

But if I believed that it was merely politics that would save Olive or legislative safeguards that would ensure her happiness, then I might well have made a different choice. But I do not believe that to be the case, and when I decided to pick up my chickens and cart them across country, leaving Shangri-La for a place with wretched humidity in the summers and monuments to the confederacy that only recently came down, it was precisely with my children’s interests in mind. Because I believe that if Olive is to survive and thrive in this world it will not be because we gave her a gender-neutral bathroom to use or because she is surrounded by people who vote the way her parents do and cheer her on loudly in her gender journey, though these things are obviously crucial to her ability to be free in very significant ways.

But Olive’s happiness and freedom have far more to do with whether she is daily wrapped in the arms of friends and family who see her for who she is all the way down deep, who see past what is changing or ephemeral, who are prepared to love her for the long haul and who count her as one of them, no matter the political scaffolding that does or does not exist in the wider socio-political environs to support her trans identity. We were so grateful for all the people who loved her back in Telluride and for the outpouring of support for her choices around her gender. Some of my best friends were made there, and those women loved Olive as if she were their own. I don’t ever take that for granted. But what we also wanted for Olive was a deeper kind of belonging, a feeling that she is precious, as all children deserve, not because of her difference and what she represents or says about the political moment, but because she is one of Us, of a tribe that calls her their own, no matter her pronouns or fashion choices, or how she is received by strangers. We worried, being the outsiders we were there, that she would always be seen as “the trans kid,” somehow different from all the rest, in a tiny place where differences are more profoundly felt. Here in Virginia, there is infinitely more to see and be, and countless other kids like her and not like her. She is able to be her wildly wonderful, gender-bending self, without much fanfare and she can shine as bright as she wants but still somehow be just like all the rest. She belongs here for the simple fact that there is room enough for everyone, and diversity has a way of supporting kids like Olive while also not making so much of her unique outward expression. Her tribe is formed by people I have known since childhood, people who would lie down in traffic for my family, no matter our political differences; by her father who bought her her first dress, and her older brothers and sisters who have never batted an eye and loved Olive as she is from the day she was born; by my mother who remains Olive’s biggest fan and with whom she shares a birthday; by my grandmother (who cannot quite make out Olive’s gender, and still calls her “Oliver” a lot of the time, but who loves her as much as any one of her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren); by my aunts and uncles who love Olive because she is one of them and they see in her themselves too and me as a child and my father who they loved dearly and my mother who is their sister, and that is how hearts crack open and moral imaginations begin to expand. That is how people are moved to change and to grow.

Olive’s greatest protector is her younger brother Jonah, a little Lakshmana if ever there was one. At seven years old, he would just as soon cut the throat of anyone who tried to bring her harm as he would peel a banana at the breakfast table. And what can explain this? Olive is no kinder to him than any other older sibling, and Jonah is put upon by her in the way that only a younger sibling can be. But while Olive ignores being nastily called a boy by kids who know better or turns the other cheek to save her own face when children on the playground say things to hurt her, Jonah quickly steps up to any bully who dares to speak against his Olive. He tells her she “looks pretty” with some frequency and seems to genuinely admire her style and wit. She is precious to him, despite her occasional meanness, but there is no doubt that his life would seem empty (to him) without her. And there is nothing rational about that. She is just simply radically unique and irreplaceable to him, as he is to her, as both of our children are to us. They cannot bear to be apart, even if they quarrel in each other’s company. It is their deep attachment to each other, and the joy and sorrow bound up in that, which constitutes their sense of each other’s preciousness, as well as their own.

We wanted more of that for Olive, precisely because we understand that she is walking a difficult path, and that feeling of being deeply loved might be more tenuous for her than other children. So we traded a politically safer state for one that is nothing less than hostile, but one in which there exists a whole community of people held together by the thick bonds that only blood and so much history can create, and friendships of whole families going back generations, a tribe ready to welcome her and her little brother, to keep them safe no matter the outside threats or current political moment, to remind them each day of their preciousness as humans rather than their specialness as any one thing or another. They belong and they are loved by family and friends here simply because they exist, and that is enough, for now, for us.