Coleen Murphy is a crabby old zinester and unschooler whose current identities include headmistress of Camp HeartWings, publisher of the Mama Calendar, co-organizer of the New Orleans Bookfair, and parent of two tremendous grown-up people. Having called New Orleans home for 23 years, she can be found around town wrangling toddlers, distributing community resource guides, advocating with and for young people, and supporting a harm reduction approach to just about everything.
BOY, I GUESS: ADVENTURES IN GENDER-EXPANSIVE PARENTING
Picture this: St. Louis Cathedral, late 2001. I’m part of a small group of moms with young children who’ve ducked in to get the free tour as a way to take a break from the heat. The elderly tour guide gathers us and then pauses, points to my scowling four-year-old and asks, “Is that a boy or a girl?”
After a pause that feels uneasy but necessary, I say, “Why do you need to know?” The response is quick: “If it’s a girl she can keep her hat on, but if it’s a boy the hat has to come off before we enter the cathedral.” Ah, interesting. My witchy atheist upbringing did not prepare me for this.
I turn to my child with the shoulder-length curls. “Well, what do you say?” This time the pause—clearly very necessary!—feels even less easy and considerably longer, although it is probably only a few seconds. During the wait, I feel the bemused scrutiny of the tour guide as well as the other parents, and I’m relieved that my two-year-old is passed out in the stroller and thus unable to participate in this conversation.
At last, my four-year-old heaves a sigh, pulls off their cap, and says, “Boy, I guess.”
A Wild Ride
This is the thing with parenting in public, right? You leave the house with your grubby little sidekicks looking to have some laughs or at least a lack of crying, but at any given moment you might find yourself thrust into the limelight as a social justice warrior.
My child had spent much of the previous year-and-a-half flowing through varying gender identities and names. Although I did not feel like I had much solid guidance to follow, my approach was to go with whatever their choice of the moment seemed to be, and to accept corrections from them as necessary. Having been raised with an intentionally feminist, antiauthoritarian perspective myself, adopting an openness around gender felt like a natural progression, one made clearer for me when I was fortunate enough to hear iconic transgender author and activist Leslie Feinberg speak during the early weeks of my pregnancy with my firstborn.
Living your parenting values is a relatively easy gig in the privacy of your own home, but public scrutiny can be a wild ride. Any parent who has ever left the house with their young children knows that assessments of gender and reinforcements of norms are a constant. I made a choice early on to resist correcting folks and just express appreciation for any remarks that seemed positive. What a beautiful little girl! Thank you! He’s a tough little guy! Thank you!
Folks get weird pretty fast, though, and I was not always so heroic. I mean… I’m assuming that’s a little girl… IS that a little girl??? I must confess that I did a fair amount of shrugging and playing dumb when it came to strangers, and occasionally blurted out “Yep!” to whatever their stated gender assessment was before fleeing the scene.
As Real As You Want It To Be
My family of origin was never an issue. Adoration and acceptance of their grandchild outweighed whether or not they “got it,” and believe me, I know what a privilege that is. I grew up with a mom who taught us to say “firefighter” and who frequently switched up gender pronouns in our Dr. Seuss books. For me, it felt right to continue in that vein towards an increased openness that makes room for possibilities.
It was the resistance in my queer community—the same community that had turned me on to Leslie Feinberg —that knocked me off balance. Proudly introducing my nine-month-old babe at a national queer conference and using the “Why do you need to know?” reply to gender interrogation, I was surprised when some of my people got downright huffy with me. Like, what?! But y’all are the ones who taught me about gender fluidity (we didn’t say “expansive” back then)…
Several years later I read legendary zinester China Martens‘ reflections on her early years of parenting in her punk community, and found myself nodding vigorously and wishing I had her clarity back in the day. She speaks of her people seeming astounded that she could be a mother AND a punk, a mother AND a zinester, and missing the part where yes, actually, these identities all inform and amplify each other, rooting us more deeply in our values as we put them into practice and clarify what exactly is the “there” there.
As a young queerdo pre-parenthood, many wise, bold, creative people in my community pushed me to leave behind assumptions about what gender may or may not be or mean for any given person. As a child advocate ever since I grew out of being a child myself, it was obvious to me that when we say this, we are including children in our definition of people. Here’s the thing, though: Adultism—obnoxious and pervasive tendency that it is—pops up in all kinds of communities, and is part of the systems of oppression that maintain patriarchal culture and keep parents and kids in rigid, gendered boxes. Not to get all political. Except that everything is political.
Gender is only as real as you want it to be, a brilliant teenager said to me when I was 28 and pregnant, and I’ve been so grateful ever since. It’s a sentiment that I’ve been trying to unpack with anyone who will listen for much of the past 27 years—everyone who’s said, “You know how girls are!” (I don’t, because I don’t believe there is a way that girls are); or, “You’re so lucky to have boys!” (I’m not, and I don’t, except when I do, and, and, and…)
Gender is only as real as you want it to be, and my siblings in queerness, I want you (us) to be affirmed in our genders, meaning and being whatever feels right and/or awesome and/or beautiful and/or unremarkable and/or fluid and full of possibilities. AND I want us to push and expand ourselves to extend that openness to our children—and to further comprehend that they’re all our children.
As it turned out, that day in the cathedral kicked off a long stretch of my child choosing to guess “boy” and I had some complicated feelings about that. Gender messaging from my own childhood put me in a place of over-analyzing my child’s choices, getting stuck in spirals of self-scrutiny of my parenting. When my child presented and identified in a way that was in line with mainstream notions of what gender is and means, part of me felt relief, and all of me felt horrible for feeling that relief. I’d always excelled at insomnia-fueled games like, What If I’m Wrong About Everything? And How Much Did I Mess My Kid Up Today? But I now had a few more hits to add to the mix: Reinforcing the Patriarchy Without Even Trying, Failing at Being Cool, and of course, everyone’s favorite, Making My Child’s Existence All About Me.
It was a lot and I worked at sorting it out. I worked at getting and staying grounded, at being present for my children’s fast-moving childhoods, at honoring and celebrating my kids for who they are, at accepting my own childhood experiences as just one piece of reality. Most of all, I worked at getting clear that my issues do not need to be my children’s problems, and in fact, their identities are not anyone’s problem, on account of this simple fact: It is not a problem at all. It is just part of the fullness of who they are.
Resources
You don’t have to go it alone!
The New Orleans Pride Center hosts a variety of in-person groups and events including specific gatherings for parents of trans and gender-diverse kids, groups for trans and queer youth, and more. @nolapridecenter | nolapridecenter.org.
Louisiana Trans Advocates is trans-led and a great starting place for locating support systems, including navigating the legal landscape and looking at options for families that may need to relocate to a state that is safer for them. latransadvocates.org/resources.
The Campaign for Southern Equality has awesome resources on the “Families of Trans Youth in Louisiana” section of their website, including tips for conversations with family members about affirming and respecting the gender identities of children and youth as they evolve, locating support all over the U.S., grants for assistance with relocation and accessing health care, and more. southernequality.org/la.
New Orleans metro area parents! Want to share your experience with ANTIGRAVITY readers? We’re always looking for a wide variety of parenting voices and circumstances to explore each month. If you’re interested, please get in touch with Erin Hall or head to our About page to fill out a contributor form.
illustrations by Victoria Allen
