What I did get was her offering to do my laundry when I came home from grad school, and her holding up various in-your-face Queer Nationish and Lesbian Avengerish t-shirts (I KNOW the education is failing the children because I KNOW you won’t have heard about those two groups in school. thank heavens for Wikipedia.). She’d say something like, “Are you sure you’re safe walking around in these?” A reasonable question, certainly, and if I did have any of ‘em on in the wrong part of town at the wrong time of day, she’d be right to be worried.

What I don’t want to even imagine right now is the ways in which either or both my kids are going to give me coronaries. Which, alas, I feel fairly certain they will.

Family making is quite some time off for me [everything inside me screams 15 more years!]…I hope and also anticipate that all these petty shenanigans we are dealing with now with be an archaic memory. Seriously, I’ve just now learned about the interracial marriage ban [the education system is failing our children! ahh!] and all I can say is, Really? Seriously? I will personally fight to the death to make sure my children are saying the same thing about this mess.

I have such a great admiration for all the gender benders out there…I think sometimes I want nothing more than to be one of them! I think at this point, I love my long blonde hair not enough that I’m tempted to go at it with the scissors as an act of rebellion. I’ll never forget the day I clipped my keychain to my belt loop–an apparent “butchey thing to do”–and my mother had a coronary. “Be a cute lesbian, Lauren, in the least!”

Also: “special lady friend” is also my favorite. Wife does not rub me wrong; however, after watching the wonderful Portia and Ellen interview marathon that has happened this week [by far, the best part of my Spring Break!], I have realized that it does not sound as smooth as I once thought it did. Perhaps this is from my current “Do Away With Marriage As A Whole” campaign; oh well…maybe I’ll go old-fashioned as well and stick with “partner.” When that day comes, of course.

Thank you for reading, Lauren: welcome, and thank you for your kind words. I dearly hope (and for the most part anticipate, but who the heck knows) that by the time family-making is closer in your sights, things will be even better for all of us, LGBT families and gender traitors and the lot of us.

By the way, I love “lady-friend.” Many folks call their spouses wifes, but I somehow can’t wrap my mouth around that word, for ol’ time feminist reasons. Fortunately neither can my beloved, so we’re back to “partner.” In spite of our conditional marital condition. We do delight in her calling me her husband, and I can’t resist referring to her in the third person as The Mrs.

I don’t have anything significantly valuable to add to your comment-conversation, but I wanted to say how glad I am to see that you and your wife? lady-friend? what are they calling you guys out in Cali now? are so conscious of gender identity with your children.

I blogged about this topic myself nearly a week ago, but it’s not something that a lot of people are talking about now. I’m 17, and a product of my mother’s own endless addiction to femininity. I’m just now reaching the age where I can even threaten that one day I will, in fact, begin to cut my own hair with kitchen scissors and wear men’s jeans, and there will be no welcome input from her in the matter!

Anyway, it’s good to hear that someone such as yourself is writing on the matter, both in your blog and in essays. Us kids out in the midwest, our identities are being smothered by rigid and expected gender roles. Hopefully half of us make it out of adolescence alive to defy them with our own children.

Simply adore your writing and your angelic children. It’s great to read about the kind of family I hope I can have myself one day…who knew it was possible?

-Lauren

It’s amazing — really, simply amazing — what it does to one to be watching children form themselves. I’ve been a die-hard social constructivist, perhaps simply to counterbalance the die-hard biological determinists in my life. But watching our kids “bring” something with them, watching them “be” somebody very distinct, long before they could be credibly receiving, filtering, and integrating cultural conditioning. Well. It’s just fascinating. As an erstwhile student of Hegel, I’d say that I’m tending toward some sort of synthesis between the two positions. I mean, I had to “be” something of my gendered self in spite of the culture that was trying very hard to construct me otherwise.

I do like the Ashleigh Brilliant take on this whole matter: it’s both very simple, and very complex, at the same time. Leastwise to me. I share your wish that an open path be available to us all. Least we can clear it for our own kids, in the parts of their journey we have the honor to shepherd and protect, with the hope that the momentum they feel internally will carry them through the inevitable rough patches that we have to leave it to them to navigate on their own.

Alphafemme – I absolutely understand your point of view. I hope my comment didn’t feel like an advancement of anti-femme bias. Quite the contrary; it’s been a battle with myself knowing that my reaction against femininity is entirely hypocritical, and serves to put others in the same situation of identity-oppression that I struggled to escape.

And LD, likewise I know what you mean about having feelings towards this issue evolve. For me, the more I have become secure in my right to my gender, the more naturally it has come to me to not grimace. (Discrimination stemming from insecurity is not limited to homophobes!)

I didn’t have the fortune of figuring out my orientation or my gender until my mid 20s and late 20s, respectively. In the meantime, I struggled along, largely unable to connect with girls, and in my normative suburban school rejected in efforts to connect with guys. I eventually ended up in a 6-year relationship with a guy that came close to marriage (whew!), and which involved a lot of fights over why I embarrassed him by not being feminine like all his friends’ girlfriends were. Leave it to me to be mistaken for a guy despite having hair down to my knees!

Having happily moved into the world of queer, I see how here I’m the one who has the easier go of it, compared to so many people. I’m the one with the visibility and consequent “legitimacy”, as opposed to those who, like your beloved, LD, have to come out on an almost daily basis. And I’ve found that relates not only to orientation but gender identity as well. My s.o. and I both identify as queer in gender as well as orientation, seeing ourselves as part of the trans community. I tend to feel “neither”, which translates to a presentation that, through its lack of femininity, is much more easily read as being queer. My s.o., however, feels a bit more “both” (note these are oversimplifications on both parts!), so, simply by nature of hir presentation and mannerisms including SOME femininity, ze is more often read as cisgendered female, and really has to fight to establish hir identity.

At any rate, yeah, having experienced so far my process of pushing against femininity and learning to lighten up about it, I too often wonder what is to be done to combat such systematic pressures on both sides of the long rainbow line. I feel pretty confident that my experiences will lead me to let my future kids follow their hearts to whatever end…now if only the same could be said of the rest of the world!

Very thought-provoking, and worth a read. Your remark, “When I see gay parents subconsciously glow when Susie is all-girl or Bobby is all-boy (whatever the fuck that means) I find it seriously depressing,” make me think of it right away.

It was a time that talking about gender balance in child rearing made me feel like I was doing a solo. In the desert.

Without too much backstory, I believe that the child rearing philosophy I had was fundamentally whole and turned out pretty well. Not without its hiccups, but all and all pretty damn successful. Nice to have a little something to applaud in hindsight. But there was/is so much about gender typing that is insidious…even if, or especially if, it manifests as harmless and sweet.

I am strongly pulled to be both masculine and feminine (masculinity and femininity as defined by society, both straight and gay). And I was a straight wife and never liked the appellation, so I reject that title…while admitting that I have nothing great to replace it with (partner is kind of lifeless, lover is single-faceted and friend is insulting).

I also have issues with being labeled butch or femme because, well, I want it all.

And I wanted my children to have it all. So if she wanted to wear a freakin’ party dress with bells in the underskirt so she jingled while she walked and he wanted to play shoot ‘em up with a wooden stick…I grimaced and tried not to discourage. Of course, when he showed interest in cooking or she wanted to learn to weld…I probably showed a bit more enthusiasm.

Because they would get all the stereotypical shit from society and I was anxious to provide them with atypical gender activities so they could someday pick and choose from the whole spectrum of possibilities.

When I see gay parents subconsciously glow when Susie is all-girl or Bobby is all-boy (whatever the fuck that means) I find it seriously depressing.

So hurray for your blog. For this conversation and the consciousness it engenders (oh, I do love a pun).

Are you a Star Trek aficionado? Sometimes I think of gender training as like the force of the Borg (”You will be assimilated”). The Borg represent the broad-based cultural force toward a kind of bi-polar gender conformity, and throughout my youth — sounds like yours, too — I was kind of plastered to the side of the Borg ship’s hallways, hoping not to be noticed for my renegade gender-traitor status. (Point of plot information: they are a race of cyborgs operating in a kind of a hive-mind collectivity, and seem not to notice individual carbon-based life-forms until such time as they become a threat.) The interesting thing about having a girlie daughter is two-fold: like you, I realize that I’m off the hook. (Though it’s not directly my mother’s foiled hopes for my femininity, what with her being in the ether now, it still feels that way abstractly.) Plus I now see the whole Borg hive thing in action with a willing participant, which changes its tenor somewhat. Makes some parts of it not the same thing at all. Yesterday at ballet class, when the teacher put on a song from the Tinkerbell soundtrack and had the little dancers flap their fairy wings, I wish I could describe the rapture — the being spoken to — on our girl’s face.