• How was your relationship with your father?

• Did you feel different from your peers as a child?

• Did you feel pressured by family, media, peers, or anything else to conform?

• Do you feel those things now?

• How do you approach gender now?

• How does your family feel about your gender?

• What do your kids call you (Mom, Dad, __)?

• How do you approach the subject of gender with your kids? (IE: Their own, yours, people around them)?

• What genders do your kids identify as?

• Have you talked to them in detail about gender and gender vs. sex?

• Do you plan on it?

 Oops. Cat’s out of the bag, down the street, and warming itself in the sun after eating the salmon off the neighbor’s dinner table.

About a million years ago, I received a series of questions for a middle school project from Mickey, one of my special nieces. “Special nieces” being the daughters of my friends, one of whom is one of my oldest continuous friendships, dating back to September 1980, the other of whom is her former spouse and the donor chum and thus special uncle to our children (more on extended familial nomenclature here). The whole family, thanks to the bond we’ve forged with love, trust, and biology, is more than special.

But so! Way back when, I told her I would try to answer them all, and since she is internet-savvy (what person over the age of 12 isn’t these days?), and knows I write here (for better and for worse, I’m sure!), I asked what she thought about my answering via a post, so as to have the whole conversation get wider. She liked the idea, and said she would link to my reply in her Tumblr site. So! Hey, Mickey! Here! Months upon months–indeed, a whole school later, ya big ole high schooler–below are my replies to your questions:

• Where did you grow up?

The suburbs of the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.

• How big was your family as a kid?

Four people: a mother, a father, and a sister. We didn’t see the extended part of it very often during my growing up years, so it felt pretty “nuclear,” for all intents and purposes. Even if I knew there were others of our clan somewhere a few hours or states away.

• What gender do you identify as?

Female.

• What is your PGP (Preferred Gender Pronoun)?

“She” is totally fine by me, but I am never disgruntled when people read me as a he, and only “correct” people  if our exchange goes on and on and I figure eventually they’ll get embarassed if they all of a sudden realize they initially got it “wrong.” On a recent trip to New York I counted well over a dozen references to me as “Sir,” and was quite tickled. I consider it a sign I’m dressing smartly.

• Have you ever considered hormone treatments or sex-reassignment surgery?

No, for two reasons. One: when I was searching for a sense of who I was, gender-wise, no one I knew of had done any of these things, and the options only became part of my circle of friends/ awareness when I was in my late twenties/ early thirties.  Two: I’ve never felt like I was born into the wrong body; I’ve always felt like I was born into a culture that doesn’t allow enough space (yet) for the full range of femaleness or maleness, so that’s what I’ve put my efforts into changing. I am totally fine with being the kind of female I am, and the kind of person I am as a female, even bodily. Butch gals rock! Even if my breasts are not my favorite body part. Don’t tell them and we’ll all be okay.

• When did you realize that you didn’t fit traditional gender roles?

Um, probably when I first realized there were any.  Quite certainly before I was five. See Fig. A below for  version of myself when I was about yours or your sister’s ages; at the bottom of this related post is a picture me when I was a pint-sized version of the above. ‘Nuff said?

Fig. A: Yers truly as a tween, early 1970s.

• How old were you when you came out to your family?

My sister was the first family member I came out to, and I came out to her within about a year after I came out to myself, which was at 19. So, 20 yrs old. I came out to my dad another 3 or 4 years later, and my mom last, 5 years in. I picked them in order of perceived comprehension and receptivity, and was dead-on in that assessment.

• How old were you when you came out to the public?

That process is always a kind of slow, iterative one (I think, or perhaps it was for me). My first partner, whom I was with for 5+ years, was way less comfortable than I was being identified in public (I recall many a finger slipped out of my hand).  We went to the Gay Pride Parade (as it was more or less called at the time) in 1985 or 1986, under the guise of ice cream salespeople for a city political group we were each working with at the time (Berkeley Citizens’ Action, the lefter-wing of the two city left-liberal groups). That might mark my first public appearance as a lesbian.

• What do you think you learned from that experience?

There are TONS of us! And if you’re out in a safe place, it can make you very, very happy. (Obviously the work is now: make every place a safe place.)

• How did your family take it?

When I came out to my sister, she chuckled and said she knew before me. While she is an older sister, and thus prone to the kind of know-it-all-ness that older siblings are accursed by, in this case she was right. (Sorry, Mickey! I know you’re an older sister. Hopefully you’ll recognize the grain of truth. Since, you know, you’re usually right!)

My dad, because he has something of a fluid sense of his own sexual identity, was sympathetic, though at first he had a fairly typical “This is surely a phase” response. Mostly because he consigned his own same-sex interests to a phase. He doled out ten years of fairly consistent, patronizing commentary about the “phaseness” of who I was before he began to realize it wasn’t a phase. Or if so, a life-long one.  To his credit, he was certainly amicable and kindly to whichever of my gal pals I brought home to meet him, as was my mother. Notable also is that somebody had to take those pictures up there of me.  It was probably my dad.

My mother understood me the least, and was initially worried I was lesbian because I had a negative experience with a boy. (Far from it! I had none; never was threatened by them; had nothing but amicable buddy relationships; my biggest beef was being underestimated when it came time to pick teams for co-ed sports in P.E.) I was still toward the early (first 5-10 years) part of a process of helping her understand when she died of breast cancer. To this day I attribute my strong desire to do coalition work with heterosexual women a kind of compensatory boobie prize. If I can’t help my mother understand me, least I can do is do the same gentle, patient work with absolutely every other heterosexual mother on Earth.

• What was your relationship with your mother like?

The $64,000 question. O, o so complex. Even as a kid I felt solicitous and protective of her. Opened doors, etc. Loved her unconditionally, still do. She was a heavyweight woman, had no siblings, raised in apartment after apartment by a single mother (father left the scene, effectively, after her parents divorced when she was 7).  Her mother was most likely an (unaware, unrecovering) alcoholic (never divulged as such to us, but my sister pieced this together after our grandmother’s death from our grandfather’s second wife). She grew up if not poor, then definitely of limited means and tenuous security. Perpetually underestimated by others, or so it seemed to me (note the swashbuckling crusader identity in Exhibit A above: random? I think not).

She was very very loving and protective of my sister and me, and did all in her power to provide for us the healthy, supportive childhood I strongly suspect she lacked. Christmasses were a potlatch of plenty, I’m sure for this reason. We looked at the delight on her face as we opened present after present. To let her down in any way whatsoever was more or less inconceivable to me.

I think it’s for this reason that it was only after she died that I really completed the process of becoming my mannish lesbian self. Only in retrospect did I realize this, but I sincerely believe that because I sensed it would let her down for me to express the true me, as I felt I was gendered, I didn’t fully let myself go there.

In the year following her death, I got a tattoo, shaved the last of the hair on my head, and got the big ole heavy workboots I always wanted. In other words, I opened the door and invited in the female masculinity that I had left shivering outside on the porch for several decades. Nearly twenty years after her death, I would say now that I think she would have loved me anyway.  My mis-step was to confuse understanding with love. Yes, she would have not understood me, not right away. But she always did, would, and probably still does love me.

Fortunately I know your parents, Mickey, and can say with confidence that they love you no matter what or who you find yourself to be, whether they understand that person as quick as you do, or not.  Hopefully you know this now better than I did about my parents when I was your age.

Halloween trick-or-treating peanut, Berkeley, CA (2010).

Visual coda to yesterday’s post, in which I mentioned our boy’s Halloween costume choice of last year. I wrote a few words about it at the time, here.  If I were to have to guess now, I’d say there’ll be a long gap ’til the next such outfit makes a Halloween appearance, though of course I could be wrong. In the intervening year, his haberdashery pace car has shifted from Big Sister to Main Boy Chum at Preschool.  For all the complex reasons that are behind such evolving self-understandings. Advancing years, increased exposure to peer groups, push of culture, pull of self, survival instinct; you name it.

The costume  above met a glowing reception throughout the neighborhood last year, though, and not just because there were blinky red lights underneath the tulle (yes there were).  I mean, really. The kid looks better in that outfit than I ever could.  Also? At least the grown-ups in our neighborhood love kids unconditionally and clearly share our conviction that the best thing we can do for them is clear the runway ahead and help them take flight.

Re: clearing the runway and helping kids take flight (into a world they’re in the process of making) – below, I’ve collected a smattering of nifty resources by and for parents of gender nonconforming kids. Halloween’s pretty much the primo occasion for this, since it’s the one day of the year kids have a wide(r) berth to explore performing different identities.

Here’s one of my favorite blogs on one family’s journey, genderwise: Labels are for Jars.  After you check out her extremely thoughtful posts, you can go on to check out the blogs on her blogroll.  Sarah Hoffman writes about her “pink boy.” Like so many (mostly mothers, but some fathers, Accepting Dad a stellar voice among them) writing about nonconforming boy kids, also has amassed a great list of valuable resources and done a lot of work at her kid’s school, which she’s written about. She’s got a book in the works, and if blog is prologue, we can expect it to be very good. Transparenthood, also very thoughtful, explores parenting a boy child born in a girl body; Sam’s now 15.

Like Sarah Hoffman, Cheryl Kilodavis, author of My Princess Boy, has done an enormous amount of consciousness- and awareness-raising, after she did some on herself as her son began to follow his own path. I met and interviewed her last February when she was on book tour locally, but had just become job-smacked and had to put the interview in the can, where several other notable ones are moldering. (Ordinary people have backlogged scrapbook and family photo album projects; bloggers have backlogged blog posts.) The succinct thing I can share from that chat with her is that she is enormously sincere, very very smart and open, learning all the time, and evangelical about spreading understanding among parents like her who were previously totally unprepared for nonconformity like this in her child. Check out her Acceptance Groups page.

No post on kids in gender nonconforming Halloween outfits would be complete without reference to Nerdy Apple Bottom, who blew the top off this topic last year when she posted about her son’s Daphne outfit and its reception at his (then) school.  And yes: comment count on that post is accurately reflected at over 47,000.  So not kidding about the “blew the top off”; the Today Show had her on as a result. Sarah (the blog’s author) is a phenomenal person, as I can attest now after having had the pleasure of meeting her last August in San Diego. This year she’s done a photo project, Just B, in which she’s taken portraits of her kids and their friends having a nondenominational blast with a box of costumes. (Whole series here.)

As to organizations, Gender Spectrum is the best one I know of, founded by (who else) a loving mother of a gender nonconforming child. Said mother, Stephanie Brill, just happened to be a midwife / educator / author of two books about conception, childbirth, and queer parenting, so she hit the ground running, as a perusal of Gender Spectrum’s resources will make clear. Their page Understanding Gender is a great first stop for folks, and her book The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals, cowritten with author/educator Rachel Pepper, is top-notch and one-of-a-kind.

Collecting this list of online resources has made it evident to me: parents (mostly mothers) are becoming transformed and expanded by their kids, and are turning around and working to transform and expand the world so it can fit them. Which I consider a pretty neat trick.

Not realizing the careful periodization in the 1950s, a straight woman friend, mom of one of my daughter’s chums, thought maybe my dad outfit might be improved by rigging up a TV with a sports game on it somehow extended in front of me, maybe with a bowl of chips affixed to one wrist and a beer to the other. At the time we were talking, her husband was off at a day-long 49er’s game (if you factor in the generous tailgating time built in pre-game) while she was saddled with both kids: who’s to blame her for veering toward the Archie Bunkeresque?

A rolling Barcalounger would have really been the only proper way to execute this concept, but then how would I be motivated to get up and reposition it from house to house? The kids are too little yet to be able to push me in a wheeled Barcalounger. You can see the challenge.

One sad year I was a walking ballot, with the exact language of Proposition 8 written out on one side, and the line-up of presidential choices on the other. Suggested votes “X’ed” in, natch. (In the fog of the intervening years, the kids now have it that I was one of the sycophantic playing cards in service to the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Wonderland. All in all, I felt just about as effectual.)

This year, nada. I dressed up as no patriarchal stereotype, good or bad; no cause célèbre. The kids wanted me to be Flynn Rider, from Tangled, but I didn’t pull it off. I was just an actual parent, trading off with the other actual parent, either doing circuits up the block with the kids, or stints on the porch doling out totally unhealthy sucrose products. We can’t hand out raisins because my beloved was raised by a Buddhist lesbian radical feminist hippie theater artist (who surely doled out raisins, or apples, or granola balls), and ours will be The House That Gives Out Raisins over her dead body.

I had duck-taped a large rubber tarantula to the brim of my baseball cap, in a feeble last-minute attempt at a costume, but it kept slithering off the brim and plopping down into the candy bowl at unexpected moments, which, though entertaining, was not the effect I was looking for.

Next door, my brother-in-law donned his regular Halloween Snow White get-up. For those rusty on the secondary character backstory here, he’s a 6’8″, bearded, loud-voiced, conventionally balding, football-watching guy. Who, also having been raised by the selfsame Buddhist lesbian radical feminist hippie theater artist, is as pro-feminist as they come, and can and will process his feelings with the best of them. Just let that sink in, and then slip that into a silken Snow White outfit and put a black wig on it.

When I was working the porch shift, I would periodically trot over to my brother-in-law at his station near his front gate, and flash a flashlight under his chin so as to heighten the overall effect. (No offense to my brother-in-law, but we really aren’t working with the Johnny Depp glam kind of drag here, way more the gender f*ck kind).

All the grown-up chaperones loved his outfit, and most of the kids did, too. I misjudged the capacities of one young Spiderman-clad trick-or-treater and did the spooky flashlight effect for him. After he froze for a moment, he declined the candy, slowly eased behind his mom’s legs, and said, “Snow White scares me.” Oops.

Not every young visitor was as innocent. A tween-aged boy, when he took in all of Snow White, laughed extra long, extra hard, and unambiguously derisively as he walked away, serving up a vivid portrait of precisely what is in store for anyone who f*cks with his already granite-chiseled notions of how women’s and men’s genders must be performed. Which, of course, didn’t originate with him.

Ridicule is an ugly thing to see at any age. In a craven world in which some punishment is doled out for those who don’t conform to “hegemonic” notions of masculinity, ridicule seems preferable over physical violence, which of course is the next alert level up from what this kid was dishing out. But suicide statistics among feminine young men (either gay, bisexual, or perceived to be) tell us that systematic ridicule and harassment can trigger as devastating an effect as a raised fist. (Here’s a fantastically comprehensive page of studies compiled by a University of Calgary professor of Social Work, if you appreciate a good study or so. Ok, upwards of 50, replete with hyperlinks.)

My son dodged a bullet this year, having opted to dress up as a pirate. There he is at right, taking a bow in the annual Halloween block party costume contest, with Laura Ingalls Wilder at his left, and Snow White, a natural emcee, at his right. (Last year my son was a princess in a gorgeous, pink, tulle gown.) I’ve written before about his evolving boyness, which for the moment continues to not be monolithic (here’s one piece; here’s another).

At seven and four, my kids already know that gender is better understood on a spectrum than with an either/or, mutually exclusive binary. They know: most people have either a boy body or a girl body, some have a little of both. That takes care of the biological/ sex part, for now. They also know that there are boyish boys, girlish boys, boyish girls, and girlish girls; they have people in their lives that occupy each spot on that (admittedly rough-hewn and chunky) spectrum, so it’s by no means theoretical. That takes care of the social/ gender part, for now.

The tougher lesson (the one I dread) is going to be the one about how harshly they may be punished, not just by something so abstract as “society,” but by people as specific as their immediate peers in their schoolyards and in their town, for deviating from “boyish boy” and “girlish girl.” And it’s going to take everything I’ve got to not want to go beat the tar out of the first kid, like last night’s gender policing trick-or-treater, who makes either of them cry, or worse. Which in one fell swoop would of course both defeat the point of redefining masculinity, and demonstrate how very hard it is to break out of prevailing cycles and do so.  Fortunately for me, Halloween’s once a year.

The short version: a woman was jumped by 12 people; clear indications were made that she was being singled out for her appearance; she was the only one cuffed and arrested by local police.

Andy Towle embedded  video from the local news station on it, and I’ll let you see it over at his blog. But  I want to send you to it with a few quotations.  From one of the men attacking Laura Gilbert:

If you want to look like a man, you’ll get hit like a man.

And from Laura Gilbert, to the reporter:

I’m an American just like the rest of us are. I have rights. I have the same right as y’all do. Supposedly.

Please go check it out here.

His sister loved this t-shirt (a beloved gift from a beloved chum, who now runs the women’s center at Ohio University, thankyouverymuch). I was tickled whenever I saw our daughter wear it, but must confess I am even more tickled to see it on the boychild. I wasn’t the one who dressed him this morning, but I can see him picking this one out because it’s a pretty color. That, and he remembers seeing it on his the sun rises and sets on her big sister.

I can’t recall whether she asked what a feminist was. If she had, back when she was little enough to fit into this shirt, I’m not sure what I would have said. I’d have been tempted to go to Rebecca West’s gem, from way back in 1913:

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute.

Problem with that is that then I’d have to explain what a door mat was.

I could have also gone with something simpler and more recent, like Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler’s 1985 pearl, so oft-quoted: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”

But then I’d have to explain irony. Which would be a challenge, since I would probably be ironic as I explained it. I learned long, long ago that irony, like youth, is wasted on the young. But this does not help me resist its siren temptations. I go to it over and over, in spite of my certainty that it will be, as it almost always is, a colossal flop. When given the choice between (a) make sense to kid, or (b) entertain the self, I opt for (a) only with a show of great personal fortitude. Which I muster intermittently at best. Hey, I’m going to be on this parenting job for years and years; may as well enjoy myself at it.

Truthfully, if I were to hazard a working definition for someone small enough to fit into the t-shirt, I’d probably go with “A feminist is someone who sticks up for girls and women.” Which the lil’ peanut is all about. Heck, to his preschool chums, he explains his preference to wear skirts thus: “I like girls.”

I think he’s going to do just fine.

Never simply late when I can be egregiously late, I am filing this mid-December response to Sinclair Sexmith’s call, posted at Sugarbutch in late October, for thoughtful responses to the following prompt:

What is butch? How do you define butch? What do you love about it? What does it mean to you?

It’s the opening gambit of  a project she’s launching this month (link forthcoming when the light turns green The Butch Lab Symposium #1 link roundup’s here!), which will be guided by the following intent:

to promote a greater understanding of masculine of center gender identities, expressions, and presentations, through encouraging: 1. visibility, because we feel alone; 2. solidarity, because there are many of us out there, but we don’t always communicate with each other; and 3. an elevation of the discussion, because we have a long history and lineage to explore and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

I am so thrilled about each of those three intents (nearly as much as I am by Mr. Sexsmith herself, whose chivalry and generosity put a maraschino cherry the size of Brooklyn on my NYC trip last August), and I’m eager to participate in the conversation.

There’s no doubt my “betwixt and betweenness,” gender-wise, is something that I don’t write directly into this blog so very often: at one level, it’s merely something I take for granted, and thus find less need to articulate. At another level, though,  I simply lack the time to step aside from the stream of continual parenting to lay it all out.  So long as I keep the blog title “Lesbian Dad,” I hope some portion of the explanation will be naturally imported with whatever associations one makes with that term.  ”Hmm. Not a mom. Whatever that means.” Which is true enough, and makes a good start.

Taking that as the entry point, whatever stories herein will be those of a lesbian parent who feels as much dad as anything else, and so (I hope) they contribute, post by post, year by year, to a complex portrait, resistant to reduction.  Still, I know that’s not enough. So I’ve been waiting for a kick in the pants like this to begin to bring all this mannish female parent stuff into sharper relief, and I look forward to ongoing symposium topics to keep me moving.

It took me nearly half my life to reach a sincere sense of comfort and belonging in my gendered self which, if I had to put one name to it, I would describe as gentle-manly. I like also to describe myself as “mannish.” I like the sassy reclamation of a term I’ve first known as pejorative; I like the mild retro effect “mannish” has. Plus it’s fairly descriptive.  Particularly the –ish part. When I use the term “butch” it’s in a fairly unorthodox way, more as a modified adjective (as in “butchy”) than as a noun (I am butch, hear me roar).  But the butch shoe fits, considering it’s been men’s shoes I’ve been wearing since somewhere about the mid-1980s. (The knickers came a bit later.)

I’m tempted to tell a long, detailed story about the journey from my first men’s shoe purchase (Bill’s Men’s Shop, Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley; some grey over-the-ankle David Bowie-ish pointy-toed number; it was a very uncomfortable shopping experience for me, a harbinger of the next at least ten years) to now. I’m also tempted to bounce back and forth between so many other influential definitions of female masculinity, from the legendary Leslie Feinberg and Audre Lorde to the intellectually dense Judith “Jack” Halberstam to the yet denser Judith Butler. S. Bear Bergman’s Butch is a Noun pretty much says it all (here’s Bear saying some of it zirself; try hard to overlook the bored undergrad to zir right, who may have been hoping this would not be on the test). Sinclair’s work hither and yon provides oh so very much to respond to.

But at that rate – telling a story of my evolution, or unfolding and fiddling with a half-dozen other folks’ intriguing propositions — I’d never actually file a response to Sinclair’s prompt before 2011. So I’ll try to just cleave close to each question as best I can. Forgive me the blurry mobility of life drawings done rapidly (one minute poses? five?), which this is. I’ll try to be as honest as I can be, knowing at the outset – and from recent experience, listening to the stinging debates at  the Butch Voices conference I attended in Oakland, CA in August 2009 — that butch means many things to many people, and thus is, as is so much about our lives, contested terrain.

What is butch? Butch is a term I spent the first ten years of my out lesbian life studiously avoiding.  Butch is women that I was afraid of – buzz-cut, rough-hewn — while at the same time fascinated by. Butch is hard, top, masculine. Is butch feminist? When I first learned of the term and the persona it ostensibly described, I would have thought: no.  My earliest conceptions of butch women were: “trying to be men.” Way off.

Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues put an end to those distortions, and was to my incipient butchy self what Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle was to my incipient lesbian self  five or more years earlier — my first playbill, as it were, for the theater I woke up to find myself in.  Another decade-plus later, reading my former grad school colleague J. Jack Halberstam on Female Masculinity — a term she either coined or thoroughly analyzed, and either way opened up –  put a name to it all for me.

How do I define butch? What does it mean to me? All of the above, if it can also be combined with its opposite (soft, bottom, feminine). “How do I define butch?” is a harder question to answer than “What does female masculinity to me?”  I place myself (with regrets) at the periphery of contemporary conversation about the term when I find myself bound by it (my presumption: more work with it would reveal it to be a suppler thing in the early 2000s than I found it to be in the 1980s).  For better or worse, for the moment it’s the raft of associations I have with the term that add up to what it feels like to me now.  And a big one entails a workingclass masculinity, something which, if you were to imagine masculinity and femininity on a linear scale (never a liberating enterprise, I’ll grant you) would be located further masculine than I’ve felt in my skin.

A late activist friend named Lisa Davis, herself a “soft butch,” revealed me as such in June of 1994.  I remember feeling a whole body release, realizing for the first time that there was a place for me that might fit.  (“Oh, you’re a soft butch, honey,” she said in her Texas accent, as I was pondering my “woman without a country” status. Was it in my Minneapolis kitchen? Or her Austin one? What I remember was the revelation, and a kitchen.) “Soft butch,” as soon as I could get over the “soft,” meant something butch of center, but mitigated, a releif of the imposter syndrome inspired in me by what I thought of as the “real” butches I knew and lived with – all motorcycle-riding, all with workingclass roots, one the first FTM guy I knew.  While that truck tire under each arm iconography represented an ideal (in the social space and historical moment I occupied), I knew myself to be a pretender to it. The steel-toed work boots I wore at demos, for instance, had never protected me from the weight of falling heavy machinery on the job.

As my sense of my gendered self has evolved, I’ve eked out a space for the kind of masculinity that feels most appropriately me: the masculinity I saw in my own father, a middle-class masculinity, slightly fey, dandyish, not-so-very-butch-if-butch-means-engine-repair kind of masculinity.  This has pulled me away from “butch” and toward “gentle-manly,” for better or worse. Upside is I’m no longer objectifying or attempting to appropriate a class position whose experiential truths I’ve only read about.

Now: take the linear x-axis of masculinity and femininity and slice a y-axis through it, representing class.  In this multi-dimensional realm I can begin to plot a kind of “butch” that makes sense to me.  Slice some more axes through – representing specra of racial identity on out – and it becomes more pliant, more descriptive. And more densely obscured. Which is as it should be.  Some triangulation points that have to do with my body and my history are not going to change. All the triangulation points that have to do with experience do change, and will continue to. For instance I am as much defined by having lived through a period of multiple deaths of people very close to me as I am by anything else. The coupling of those deaths with the inception of my parenthood even more so. If there were a single-syllable name for that, that’s what I’d call myself by right now.

What I love most about “masculine of center” female gender identities is that they exist outside of me as well as inside, and therefore I am not alone. I have my beefs with my female body – I’ve arrived at a strained truce with my breasts; could never envision myself pregnant (the clothes! the clothes! the breastiness of nursing!); stopped short of it primarily because bearing a child felt like it would pin me through the thorax to a very decisive femaleness, like a butterfly to a board.  But my body’s mine, as is, I’ve long since decided. Several years into menopause, I can barely remember what it felt like to manage the monthly flow of blood that was my femaleness’ most trenchant reminder.

Whether or not “butch” is the first term I find myself using to describe my gender, it is an umbrella I find shelter under. At the Butch Voices conference my breath was taken away: a room after room, hallway after hallway of people like me. I’ve got years of familiarity at being called “sir” (“six of one, half dozen of the other,” I usually reply, with a smile and a hop of the eyebrows); I am resigned to forever fluster/ disorient/ alarm women in public restrooms (at forty some-odd, I still avert my gaze and head for stall or sink, in mute attempt to convey I’m  “just here to pee, ma’am; just here to pee”).  Yet being surrounded by so many mannish women showed me how inured I am to aloneness in public. And how much I welcome Sinclair’s project.

I’ll end this by wending my way back into the heart of this blog. “Butch,” as a gender descriptor for me, is now eclipsed, at least in daily life, by “Baba,” which is decidedly a gender descriptor for my kids. Their world — which, for the moment, overlaps nearly completely with mine — is defined by familial relations in a big way. The very young are narcissistic — developmentally appropriately so — thus, my relation to them is way more germane than my relation to anything else.  When gender is refracted through that prism, butch becomes baba. As in, “That gal looks like a Baba to me, dontcha think, kids?” (About “Baba’s” nomenclature and its origin for me, much more here.)

Without a doubt, right now the facet of my identity that is engaged more hours of the day than any other is that of parent. I waded into this blog in order to wrestle that identity down for myself, to call out to others that they may help shine a light. Before I could begin to comfortably inhabit “parent,” I had to give myself permission to excuse myself from the table of “mother” and set another one. “Baba” is a sumptuous repast for me, more so than “Papa,” maybe for its openness, or maybe for the same reasons that “gentlemanly” occurs to me faster than “butch.” Maybe it’s because, as a Buddhist, I’m most intrigued by the middle path.

As breathtaking as the conference full of butch women was (and the femme women that understand and love us), breathtaking, too, is the daily nonchalance with which my kids take my ’twixt-‘tween gender. There is no struggle to understand: it is as basic as the feel of my hand and the smell of me as I hug them. My son makes a count of the “boys” and “girls” in the co-housing cluster of extended family we live in – my partner and our kids in one place, an old friend in another, and my partner’s brother and his family in another. One by one my son names the girls: every other girl or woman but me – and then the boys:  his uncle, his boy cousin, himself, and me. To him we are boys together.

Eager to insure I’m not setting a petard he’ll be hoisted on one day, when the social and bodily pressures work to enforce an either/or binary on him, I clarify: “You know I’m a girl in my body, right?” “Yeah, I know,” he says. And, paraphrasing a gender-queer five-year-old I once knew, I say, “I’m a girl in my body, but mostly a boy in my heart.” He smiles because he understands. He’s a boy in his body and mostly a girl in his heart.  There’s space for both of us in this world, sweet by any name.

Love fairy, Berkeley, CA.

The boy’s Halloween outfit, as worn to preschool yesterday. Worth rendering in color, even if it is the weekend and I usually like to go B&W on ‘em. (Full-body preview shot here.)

He picked this fairy godmother outfit himself, when out & about with his Ma. He was reportedly entranced the moment he saw it, and insisted they get it. He had initially intended to be a poodle or perhaps a monkey, but all those plans went flying out the window when this sparkly twinkly number spoke to him from the 5-and-under aisle.

I added in the t-shirt, what with it being a chilly day yesterday. You know, for Northern California standards. It was the only clean white one we had, but I also like that it bore an additional, subliminal (and I mean really subliminal: none of his preschool chums reads Latin yet) message.

In the morning before he went to school, he said he was worried someone might say he looked silly. We asked: “Do you still want to wear the outfit?” He answered: “Yes. But I’m worried someone will say I can’t.”

We followed up with the usual questions, clarifying whether his worries were based on speculation or past experience. No one has said he looked “silly” yet, he admitted.  Most of his cohort is comfortable with who he is, now that they’ve come to know him; every once in a while someone disputes that you can be a boy and wear a skirt or a dress; he comes back with the simple factoid that may one day be true beyond his personal experience and that of his bretheren: you can too be a boy and wear a skirt or a dress. It doesn’t mean you’re not a boy. It means you’re a boy who likes to wear a skirt or a dress. And so on. He’s got this down at 3.75 years old.

Still and all, I felt like shadowing him like a Secret Service Agent all day.  I mean, he’s a little 35 pound pink ball of everything masculinity both needs and fears/reviles. To a pack of big dogs, he’s a Chihuahua snack. But not everyone is a big dog, or pretends to be. Plus at preschool my Secret Services weren’t necessary. Most everyone was unpurturbed: this was merely a slightly showier variation on a familiar theme. Several parents smiled sweetly at me; a mom or two may have even swooned (he really is a dreamboat, and it’s a nice color on him).

When later we went to pick up his big sister at the elementary school, as we entered the playground I scooped him in my arms and carried him through a phalanx of fourth graders. This based on some repeat snickerers and pointers, who weren’t among this bunch, but like I’m going to take a chance. Love may conquer all, but it’s a slow conquer, and I’m sure not letting my boy’s psyche be roughed up before it has to be.

Does it have to be? No. Will it be? As a genderqueer, lesbian parent who knows a bit about the costs and benefits of transgressing social boundaries, and as only a wannabe optimist, I just don’t want to answer the question. Anyhow, one day I won’t be able to scoop him in my arms.  And one day he may actually want to stride through that phalanx (pick a phalanx; any phalanx) all by himself.  As have countless parents before me, I hope, when the time comes, that I have the strength to let him go. As have countless parents before me, I realize that at some point, finally, I don’t have a choice.

I hope I’m not giving too much away about his Halloween costume this year. Least this picture doesn’t show it with the blinkey red lights emanating from under the — what’s the word for that stuff? tule?  Oh, man, was he electrified (well he was!) by the discovery of that feature, by the way. “A twinkley dress! A blinkey twinkley dress!” Secretly thinking inside, I’ll bet, “Ha! No WAY the big sister could ever have had something like THIS!”

There will come a day when he takes his measure with a stick other than something he’s plucked right off her person, but that day has not yet come.

The headwear on this year’s get-up will be different than shown above, and he may not use this flashlight as his wand. Though I think I might suggest he seriously consider it. It does have the dual purpose of proper fairy godmotherly accessorizing and prudent night safety.

(A coupla years back, sister was a dragon and then a bee, whilst brother was a very smiley leopard.)

The boychild and I were at a stationary supply store this morning, getting the nicest congratulations on completing Kindergarten/ congratulations on starting preschool gifties I know to give these kids: spiffy little hardback notebooks and fresh felt-tipped pens with which to fill them. Per usual, the boychild is in a dress. Today, it’s an especially pretty one, since it’s the last day of school for the big sister and he wanted to be fancy for the school’s Friday morning community meeting. It’s got an empire style cut, with forest green velvet on top and white organdy below, layered over a built-in slip dealie. Twirls nicely. Over it he’s wearing a plaid shirt-jacket, under it, striped cotton tights. All per his request.

Other relevant matters: in the past month or so, perhaps because he’s bigger, perhaps just because, our son has drawn more and more attention from kids around him,ranging from stares to snickers to derision.  These kids are all either a little or somewhat older than him, since kids his age continue to either not notice or not care much.  We’re at the point that I pretty much have my feelers out the whole time we’re in public, and anticipate some management/intervention/dialog of some sort with other kids.

Also: it’s a small stationary supply store, an independently owned one, very much like the kind our mother took my sister and me time and again throughout our youth, usually under the most tissue-thin of pretexts. Stationary supply fetishism: it’s born, not made. I’m doing all I can to exert what influence I can on my kids.

Further: Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 is playing on the store’s tinny overhead stereo. Somewhere around the mid-1980s I made a cassette tape recording of the Gymnopédies for my mother, along with some other music I know she loved — Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, maybe some David Oistrakh — to be played on a little portable cassette tape player.  These I brought to her when she was in the hospital recovering from a near-death experience, or at that point the nearest we’d gotten with her (cellulitis run amok).  She didn’t really use the tape player much after that, maybe even not so much in the hospital room. Not the equipment type, her. But I remember she at least seemed transported when we brought classical music into that fluorescent lit, metal- and plastic-filled space.

I still have the tape player, and use it sometimes when I’m doing indoor, manual work. Lately I’ve played it a lot, late at night, classical or jazz, while painting rooms in the house I plan to raise my kids in, both of which — house and kids — my mother has never seen and never will. I’ve thought about that a lot, and about the pockets of emptiness that can develop or appear inside of families, and how home-making and milestones make those empty spaces echo audibly, no matter how accustomed we become to their silence.

Satie’s music (and the tape player) always reminds me of my mother, and the poignance of this attempt — and others like it — to bring her love and peace during what would be the last decade of her life.

Okay, so there’s that.

Finally: yesterday was the one year anniversary of the sudden, unexpected death of an old friend, Nancy, my dear friend Ann’s long-lost and recently re-found life love. I wrote the tiniest bit about it around when it happened. I’d spent the day before at a memorial for Nancy in Ann’s new home, and then yesterday morning in lengthy, open-hearted conversation with Ann about love, life, death, healing, perseverance, what the dead teach us and what we owe them in return, and the oceans of grief we all cross in our lifetimes, guided finally only by the stars (when we think to look up). The conclusion was the same as every conclusion to every such conversation: life is equal parts joy and pain (or as Buddhists say, like licking honey off the edge of a knife blade); and love is the overarching, abiding truth, the sun up behind the clouds.

On top of all this, or running along in the background (sometimes underfoot): my children are each taking these large leaps, from one stepping stone of their youth to the next. They get older and older by degrees every day, but some days it all just tumbles together, and they are suddenly a lot older all at once. One day, if we’re all lucky, they’ll be safely on the other side, and their youth, back there on the other shore, will be as impossible to grasp as the stars.

So. I’m at the stationary supply store counter purchasing the goods, and two young men walk in, knit hats scrunched down over straggly hair, skateboards in hand.  I’d been pulling out my wallet and beginning to pay for the supplies when they walked in and paused at the entrance of the store, staring at my boy.  Just after I’d given the proprietor my money, I felt their looking. I also saw one whisper something to the other, and chuckle a bit.

I turn to the one nearest to me, the one who was whispered to — he wasn’t that much shorter than me, so it was easy to make eye contact. And I just stare dead in his eyes. No “Hello,” at least not at first. No nothing. Just a dead-on, true, wordless, my soul is tired look.

I have nothing to say to him. Not with words. But I also feel like I don’t need to. Right now, at this stage of it all, and often, all I want to do is put the other young people on notice: I am watching you watch my child. What you do or say next will happen with that child’s parent’s knowledge.

Several moments pass, during which we are both looking in each other’s eyes, the young man and me. His are hazel-brown, darker than my son’s, lighter than mine. He has freckles.

Satie continues to play behind us; the proprietor is making change for me.

“Hey,” the boy says.

“Hi,” I say back.

I take the change, and look back at him as the proprietor puts the stuff in a bag. I drop my hand down and finger my son’s hair as I wait.

The boys are still standing pretty much in the same place, but the other one is paying attention to something else.  I exchange one last look with the boy.  No words: for each of our reasons, we have nothing to say, or nothing we can say, there and then.

Except I sense some kindness in the boy’s eyes.  He is young, but on the verge of his own individuality. He is entering the peak years of the crucible-hot formation of his masculinity: ad agencies, media empires, every force in the culture around him is ramping up first to tell him who he is, then sell him what he needs to be who he is. Male femininity is not part of this onslaught.

Except he is himself, and for a flicker, I see this in his eyes, and I wonder perhaps whether when he was looking at my boy, he didn’t see an object for derision, but maybe himself, a dozen or so years ago.