Or, How to Talk to Your Kids About Gender-Nonconforming People.
It ranges from people laughing at me, verbally assaulting me, or taking my picture without my consent, to people stopping me mid-strut to exclaim “Oh my god, I love your outfit,” or inquiring “WHERE is that lipstick from?!?”
Jacob Tobia
Children would see me on the subway sporting my beard and lipstick and wouldn’t quite know how to react. They’d wear their confusion, marvel, or pleasant surprise at my gender expression blatantly on their sleeves. Children are anything but subtle about their interest when it is piqued.
Jacob Tobia
Half of the hotel was filled with queers trying to learn how to better serve trans youth; the other half was filled with nuclear families who’d come to Orlando to meet Minnie and Elsa and Goofy at Disney World. It made for an interesting combination.
They’d never seen someone like me back home in Michigan or Spokane or Wichita. Some kids gawked quietly, others startled in fright, still others giggled in a curious, empathetic way.
Jacob Tobia
Your kids, upon seeing your embarrassment at the situation, turned away, became embarrassed *themselves*, and, after a few minutes’ recovery from the shame of it all, resumed splashing around in the pool. This interaction played out dozens of times over the course of my weekend in Orlando.
Beneath every observation of difference is an implied question about whether or not that difference is acceptable. So when your child commented on the fact that they saw a boy wearing lipstick, what they were really asking was, “Mom/Dad/Parental Unit, is it okay for boys to wear lipstick? Is what that person’s doing acceptable?”
Jacob Tobia
You took a moment when your child could’ve learned an important lesson about how to respect the broad diversity of gender expression, and reduced it to a tangential and less important lesson about manners in public. Furthermore, by demonstrating your own discomfort with the situation, you made your kids uncomfortable too — inadvertently furthering the culture of stigma and discomfort that surrounds gender-nonconforming people.
Jacob Tobia
Or, if your child is a savant, you could even say “Yes, Tabitha. While we are often presented with the myopic notion that gender is biological in nature, it’s actually a socially constructed, performative/discursive system that creates hegemonic power within society and varies across cultures, time, and anthropological space. You’ll learn all about that when you go to college on a full scholarship, become a gender studies major, and read Judith Butler and Michel Foucault en route to writing your thesis!”
Children can smell parental discomfort from a million miles away. If you show your children that you’re uncomfortable when confronted with a gender-nonconforming person like me, then your children will learn to mirror that behavior. And that’s not okay.
Jacob Tobia
Any one of these responses (particularly the last one) not only answers the question that your child is really asking you, it also teaches your child, early on, to respect the natural diversity of gender in our world. Equally importantly, it opens up new possibilities for your child to lovingly explore their own gender identity in years to come.
Feel free to talk about me all you want. Feel free to tell your kids all about the beautiful rainbow of gender that is this world. Feel free to tell them that they can be whoever they want to be and express their gender in whatever way makes them happiest. You have my enthusiastic consent, my affirmative permission, to do so.
Jacob Tobia
P.P.S. I will also accept free drinks from the pool bar.
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