Undetermined

Hey, everybody! It's Emily. I've been talking in the last few months to a lot of parents of trans kids who are absolutely terrified at the state of trans rights in the United States. Several of them have expressed an annoyance that the parents of trans kids who have their voices platformed are too often those who are skeptical of their children's identities, while supportive parents rarely have their stories told. We don't have enough trans voices in the media right now, and we also don't have enough voices of trans allies in the media right now. So, I asked one of them to write this for my newsletter! If you like this piece – or any others here – consider becoming a paid subscriber! It helps me keep pieces like this on coming in. You can sign up by clicking the button below.

Esther Wray is an artist living in California. Also, her name isn't really Esther Wray, but you probably figured that out.

When I was 11 weeks pregnant with my first child, I took a blood test to screen for chromosomal abnormalities. As an added bonus, the test could also tell us the sex of the fetus. I called to receive the results (all normal), and when I asked the sex of the baby, the receptionist paused and eventually said, “It says undetermined.” Undetermined? My mind raced. What could this mean? I had taken a class in college on the biology of sex and gender, where I learned that scientifically, there are closer to five definable sexes, not two, and, in fact, there are probably far more. Was my child intersex? Was that what this lady was trying to tell me? Why didn’t she have any more information? Why didn’t anyone with a medical degree call me? Why was I talking to a receptionist and not my doctor?

The next day, the doctor called. There had been a mix-up. Someone had checked the box that indicated that my husband and I did not want to be informed of the sex prior to birth — the woman should have said unreported not undetermined. “You’re having a boy,” the doctor told me. I called my husband, who was in an airport flying for work. He cried happy tears, and then he went into the nearest Hudson News to buy a Hot Wheels car for the boy we’d already begun to dream about.

At two years old, my child, Alex (a pseudonym), began to develop a strong sense of self. It was thrilling to watch my kid get into stuff — to memorize the lyrics of songs or ask for toys by name. It was also increasingly clear that Alex’s preferences were stereotypically feminine. Alex loved Frozen, knew all the lyrics to every song from Into the Woods, Les Misérables, Wicked, and every Disney princess movie that has ever been made. My husband and I are both progressive liberals. We did not blink at the idea of buying our child a doll. It was our job to guide and protect, not to dictate.

But in my quiet moments, I worried. I grew up in a red town in a blue state, an affluent suburb of New York City where most of my friends’ parents worked in finance in “The City.” While I was growing up, my public school was 99 percent white, except for the six Black girls from the outer NYC boroughs who left their parents, neighborhood, and homes to live in town and attend my highly rated public school (I cannot even begin to imagine how much bullshit those girls dealt with on a daily basis). Nearly every single family in town was at least nominally Christian. The one Jewish friend I had in elementary school moved away in third grade because his family was sick of feeling like outsiders. There were only three socially acceptable sports for boys — football, hockey, and lacrosse — and a sport like soccer was seen as suspiciously feminine. This is the place I am from. This was the part of me that worried about my 2-year-old who wanted to play dress up and didn’t give a single shit about garbage trucks or concrete mixers.

The first trans person I was ever aware of lived next door to my aunt and uncle’s lake house. She was, by all accounts, a great neighbor, who would wave and smile at us from her porch. We’d wave back. In whispers, her gender identity was explained to us with the phrase “a woman trapped in a man’s body,” and in the same way that my cousins and I (and every other white kid we knew back then) were taught about race, politics, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, we were told that it was impolite to talk about or point out anyone else’s differences. In hindsight, that approach created a sensitive mystique around The Neighbor, a mystique that carried a hint of shame, a whiff of rumor. This was the 1990s, and the movies we watched reenforced ideas about mysterious neighbors. The Sandlot, Field of Dreams, The Man Without a Face – these were all movies I thought about when I thought of the woman who lived next door to the lake house. Though I did not know a single thing about her life, I imagined her as a hermit, tucked away in her house living as her authentic self, but only in secret.

She was the first person I thought of as Alex’s gender expression began to come into clearer focus. Of course, boys can love musicals (and should!), but Alex was also miserable in pants and hated to get haircuts. As Alex’s hair grew longer, it became clear that hair was so much more than hair. Any mention of shortening it would bring on an avalanche of tears. I’m not proud of the amount of unconscious (and conscious) micro-policing I did of my child’s gender in those early years. While I never told my kid that some things were for girls and some were for boys, I balked at Alex’s pleas for a girls’ bathing suit or girls’ underwear. If Alex wanted to wear a tutu, that was punk rock, and we’d pair it with a Nirvana t-shirt. If Alex wanted to wear an Elsa dress, that was make-believe. Drag adjacent. I was completely comfortable with the idea that my child might be gay, but my fears about what would happen if Alex turned out to be trans would keep me up at night. How would we navigate that? What would it mean? Would people be mean to my kid? Would my child have friends, a community? What did this mean about Alex’s future?

Eventually, my husband told me to let go of all of those worries. I’d express my fears about the world narrowing if Alex turned out to be trans, and my husband would tell me there was nothing I could do about it either way. He’d remind me that Alex was going to be whoever they were going to be, whether we bought cotton sundresses and a girls’ bathing suit or not. “So what if our kid wants to wear pink underwear? Literally who cares?” Our only choice was whether or not to follow our child’s lead, to let Alex tell us who they were, instead of dictating who we thought they should be.

In public, people would constantly use “she/her” pronouns when referring to Alex. For a while, I corrected them. At three, Alex had told me, “I’m a boy who likes dresses,” and I felt that I was honoring them by correcting the people who were misgendering “him.” Yet I started to notice that Alex never corrected anyone who used she/her pronouns. In fact, they seemed kind of delighted. Eventually, I stopped correcting people. My child has always been confident and outspoken, and even at 2, Alex had no problem issuing corrections to adults.

She was 5 when she told us she was a girl. At that point, I was on board with my husband’s point of view — let her lead the way. It seemed bizarre to imagine that I’d ever been reluctant to let her grow into the person she so clearly was. I relinquished my desire to protect her from imagined cruelty (or rather, I acknowledged that the only cruelty I could control was my own). My husband bought her the underwear and bathing suits she wanted, and he came home with a haul of cotton dresses that filled her with the kind of joy that no article of clothing ever had. Her happiness was all that mattered to me. That, after all, was the only reason I had been fearful to begin with. Would the world be kind to her? The question that had thrummed in the back of my skull for the first five years of her life dissipated when I saw how joyful she was just to be herself.

As soon as she stepped into her true self, Alex flourished. She had been refusing to wear pants for years. Suddenly, her clothing choices were no longer a way to defend herself against a world that couldn’t see her. Now getting dressed was a form of self-expression, a way to be creative, to play. 

Alex’s friends embraced her pronouns immediately — in my experience, kids have no problem with this concept. Our community was loving and accepting. We are grateful, and we are lucky. As my community has expanded to include other families with trans kids, I see how lucky I am to be married to a man who has never doubted that the best way forward was one of acceptance and overwhelming love, a man whose own gender identity was not threatened by his child’s journey of self-discovery. When parents are not aligned on how to best support their gender non-conforming child, marriages shatter. Anecdotally, I have found that men especially can have a difficult time accepting their child’s gender identity if it does not match the gender they were assigned at birth. Maybe this is because masculinity is policed so intensely in our culture, and boys are taught from birth to stay as far away from femininity as they possibly can if they’d like to remain in good standing with the group.

This is a story about transition – but not my daughter’s. She has always been exactly who she is. I’m the one who needed to grow, who needed to confront my long-held beliefs about safety and conformity. I was the one who needed to think about how my upbringing in a homogenous community where gender was constantly reenforced created a fear around individuality that I needed to overcome. I see now how fear was driving me instead of love. Like parents in the '80s who equated homosexuality with the AIDS virus, I had absorbed harmful messages about what it meant to be transgender without investigating where those ideas had originated. 

I worried that the world would be harsh and dangerous for my child. Of course, in many ways, it is. Every single day, Trump and his minions chip away at recent gains toward acceptance. Trans women (especially Black and Brown trans women) are murdered at rates that far outpace the rest of the population. The Trump administration is unrelenting, playing on the public’s limited understanding of this small population of people to create a bogey man. I am terrified of the world my daughter is growing up in, but I am thankful every single day that she is exactly who she is.

Parenting is risky, dangerous, painful, heartbreaking. Parenting is joyful, expansive, beautiful, life-changing. The birth of a child is the beginning of a journey into uncharted waters. As a parent, you drive the boat, navigating rough waters to ferry your child through their early years until they reach the shores of adulthood. I would not recommend trying to fight against the current. No matter who your child is, you cannot protect them from the world, you can only build their resilience and courage and surround them with love and acceptance. You cannot control who they will become or who they will love, but the way we teach our kids about love will absolutely influence whether that person is kind or whether they are punishing or withholding. 

When I think about the world my daughter will inherit, I’m scared. I know that she will face unbelievable challenges and countless known and unknown dangers. I know that she will have to fight for herself in ways that other women do not have to. She never asked for those dangers or those fights, but I am confident she can face them. I believe in her, I know she is resilient, confident, and outspoken. I know that she is brave, honest, and loving. And she’s got her dad and me in her corner rooting for her.

As soon as I began to parent from a place of love instead of fear, I found that the world, in spite of its horrors, is an exceptionally beautiful place. My community has grown to include many trans people, whose adult lives are filled with love, creativity, children, family, and professional successes. As an adult I’ve learned that my aunt and uncle’s neighbor was a dear friend of theirs, that the fact that I didn’t really know her was because she was an adult and I was a child, not because she was hiding away in her home as I’d imagined.

Trump is able to vilify trans people because a lot of people don’t realize that they know trans people. As with all prejudice, assumptions are hard to maintain in the face of real relationships with actual people. My child’s identity cracked my assumptions and fears wide open. Human beings are hard-wired for prejudice. We are tribal animals, prone to create categories, to label, and to stick to the people and places where we feel most comfortable (often homogenous places where most people are just like us). When we insulate ourselves, when we vilify difference and prize fitting in above all else, we are cutting ourselves off from the beauty of individuality. Homogeneity relies on shame to keep people in line. When we celebrate individuality, the possibilities are wide open. My daughter’s journey has allowed me to celebrate my own individuality instead of hiding in the group. Her confidence and resilience and her insistence on her identity have encouraged me to be more comfortable in my own skin.

In ways that I’m only beginning to understand, my daughter has opened me up spiritually. My daughter’s insistence on her identity as separate from her body is evidence to me of the human soul. The gift of being her mother has expanded my community, my compassion, and my life. I am grateful every day to be her mother. There is nothing more divine or sacred than that.

At 11 weeks pregnant, I called my doctors’ office to get the results of a blood test. “What’s the sex?” I asked, and the receptionist hesitated a moment before saying, “It’s undetermined.” 

Undetermined. If there’s a better word to describe the experience of parenting, I don’t know what it is. Our children are entrusted to us for a brief period of time, and it is our sacred duty to shepherd them to adulthood. We cannot protect them from every danger; we cannot insulate them from pain or suffering. The only thing we can control is how we teach them about love, how we react to the ways they deviate from our expectations, and how we grow from the challenges they present us with. We can’t force the world to be kind to our children (though I’m trying every day), but we can teach them that kindness is what they deserve. We can help them build their resilience and courage. We can give them the tools to overcome whatever challenges they will face. We can love them expansively, celebrate their individuality, and encourage their growth in the direction of their most authentic self. The rest is undetermined.

A Good Song

(I am 100 percent sure that I used this song before in this very newsletter, but it's a great fit for this piece, and also, this is MY NEWSLETTER, and I will DO AS I WISH. -ESJ)

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