My gender identity is male and my gender expression is female.

February 28, 2020 6:16 PM

CJ Duron (instagram) (previously) writes an essay on the difference between being gender creative and being transgender: When people call me a girl or misgender me I don’t really care. To me, gender is over. Gender is so last year. But when someone tells you their preferred pronouns, you should use those pronouns.

When I was little, like five or six years old, I wanted to be a girl. I never felt like I was a girl or like I was supposed to be a girl. That means that I’m not transgender. I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong body. I feel like I’m in the right body. I’m just me.

I know transgender people who have transitioned. I’m happy for people who transition because it means they are being their authentic self, but transitioning isn’t for me.

My advice for younger kids like me is that it’s going to be okay. Just be yourself. People will learn to like you the way you are. You aren’t weird, you’re just different. And being different is awesome!

CJ, at 11, was the youngest Pride Grand Marshal ever, and he and his loving parents are covered on such sites as Popsugar. "Gender Creative" is a term coined by Dr. Diane Ehrensaft in her books Gender Born, Gender Made and The Gender Creative Child.

posted by one for the books (29 comments total)

Martie Sirois, mother of another gender creative child, on nature vs. nurture and blue vs. red states, in 2017:

The bigger misunderstanding of my friend, and of society as a whole, is that this is a lifestyle or a choice, much like the soup du jour in a trendy restaurant. Like raising this type of child is on par with baking your own granola, shopping exclusively at Trader Joe’s, or smoking Parliament cigarettes. It’s the implication that my husband and I had any say in putting together all the pieces of our child’s brain - all the pieces that form connections and predispose one to be “feminine” or “masculine,” some combination of both, or neither. Just as a parent does not choose to have a child born with a handicap, or disease, a parent cannot choose their child’s gender expression or later in life, sexual orientation. A parent can verbally forbid these things, but we all know how that goes.

posted by one for the books at 6:19 PM on February 28, 2020 [6 favorites]

I am so here for this.
posted by nikaspark at 7:10 PM on February 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am so very, very here for moving away from the idea that one can tell anything about a person's gender by how they look.
posted by Lexica at 7:23 PM on February 28, 2020 [20 favorites]

I was recently in an office that had a copy of the DSM V on the shelf. I was waiting around and grabbed it. I looked up “gender dysphoria” and in the first two sentences it hit me. It’s when a person’s felt gender, identity gender, is in conflict with their ASSIGNED gender. “Assigned” meaning what somebody else thinks you are. So... if who you are inside doesn’t correlate with what other people think you are, then you have a problem? That’s when I realized how wrong we have this thing understood. I have no right to say who you are. No one has the right to say who you are. You are - who you know to be who you are. How you look, how you act is not indicative of who you are. I can’t make assumptions. You are who you are. You can share that identity by telling me how you want to be referred to, and I have to respect that because you are who you are. No one assigned you an identity. You just are.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:33 PM on February 28, 2020 [10 favorites]

Used to be parents thought the best way to protect creative kids was to try to force them to conform to society's expectations. Glad that times are changing and parents are pushing back against society. Gender creative kids will get hurt a lot for who they are, but that's better than getting hurt because you can never be who you are. We all have to rise up and change the world for them, and for us.
posted by rikschell at 8:20 PM on February 28, 2020 [8 favorites]

My kiddo just came out as trans and it's actually kind of awesome to see her begin to show her true self. My kid was always so shut down/unsmiling, didn't share thoughts or feelings, and now there's a person who smiles and talks and it's like oh, THERE you are!

Having seen that, whatever lingering prejudices I might have had about any of this being not real just shriveled up. My kid is awake and present in a way she never was before. Going back to that closed- down state would be like trying to wear shoes that don't fit anymore, painful and pointless.

I want so badly for kids like mine and CJ to be able to always be themselves.
posted by emjaybee at 8:54 PM on February 28, 2020 [71 favorites]

Gender is so last year

This kid is an icon. And that line's going on the mirror.
posted by thivaia at 9:46 PM on February 28, 2020 [5 favorites]

Some nice quotes, but it looks like the website is a way to sell the mother's book about the kid. The photoshoots and interviews resemble child labor. I really hope any profits from the site/book go into trust for him.
posted by Sterros at 10:20 PM on February 28, 2020 [10 favorites]

The website definitely gives me the heebie-jeebies, speaking as an effeminate gay trans man.
posted by Mauve at 10:56 PM on February 28, 2020 [5 favorites]

@emjaybee, that's lovely.

I've heard that from a friend who has a trans kid, that they were not perhaps unhappy but spending so much mental energy handling and masking against this way people expected them to be, that it was transformative to be able to set that aside.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:43 PM on February 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

My thirtysomething child identified as lesbian in grade school, fell in love with and married a cisgender male, uses "they/them" and just had a baby. My kid is tall and strong and presents as masculine, including clothing (both partners wore custom-made three-piece menswear suits for the wedding, though my kid wore a jumpsuit when they danced the hustle at the reception). People (including friends whom I might have expected to be open minded--gay, lesbian, transgender) find it very difficult to understand their choices, and often ask surprisingly blunt questions (oh, so they don't have sex? was it artificial insemination? is it an open marriage?) and I answer the questions kindly because being rude to my friends has never worked as a way of changing minds.

But I swear we have swapped a different set of prejudices for the old ones. You can only be one category, and sometimes the people who belong to the newly-acceptable category are inflexible and judgmental about the new categories too. Human beings are unpredictable, complex, polymorphous, and wonderful.

N.b. it is really tough to find maternity jeans that look masculine and someone could make a nice niche business out of that.
posted by Peach at 6:25 AM on February 29, 2020 [20 favorites]

I think the message is great. I think a few photos is illustrative. I think the endless, staged, makeup (so much) and lighting is...not appropriate for their age. It might be geared toward an audience of one, themselves, but performative stuff like this feels exploitative and unnecessary? I don’t know.
posted by amanda at 8:36 AM on February 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

When I was little, like five or six years old, I wanted to be a girl. I never felt like I was a girl or like I was supposed to be a girl. That means that I’m not transgender. I don’t feel like I’m in the wrong body. I feel like I’m in the right body. I’m just me

This gave me pause when it was making the rounds on trans Facebook the other day.

I'm absolutely not trying to contradict this kid about his own gender. Nobody should ever do that to anyone. He's the world's foremost expert on himself and I'm some rando on the internet. He sounds amazing, I love that he's getting the support and encouragement that he is, and I'm so excited to see what he makes of himself as he grows up.

But... I could have said all these same things in that pull quote eight years ago, before I started transitioning. There are a lot of trans people who never resonate with "trapped in the wrong body" language, and who never feel valid enough to say they are girls or boys or men or women, but only that they wish they were. Those things don't disqualify you from being trans — though they often do make it harder to recognize you're trans, harder to convince others, and harder to get permission to transition. Trying to apply them as a litmus test to ourselves messed a lot of us up real bad, and made me and a lot of other people I know put off life changes that would have done us a lot of good.

I'm not saying this kid is Secretly Trans After All. He's the authority on that, and I'll believe it when he says it, not before. I'm just a little sad that the busted litmus test that messed up a lot of trans adults of my generation is being used by the next generation of trans kids. I hope they find a way to use it with more discernment and more kindness to themselves than we did.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:39 AM on February 29, 2020 [29 favorites]

I recall a short story that imagined a reversible medical treatment that would stop you from seeing people on an attractive/unattractive axis, and imagined what it would be like if this was widely used. But I wish I could get a treatment that stopped me from (of course often erroneously) gendering everyone I see or hear. What an alluring world that is.

I also wonder what portion of that gendering urge is social training and what part is "built in". (Cueing from clothing is learned, surely) And I'd love to hear anyone who has a different experience of this. Can it be unlearned?
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 9:57 AM on February 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

A huge part of the "gendering urge" is language based. In English (and many other widely spoken languages), in order to refer to someone, you have traditionally needed to know their gender. Of course, the singular they for a person of unknown gender has been around for a long time, but the emphasis has always been on knowing immediately the gender so you can "tag" them "correctly." It causes controversy whenever gender expressions start changing (like when some men wanted to wear their hair long after many generations of male short-hair norms).

I think basically 0% is built in. It's not something we need to know for any inherent reason, it's all societal.
posted by rikschell at 10:34 AM on February 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

(I'd argue it's not as linguistic as you might think. There are plenty of places where the dominant language has no gendered pronouns, but where the dominant culture is just as gender-obsessed as it is in the English-speaking world. And there are plenty of other kinds of snap-judgment categorization we do to strangers even though our grammar doesn't force us to. It turns out we are really invested in sticking each other in boxes whether or not language demands it.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:36 PM on February 29, 2020 [8 favorites]

I'm not saying this kid is Secretly Trans After All. He's the authority on that, and I'll believe it when he says it, not before. I'm just a little sad that the busted litmus test that messed up a lot of trans adults of my generation is being used by the next generation of trans kids. I hope they find a way to use it with more discernment and more kindness to themselves than we did.

Hard same. Every word.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 12:39 PM on February 29, 2020 [9 favorites]

@antecedent, that story is Ted Chiang"s "Liking What You See" if you want to re-read it.

You might also go for Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation".
posted by away for regrooving at 12:52 PM on February 29, 2020 [6 favorites]

Upon further reflection, I've updated my estimation of this parent's behavior from "unsettling" to "disgusting."
posted by Sterros at 1:23 PM on February 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

Same. I spent the last hour or so scrolling back through the blog. Not only is it excessively public about this child's deeply personal struggles--children chasing him to see his genitals in the bathroom, being dumped by a longtime best friend for being "gay"--there are also posts like these that suggest that this child is all-too-aware of gender policing and homophobia and has pretty deeply internalized them. Which casts posts like this one and this in a different light. And then I found this post where the mom says that professionals told him her child was transgender, that she should let him socially transition, and that he said he was transgender, wanted to grow up to be a woman, wanted to be a mommy, wanted to be called by girls' names, but that they didn't stick with it because of her "mom gut."

It feels really, really disturbing to me, even though this family sounds in some ways supportive and affirming. Because being trans is not about "signs of distress" (hi, that's a cis narrative) and children aren't always "consistent" about these things, particularly if they know a parent is committed to one narrative about them (like, ahem, selling a book called "adventures in raising a fabulous, gender creative son"). Trans spectrum people learn from a very very young age to maximize others' comfort about their gender performance. And this child doesn't seem to have started puberty yet, can still reasonably display a "gender expression [of] female" and be read that way. That won't necessarily be the case in five or ten years--many trans people feel dysphoria skyrocket after puberty.

I don't know what the story of this child's gender really is. Only he can know that. But he deserves to have the process of figuring it out be private, because it's a deeply private process, and it's not his parents' journey at all--it's his. And it's obvious that the parents have felt some degree of hope and/or investment in the idea that he's not trans or gay at all, too, right from the very start.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 3:28 PM on February 29, 2020 [33 favorites]

...Ugh. I was keeping an open mind on the situation, but that business about how he's already tried to transition three times and her Mom Sense told her to say "no" does not make me feel great about it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:12 PM on February 29, 2020 [11 favorites]

In the light of the Mom Gut thing, I'm upgrading my initial response from "heebie-jeebies" to "oh hell no". I just really hope the kid has some older trans people in his support network, and that he's able to leave his family situation if it turns out to be unhealthy for him.
posted by Mauve at 9:59 PM on February 29, 2020

Is 'gender hothousing' a term?
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:49 AM on March 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

I saw this on Facebook, and I was like, "Ewgh the TERFs and anti-trans gender abolitionists are gonna love this," and sure enough by the time I got back to the Facebook tab someone had commented, "Finally! Now we can start talking sensibly about gender and stop using body-destroying chemicals on children!"
posted by fleacircus at 2:18 AM on March 1, 2020 [4 favorites]

Why isn't her Mom Gut telling her that a kid that age doesn't benefit from being in the public eye like that?
posted by needs more cowbell at 5:07 AM on March 1, 2020 [15 favorites]

The whole Mom Gut concept is so gross, especially as an override for listening to your kid about who they are.
posted by bile and syntax at 8:50 AM on March 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

i really feel like this focus on what someone is or isn’t is really quite beside the point. if someone asked me when i was 13 “do you think you are a girl?” i’d probably have said no. but if someone really empathetic and open-minded told me everything that would happen to me during a testosterone-driven puberty, and everything that would happen to me if i received hormone blockers and, later, estrogen, etc. i would have surely gone the latter route. if you wanted an honest answer to the question “are you a woman?” i might answer, “eh, i kinda don’t care.” but i sure do like wearing dresses and flats and and and. and i like everyone else thinking i’m a woman.

another point i often dwell on: i wonder what things would be like if our human/hominid ancestors didn’t saddle us with the secondary sex characteristics we all know, love, and hate.
posted by baptismal at 4:48 PM on March 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

and i agree with others who have pointed out this is a deeply sad situation for this child. for so many reasons.
posted by baptismal at 4:48 PM on March 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh god that the mom is upholding a desired transition is awful and gross.
posted by nikaspark at 12:39 PM on March 2, 2020