Gender Waves

Or How My Mother Thought I Was Going To Grow Up To Be Trans

A few days ago, my mother was reading an opinion piece in The New York Times about women’s colleges and their reluctance and sometimes outright refusal to accept trans women and gender non-conforming students. She asked me what I thought about the issue, and I gave my standard answer. Trans women are, in fact, women, and denying that is radically exclusionary, that it is shameful that these colleges that were founded to give women a chance at education now discriminate against women.

So, my mother and I were talking about gender identity and trans women and women’s colleges, a very standard breakfast conversation in my house. As we were talking, my mom brought up my own childhood. As a kid, I was a very big tomboy. You know, short hair, boys clothes, loving sports, the whole thing. In my fifth grade class photo, I stood proudly in the front row, dressed in my favorite khaki cargo shorts from Gap Kids and an oversized red polo shirt.

My mom was the one to bring up the subject. “So, Catherine, do you remember how when you were younger, you said you wanted to be a boy?” I vaguely remembered saying that I wish I had been born a boy, mostly whenever I was forced to wear a dress, so I said yes. My mom continued. “Did you actually want to be a boy?” Wait, what? “Like…” My mom’s voice changed pitch ever-so-slightly. “Did you feel like you should have been born a boy?” Oh. My mom is asking if, at the age of eight, I was a trans individual.

“Um. No. I don’t think so?” My mom looked, well, relieved. I’m sure that if I had ever been gender non-conforming, my parents would have been more than supportive of me. After all, I grew up in a liberal zip code in a liberal state in a liberal family. My parents never grew angry or concerned, at least outwardly, when I stubbornly said I wanted to be a boy, not a girl. “It was because, uh, well, the guys got stuff I didn’t get.”

It was true. Boys did get cooler stuff than girls did. Boys got to play kickball and handball and a yard monitor didn’t have to get involved when they were told they couldn’t play because they were a girl. Boys got to play the cool aliens math computer game where you shot numbers with a laser, not a math game where you sold lemonade. Nobody was shocked when boys could beat Oregon Trail. Nobody took the Goosebumps books away from the boys because they might be scared by the stories. Boys got to wear hats in the classroom. Boys got to be loud, run around, get into fights, take up all of the teacher’s attention, not get mocked for speaking their minds.

I didn’t know what feminism or gender identity or privilege or oppression was when I was in elementary school. Hell, I still don’t fully understand them now, and I’m starting my junior year in college. I clearly wasn’t going around my second grade classroom, looking for examples of how boys were treated differently from me. Clearly, the teachers at my elementary school didn’t have the goal of letting the boys do certain thing, didn’t mean to pressure the girls to not rough house with the boys or read more “masculine” books.

And that’s the scary thing. I was a kid, and I was still partially aware that I was getting treated different from the guys just because I was a little girl. It’s upsetting that I had to wish to be someone who I’m not just so I could do the things I wanted to. But what’s more upsetting is that young women who have struggled with self-identity and who they are, who have faced more challenges than I can ever imagine, who are looked down on and treated differently by society and the legal system, are refused entrance to institutions established because of the historic discrimination people who aren’t the gender society thinks is superior.