My Feels on a Bill Requiring Schools to Out Kids Over Gender Expression
I feel like I am six years old again asking my mother if I can have my hair cut
This evening I’m at a not-advertised-as-queer-but-feels-queer little restaurant with a magical back patio overlooking a small auto repair lot full of cars. I walk down the steps feeling anxious about choosing where to sit with plenty of open seating. A woman sitting with someone smiles at me and I return her smile. A misty rain is falling. I sip my beer and write in my notebook.
I took myself to dinner because there’s something on my mind that hurts. Recently, I learned about New Hampshire bill HB 1431. It proposes to legislate that parents can be notified if teachers or administrators find something wrong with a student’s gender expression or identity.
Parents would be granted the “right to be notified promptly when any school board, school district, school administrative unit, school administrator, or other school employee initiates, investigates, or finds the need for any action by school authorities relating to the student pursuant to school policies governing student…gender expression or identity” (HB1431).
The bill also includes notification for bullying, among other things, but the legislators don’t seem self-reflective enough to understand that harassing children about identity or outing them to unsupportive parents is bullying.
I found myself having a lot of feelings about myself as a child and my own journey with my expression of identity.
I have questions. If a teacher doesn’t agree with a child’s gender expression, is this because a child appears too “feminine” if they identify as male, or too “masculine” if they identify as female? What about non-binary identity? Is it possible to condemn someone’s identity if their identity is their own?
It is illogical to say that a child has made a mistake being themselves.
I don’t have a legal perspective on HB 1431. All I know is how I feel. I feel like I am six years old again and asking my mother if I can have my hair cut short like my brother’s and asking to wear clothes like his, instead of the dresses she wants me to wear. I was never comfortable in the role assigned to me by my parents, even when I didn’t know what a “role” was.
I didn’t have words for what I felt. All I knew to do was ask for the clothes I wanted and then hang out in the tree I considered a true friend. I was a kid who felt out of place, or rather, I felt fine, but the adults in my life told me that I was being myself in the wrong way.
It is impossible to be yourself in the wrong way. As a child my only reference for myself was myself. When I said that I didn’t want to wear a dress, it was because I didn’t want to wear a dress. I didn’t have another reason. I could say what it was I wanted. I could say what it was I didn’t want. I didn’t want the dress and I did want short hair and the tee shirts and shorts my brother wore, and his sneakers, and I wanted a pocket knife and I wanted to join the Boy Scouts and I wanted a red bicycle.
I got a few things. My hair was a nondescript bowl-cut, and I could wear my brother’s hand-me-downs when we didn’t have to leave the house or it wasn’t Sunday, which meant church and frills and patent leather shoes.
I grew up feeling that my most comfortable self could only exist when other people’s expectations didn’t take priority. I was asked to look like what other people thought they wanted to see. I maintained two selves. One was the self who felt fully like me, and the other was a self who appeased the social beliefs of family and immediate community. Over the years, my two selves flickered in and out like a badly wired light that I didn’t know how to repair. I was me and also a version of me. It took me a while to allow my most consistent self be my everyday self. It took a little over three decades.
Shining brighter and dimming the spotlight of others’ projected needs took time. It required a lot of lying on the bed staring at nothing and lying on the couch staring at more nothing. I let my mind drift back in time. I gathered scattered moments when I knew I was truly me. I stitched them together and made a memory quilt I wrapped myself in and tucked securely along my body so I could drift into dreams full of ordinary happiness.
Being queer is waking up and wanting coffee. It is never jumping out of bed with an ideal sense of self ready to engage in defending my daily existence. The thought of that makes me want more coffee.
It hurts me on an aching-gut-level to think of my joyful child self who was notified that I was missing a memo about other people’s assumptions of identity and expression. I didn’t know what memos were.
It frightens me, in the chilled-belly kind of way, to think of a child in school in New Hampshire, or anywhere in America, being told they have come to class as the wrong version of themselves.
That child woke up as they are. The teachers, administrators, the principal, the assistant principal, parents, other kids, and the legislators, they all woke up as themselves. The people who hope to control the child don’t wake up as the child, like they would in a 1980’s body swapping comedy or any remake.
The child wakes up and they see the sky and maybe trees and clouds. Maybe there is a cat. One child was me. Another is my own non-binary child. Both children, past and present, are perfect. There will always be future children, too. May we love them just as they are.
