The Next Barrier

I finished reading Lauren McLaughlin's new YA novel Cycler this week. In the wake of the presidential election, where I think that we proved that, as a country, we've finally moved past our oldest form of racism, I think it's time to move on towards eradicating some of our other forms of national lunacy, like homophobia. (Votes to ban gay marriage are not a step in the right direction, though.)

Cycler is not about being homosexual. The main character, Jill, is physically changed into a boy for a few days each month. But Jill's parents, who are understandably upset and bewildered by this change, which began with puberty, refuse to see the boy, who calls himself Jack, as their son. They lock him in Jill's room and help her use self-hypnosis to forget what happens during the days he exists. But Jack knows what is going on in Jill's life, and as he emerges more frequently and with needs of his own, the plot comes to its crisis with Jill and her mother trying to contain the harm they think he will do, and with Jack showing them that it's not possible to wall off part of your existence forever.

Jill panics when she learns that, as she puts it, "the man of my dreams, the love of my life, is not even heterosexual" when the boy she's had a crush on tells her that he's attracted to her, but that he's bisexual.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I don't know why I thought you'd be cool with it....Better to know now rather than later," he says. "I've learned that lesson."

Jack, on the other hand, finds that the girl of his dreams, Jill's best friend Ramie, has some idea of what's going on, despite how unbelievable it seems. He is willing to open up to her because, he says, "Ramie, 'worshipper of chaos' that she is, can usually be relied on to choose the more reckless of any two options."

And yet, why is it "reckless" to love someone who doesn't fit neatly into one of two gender categories? This month's Atlantic has an article about transgendered children, and their parents' struggles to accept them and help them be accepted in their communities. One parent, the mother of a transgendered boy's best girl friend, refused to let her daughter see her friend anymore, saying "God doesn't make mistakes."

Mistakes? Infinite variety is a mistake? I don't see that. I particularly don't see why doctors (a psychologist named Kenneth Zucker is featured in the article) should try to "re-educate" such children. I don't see why doctors in the 1960's felt entitled to physically alter babies who had been born with both male and female characteristics, sometimes without the consent or knowledge of the parents (shades of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards and Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides).

I do see that it's a difficult decision for some parents, who have to authorize their child's use of hormone blockers as early as age 10, before the onset of puberty. And yet, since the hormone blockers are reversible, what kind of parent would deny them to a child who has identified with the "opposite" sex since she/he was first able to talk and draw pictures (the article features a kindergarten-age boy's self-portrait of himself as a girl)? Yes, there are cases much less clear-cut than that one. But why is it so important to us to make a clear distinction?

Are we making all of this harder than it has to be? I think so. What do you think?

Step in the Right Direction

Lately I've noticed an increasing number of popular books about what it's like to see the world differently. Here are some of the best ones:
Eye Contact, Cammie McGovern
Rules, Cynthia Lord
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
A Mango-Shaped Space, Wendy Mass
The Martian Child, David Gerrold
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The first three involve young people with some degree of autism, and the reader learns to see things more from their point of view and even to appreciate the view. The next two are about people who can see colors associated with things like numbers, letters, and sounds, and how others react to that seemingly innocuous gift (synesthesia). The Martian child sees everything so differently that he decides he must be from another planet (this is the oldest of these books). The protagonist of the last book is born a hermaphrodite, and spends years trying to fit in as a girl until, at puberty, he finds out that he is genetically male, despite a doctor who tries to keep this from him.

The good thing about these books is that most of the revelations they provide are for parents. Kids are growing up without as many ideas about fitting in and what "normal" is. It's still a much bigger fight than it should be to let a child who doesn't fit in with other children his age do something like skip a grade. But it's getting better, and some of that must have to do with the increased popularity of books like these.