Parents want to love their children, sometimes perhaps too much. Parents want their children to have idealized lives, forgetting that nobody really has an idealized life. We all are individuals; we all have our own identities. Gender identity is just another way we are differentiated from other people, with no two people very alike, really, at all.
Too often parents believe that if their child is different from "the norm" that the child's life will be more difficult. This does not have to be the case. In fact, too often it is the parents' concern about their child's being different that is what causes any problems the child might have in simply being different.
In A Ghost in Silence I liken Chazz's being gay with his Grammy Rose's being left-handed. That is a very good parallel. It is about the same percentage of Americans who are gay as left-handed, which is not to equate left-handedness with being gay in anything but a numerical sense. Just as left-handed people are not discriminated against in modern times, neither should gay people be discriminated against, or indeed anyone with any sort of physical or mental differences. Yet, it was less than a century ago that left-handed people were indeed discriminated against, with some parents and teachers attempting to "correct" their handedness, as happened with Grammy Rose. Society keeps moving in more progressive ways to be more inclusive and less judgmental. I believe that one day gay people and people with gender identities that do not fall within "the norm" will cause as little furor in society as left-handed people cause today.
In fact, we see that change coming about already: polls dealing with same-gender marriage show that younger people are far more accepting of gay people than older people, bravo! Oprah Winfrey has frequently sponsored programs featuring people with different gender identities, people born with both male and female genitalia such as the main character in the novel Middlesex, for example, or transgender people as in the book Conundrum who have felt from early in their lives that they were born into the wrong gender, and who have undergone first counseling and then surgery to change their gender.
In my book Lonely Island I have the narrator, Toromiru, say:
N.B. When Mrs. Jones read this that I have written about “the third gender” she replied to me immediately and in some consternation—it seemed to me from the words she chose and the many exclamation marks she used so untypically—“But Toromiru, you must understand that there are many more than three genders!!!!” On the various further remarks of Mrs. Jones on this subject—and the reader must remember that Mrs. Jones appears to have some little history in anthropology—I will give no more than this pith: read for yourself, if you can, the book Mrs. Jones recommended to me, Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders Among Bugis in Indonesia by a Sharyn Graham Davies. I must say, however, that this author might as easily have subtitled her book Eight Genders… among the Bugi tribe, or even a dozen, or two dozen, given the gender parameters she allows. But let me digress no further; the gender-ardent reader may digress at his or her—or whoever’s—own whim.
For younger readers, I recommend the book If You Believe in Mermaids ... Don't Tell for insights into emotions and confusions about societal pressures dealing with gender differences.
All of this is social pioneering, and it is all to the good of understanding the human condition and adopting the live-and-let-live policy which is for the good of us all. A Ghost in Silence attempts to further this pioneering by giving young people some sort of guidance through the familial and social hazards that face us.
Copyright © 2008 Robert Locke
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