People | Arts & Culture | Queer Life

Son Boy Allowed: A Trans Mother Finds Space for Boyhood

Well, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The answer so often is, simply: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that it actually matters, anyway.

1.

“So, it looks like you’re having a little boy,” John the midwife says. “They found a Y chromosome. Girls don’t have those.”

There in the exam room, my mouth gapes just a little. Sometimes it’s amazing how cis people can’t connect the plain dots right before their eyes. This isn’t our first prenatal visit, he knows our story, and I know I don’t “pass” that well—he has to know I’m trans. It was thoughtless; it would be easier, somehow, if he meant to hurt. But as I sit in the anger, it’s hard to say precisely who I’m angry for. It’s about me, and it isn’t.

I know where that Y chromosome came from. We all know where it came from. And for all the pain it’s caused me, I’m suddenly ready to throw down in defense of it. It is, indelibly, mine, a part of my story, in my literal blood.

And now it’s in my kid’s blood, too.

In the first photo of the meme, a banner made from dangling letters hangs against a lesbian couple’s wall, boldly proclaiming “No Boys Allowed.” In the second photo, they learned a thing or two about their new child, and redecorated accordingly: “Son Boy Allowed.”

We learned the genetic makeup of our kid early, the byproduct of a screening test. And for weeks after the discovery of that Y chromosome, that meme never left my mind. I would chant the phrase while making my morning coffee. I would hum it walking down the street. I would lay in bed, stroking my wife’s belly, and sing the words like a nursery rhyme.

Son Boy Allowed.

The thing is, until the moment we opened the test results, it hadn’t occurred to me that we could have a son. Not really. There, in our family space, with our two female cats and our two queer femme selves, a closet of shared clothes, and all that space we’d built together, how could it fit? For a decade I’d been running in the other direction, rejecting maleness, escaping from it, shaping a world outside and apart from it—hanging my “no boys allowed” sign high and proud. It seemed natural and obvious that this kid would fit that theme too.

Son Boy Allowed.

We started early on the baby names list, before we knew anything. We brought our old lists, notions, family traditions, wistful musings over the years. We talked over principles, our preference for neutrality, for space. But the task was daunting. It took on an extra strangeness as I wasn’t too far past my own naming project. To be honest, that one was anticlimactic. “Nora” stuck way back in high school, and never left since. When I told my wife the name I finally chose, she already knew, as it had come up so many times in so many ways over the years. Now, with a kid on the way, I got to truly dive into those lists with an openness I hadn’t had with myself. With “Nora” crossed off the top, so many other favorites, so many potentials bubbled up.

I made three lists: neutral, girl, boy. And it became immediately clear which list was the shortest. I knew I needed more “boy” options, but it was always tough; the shapes didn’t sit on the page quite right, the sounds didn’t quite fit in my mouth. And anyway, did I really need to flesh out a list I wouldn’t use? My wife tried to tell me different, intuiting well from their shared blood. I still had the little girl in my head.

There was a boy there. But he was distant, indistinct. Though I tried, I couldn’t quite see him.

2.

The women at work are talking about scouts. Girl Scouts, Brownies, all those shared experiences, all those shared memories. I hear them and I see the inside of an Adirondack tent at midnight, my flashlight revealing a swarm of banana slugs that will give me nightmares for years. I feel the bite of a knife in a twig, fir bark, wood smoke. I feel piled canvas gear, everything like an old war antique. Redolent kerosene, rough twine. The cloying sweet of hot chocolate sipped from a tin cup in a Christmas tree lot after dark, as I sit alone in a musty trailer hunched over an old frayed hardcover of The Two Towers. The astringent tang of grand fir needles. The particular way you can taste carving soap.

And I remain silent, there at that table, lost in thoughts I cannot speak, a life I cannot share.

With a new family member on the way, we moved out of our tiny apartment. The new house had a giant sequoia out back, and looking closer, we noticed a run of spikes up the front like a ladder to the first branch twenty feet up.

“If the kid takes after me, those can’t stay,” I told my wife. “They’ll be up there in a second.”

I found that thought creeping in more and more, as time went by, as her belly grew, as the (probable) Son Boy drew nearer. If the kid takes after me.

The Italo Calvino novel The Baron in the Trees always held a special place in my heart, in a “but for the grace of god went I” sort of way. One of childhood’s minor heartbreaks came the year my parents cut back the big, gnarled plum tree in our backyard. In doing so they sliced right through my favorite hide, a little crook of branches that made a perfect seat. It was a thick and wonky climb, a tricky procedure, but once you found the crook you could stay aloft for hours. It became my second home; over time I filled the surrounding branches with tools, charms, trinkets, and other hidden things.

As a trans woman, we’re expected to ret-con our pasts on a continual basis. We learn the popular narratives quickly, and we learn them well. “Since I was little, I knew . . . ” “As long as I can remember, I knew . . . ” We retell these stories constantly in order to justify our present, whether or not they are actually our stories. We’re expected to filter our whole lives through this prism of binary gender, through our dysphoria and our transitions, as if everything we’ve ever lived is part of this one, neat, contiguous puzzle.

And particularly when things start to stray outside the lines, we’re confronted with that question: well, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The answer so often is, simply: I don’t know. And I’m not sure that it actually matters, anyway.

I did know a lot of things as a kid. For one, I knew that dinosaurs were really cool, so cool I spent countless hours memorizing every book the public library had on them. Big cats were also amazing—snow leopards in particular.

I knew the crows gathered in the schoolyard heard me as I cawed to them, in the crisp pre-dawn before fourth grade. When I spoke crow speak they hopped closer, tipped their heads, until they eventually cawed back with questions and advice and other wisdoms I could almost, but not quite, understand.

Consider: the smell of baking mud on river stones, all minerals and fecundity.

Consider: the way pine sap sticks to your palms so that you can never scrub it clean.

Consider: the delicious burn of a heater grate on your bare back on a dark, cold winter morning, the metal slats just a little too hot to bear.

Consider grass: its fresh smell of life and sunlight; the way it stains your knees no matter how cautious you are; the dendritic nature of its stalks up close; the rasping texture of its blades, like the surface of a cat’s tongue; the delicate work of peeling it down, layer upon layer, to the tender, delicate, edible quick; the worlds that grow up around each blade, with a new teeming something every time you look closer; the way a little child’s fingers can’t quite stretch a grass blade to make a clear whistle, but your father’s can, and yours will too, someday.

One of the overriding things that impelled me to have a child was to share all the beauty in this world. To share the beauty of being in this world. That’s what felt, and what feels, truly necessary to pass on.

That beauty was never clearer, never closer, than childhood.

I do know, now, that when I experienced all that, if I needed to call myself anything, I called myself a boy.

And I think that’s okay.

3.

It’s a random Monday night in an early-’90s autumn, and my dad is cranking the TV volume all the way up. Monday Night Football is moments away. The last commercial fades, and there’s Hank Williams Jr., adjusting his guitar.

Get Ready.

I mean, Get Ready.

Before Hank even gets through “ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL!” my dad leaps on top of the toy chest, dancing in slippered feet, belting out the lyrics in time.

“A MONDAY NIGHT PAR-TAY!!!” Dad’s down from the toy chest again, dancing around the room. He grabs me under my arms, spins me around and we dance there for a moment, my little feet swinging in the air. Dad has shed all reserve, all dignity, and it couldn’t be better. My little brother wobbles out his own little dance, clapping in time. Dad’s hands are strong and gentle and his eyes have this spark in them, a glimpse of his artist’s soul, his wanderlust. The elf child still within him. There are dreams there, an imagination and a tender heart he doesn’t get to show enough between all his overtime shifts.

“All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night.” The last chord rings and fades. Announcers appear. There is, I assume, a football game after; I don’t particularly recall. What I know, though, is that Monday nights are magic.

I know, intellectually, that nobody truly needs a dad. I know it politically, and I’ve known too many wonderful single parents and queer parents to think otherwise. So when the guilt hits, the worry about my own Son Boy’s fatherless future, I’m taken by surprise.

4.

It’s a sunny afternoon in the summer of 2012 and Dad’s lying in the hospital bed only half there. The ugly bloody sutures are still raw at his scalp, his eyes wandering; his mind is elsewhere, struggling, and we’re still not sure if it will come back. I can’t handle the blood, so I drop my eyes all the way down past that loose hospital gown to his bare feet. Somehow, these aren’t aneurysm feet. They’re shocking, not just in their cleanliness amid all that carnage, but also in their familiarity, their sameness. They’re youthful feet, smooth, oddly out of time, and I’m struck by the notion then, that if I were just to climb up on that hospital bed, slip off my own shoes and socks, and lay my own two feet there beside his, you couldn’t tell, looking at them, which were the father’s feet, and which were the child’s.

I feel the skin where it used to be—that tuft of hair that grew at the middle of my collar, pointing straight up. The one I got from my dad. I remember the way it melted to nothing within a year of HRT, how wonderful and euphoric I felt within myself, shedding these pieces that never fit, finally feeling complete. But also, as so often is with transness, there was that other side, that sense of loss there, not for the thing itself but what it signified. It was a tie, a thing that bound us, a thing that anchored me in him. And there it was, fading, vanished.

I know, intellectually, that nobody truly needs a dad. So when the guilt hits, the worry about my own Son Boy’s fatherless future, I’m taken by surprise. 

There was, in that first year of transition, an effervescence. If you’ve ever played that game where you stand in a doorway with the backs of your hands against the jamb and push out, strong as you can for a minute or two, only to step out to find that you cannot help but lift your arms, that they seem to rise of their own accord, you will know what I mean. That first year, they were always rising. I’d be going about my day and suddenly there they were, out of the corner of my eye, lifting, dancing in the air. As the old weight faded, how could they not rise? That escape, that letting go, that smelting down to the essential within was so good, so necessary. For the first time, they could truly be.

To be sure, many people don’t really have that tie in front of them—maybe their Y-provider was absent, a faceless donor, a piece of shit, tragically passed, as mine almost was, or for whatever reason isn’t there. But still, for all of us, there is, or was, a human traveling this earth who gave us our blueprints, from whose flesh we spring, who anchors us in the bodies we grow into.

What my Son Boy will have is a shapeshifter. His hands will carry a weight he cannot find in the hands that made his. His hands will carry a weight I gave him, a weight I couldn’t carry myself. If and when that little tuft of hair starts to grow up at his collar bone, he won’t see it in me, won’t see how it ties him and how it binds him, how it binds us. How can it hold, then, the sense of grounding, of history, of familiarity and safety? The shapeshifter and her changeling. It’s just difficult, sometimes, to realize you’ve given away something that wasn’t fully yours.

5.

The wind starts to blow through the pine boughs and I can feel the sway. My best friend Carl calls up from the treehouse platform below, worried. The pine tree creaks as it bends, one way then back again; it’s so easy to climb too high without realizing it, to get stuck with no easy way back down. Sometimes all you can do is cling tight and wait for the wind to pass.

There’s a question I can’t quite shake as we look ahead to the arrival of the (probable) Son Boy. Why is it, exactly, that a little boy can’t grow up to be a woman? Why can’t the one follow the other, or even flow from the other?

There is a scene in the kids book George by Alex Gino that ripped my heart out like no writing ever quite has. In it, the nine-year-old protagonist, Melissa, sits on the edge of her sink, stares into the mirror, and envisions her future self, all that will happen, all the damage her Y-chromosome will cause if she can’t find a way to stop it. When I sat on the edge of my bathroom sink at nine, all those hours with the door locked, just staring into the mirror, I wasn’t looking at discord, present tense. I saw an appalling future. My child’s fingers traced a hairline still full and round, knowing where it would go. I was lost in nightmares of bristles like black pine cones bursting from the pores of my smooth face. Jutting angles and muscles in slabs and skin thick as cowhide. I saw this all mapped out in the one who gave me my Y-chromosome, and saw no other path, no way out. And so I spent so much time in the mirror trying to fix and save those images, that point in time, that state of being, in memory if nowhere else. I spent so much time mourning a present while I was still living it.

But for me, then and there, in that body, in that self, I was okay.

I wonder often how it could have been, if I could somehow reach back and place a light hand on that kid’s shoulders, on that little boy’s shoulders, and tell him that no, it can be okay. That no, things can be different. That no, what he’s foreseeing is a possibility but not a destiny.

And I wonder now, what it would take to draw that kid back through time, to bring him into the here and now.

I wonder what it would take to let him live, here and now, so the Son Boy can know him, too.