The Bold World Read online

  I needed new pictures, because the only ones I did have—like the Silence of the Lambs psychopath wiggling at the camera with his penis tucked between his legs, or the kids in Paris Is Burning whose narratives too often ended in body bags—were flooding the good spaces in my mind.

  Cautiously, I started making my way onto the Internet in search of more. In the media landscape of 2011, “transgender” was still a word largely relegated to high art or carnival sideshow. It manifested in exhibits that one might see in a gallery on the Lower East Side, a severe black-and-white photograph of a broken mom with her broken son, coupled with a sad caption revealing the bleak details around his transition: “After a lifetime of pain, rejection, and confusion, Dylan’s courageous decision to live life as he wants, as a man, comes with its own form of heartbreak.”

  Words that denoted fear and deviation were commonly used to define their experience—and the subjects in these exhibits were always people of color from “the wrong side of town.” What am I looking at here? I often thought when I saw these images. Were these people broken because of something that had happened to them—a drug addiction, an alcohol problem—or because of some bigger systemic problem, like racism or poverty, outside their control? Why were things so bleak? Was transgender a form of divergence that led to a rough and troubled life? Or was there something hidden within these images that I had yet to understand?

  Sometimes I’d see “transgender” appear in small print under flashy headlines: WORLD’S FIRST PREGNANT MAN—referring to the Thomas Beatie story that had dominated the talk show circuit just a few years before. I remember watching Thomas’s interview on Oprah in 2008, a year after Penelope was born. Before bringing out her guest, Oprah prepared the audience, setting each word down like a trail that led to the mystery behind Door Number Three.

  “Thomas, not Nancy, is the one who’s pregnant…I’m gonna let you take that in.”

  Cut to mouths open, aghast, as studio monitors flashed photos of a shirtless Beatie, flat-chested and swollen-bellied at eight months pregnant, with short-cropped hair and a full beard. Oprah concluded the segment by saying that Thomas and his wife’s story of love and family gave us “new definitions of what diversity means for everybody.” But not before probing Thomas about his sex life and his hormonally altered body. The topic never seemed to be able to escape tabloid treatment, even from Oprah.

  I didn’t remember much of what Thomas said in this or any of the other interviews he gave during that initial media blitz. I only remember the aura that surrounded it. It was conjured as a bizarro world where women are men and up is down. It does sound freakish when you don’t understand, and when the media serves it in such a sensational way.

  Not much had changed since Thomas’s Oprah interview took place. In those first months of my Penelope research frenzy, if I happened to run across the rare story of a person who was transgender, it still seemed that the media wasn’t quite getting it. Transgender was still being presented as something that belonged in a documentary series alongside profiles of sex offenders and gay conversion therapy. And within all those conversations, never once did they include or discuss transgender children.

  At night, while Joe lay next to me reading his book, I clicked from website to website, from article to article to article, searching for pictures—grasping for anything that could help me better understand.

  In the midst of this relentless clicking I came across so many new words: androsexual; androphylic, aromantic, asexual; bicurious, bigender, cisgender; demisexual; intersex; feminine of center, masculine of center; F2M, M2F; gender fluid; GNC—gender nonconforming; GSM—gender and sexual minorities; DSG—diverse genders and sexualities; gender straight, genderqueer, gender variant; gynesexual; pansexual; skoliosexual; same gender loving (SGL); mx, ze, hir. Third gender. Two-spirit.

  I had no idea that the human experience could be sliced in so many ways. The words were dazzling, seductive, tongue-twisting, and so foreign to me—and for those reasons, they were intoxicating. It felt like being back at Spelman again freshman year, digging deep into a new world that opened up to me through stories told at Sisters Chapel, in the dormitories, and within the pages of The Bluest Eye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Their Eyes Were Watching God. These new words hinted at other universes—whole dimensions I had yet to explore. I wanted to know everything and understand it all.

  Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours to master anything, and that became my guiding principle.

  This learning exercise, though, had an ugly side. Doctors and clinicians categorized many of the identities I was discovering as disorders, the result of some kind of body chemistry gone wrong. I learned of doctors talking about transgender as a “condition” that might be caused by “hormone surges” in the mom. There was talk of trans people being “stuck in the wrong body.” The phrase “gender dysphoria” crept into my new taxonomy, paralyzing me with the feeling that Penelope and the body were truly, medically, at war. That my child was inflicted with a condition that put his brain and his body at odds. According to this line of research, Penelope had a condition that no doctor seemed to know how to heal, and that often led to suicide or murder—death, so many mentions of death, in some form or another.

  I’ve always had such faith in my children. Even before they were born I had a sense of their spirit. I could see their greatness like an aura around them. Georgia was wise, Cassius was receptive, Othello marched to his own rhythm, Nain had grace and a gentle way about him—and Penelope, I thought, This one is tenacious. This one is lucky. When I said I wanted children, I meant that I wanted to have healthy, beautiful, smart, capable children. But Penelope felt more like “broken.” Someone who hated himself and couldn’t be at peace with his own reflection—and I took on that angst. When my kids are thrilled, I’m over the moon right along with them. When they’re low, it feels like my personal failure. I can’t separate from them in these emotional moments. Seeing Penelope this way made me feel trapped in his sadness. Both of us trapped. And so I sank.

  Penelope was not at all the child I’d imagined. Penelope would never grow up to become that brilliant, beautiful, witty woman the world needed more of. The type of woman I wished I were. No, he was never going to be that person, and I had to adjust to that. But even deeper, Penelope, with his mind saying one thing and his body saying another, was set up for disappointment, over and over again. He was, it seemed, the unluckiest kid in the world.

  Such was the rhythm and force behind these late-night searches—full of incredible highs and soul-crushing lows. Although I was learning more, finding more, opening the door a little wider, what dominated my emotions was the sinking feeling that my kid was burdened. That the life I’d wished for all my children, and privately for myself, would never be possible for this one, and freedom—uncomplicated freedom—was out of Penelope’s reach.

  * * *

  —

  “Joe, babe, have you seen the book I’ve been reading? I can’t find it.” We were in bed one night, about to turn off the lights.

  “Which book? There’s one right there at the foot of the bed. Are you reading Goodnight Moon, babe?” Joe cut a smile at me.

  “I wish,” I joked back. “It would probably put me to sleep much faster. No, I’m looking for the book I’ve been reading for the last month. I think it’s called Transgender Basics or something like that, I can’t remember.”

  “Yeah, I took it with me to Ghana on my last trip. Transgender 101, by Nicholas Teich.”

  “Umm, yeah! I didn’t know you were reading it.” I turned toward him so he could see the smile on my face. We hadn’t genuinely smiled at each other in a while, and I wanted him to notice.

  “I’m so happy you picked it up! What do you think? It brought up so many questions for me…Did you see how much I underlined? And all the stuff I wrote in the margins?” I was about to explode. Maybe Joe and I could do th
is together.

  He had been slow to read the signs around Penelope, but even slower to define anything that we were witnessing. He wrote off the coloring over of pink stitching as typical mom indulgence of a daughter. The boy jeans as a bad but comical style preference of a child who didn’t know any better. The moody disposition as part of the typical middle-kid syndrome. I’d yet to hear Joe say out loud any form of recognition that we were in deep over our heads—looking at something we’d never seen before, something completely new. What a beautiful surprise to see him trying to learn about Penelope.

  “You know, I started it. But I never finished. Actually, I think I left it in Ghana…I’ll call Dad and ask him to hold it for me.”

  He was short on words, even a bit dismissive. I did an about-face on my enthusiasm, pulling it back into my chest.

  “Oh. Got it. Well if you could just remember to return it to me…I want to keep those notes I wrote in the book for future reference.”

  “Yup, I’ll grab it when I go back next time. Night.” Joe rolled over to sleep, completely unaware of the tightness on my face, or the restraint in my breath, or the disappointment that suddenly took over me.

  I read more books and clicked away on the Internet thousands more times, alone. To take away my growing anxiety, I’d wash it all away with a glass of red wine. Sometimes that glass would become a bottle, maybe more. It was that bottle that loosened me up and made me think good thoughts. It gave me a warm feeling of peace and alignment, that everything would eventually work itself out. Sometimes I even felt euphoric. I would drink until my brow relaxed and my lips were no longer tight. Until my bedroom walls started to flicker with golden lights, my eyelids getting heavy while I watched the dancing glow. Eventually, I’d fall asleep.

  That’s how I got through those ten thousand hours.

  THIRTEEN

  Shifting

  WHAT CAME NEXT WAS CHANGE—the slow shifts, the profound moments, the lessons learned that come along with navigating so much unknown.

  There were no big announcements from us, no formal family meetings—no memorable shouting-from-the-rooftop declarations. Instead, I wanted us to move like water—changing incrementally in the flow of our days. I wanted to teach our children about transgender the same way my parents taught Ramona and me about Blackness, infusing it into our lived reality, moment to moment, interaction to interaction. When we were growing up, Mama and Daddy never made us chant or march or announce our allegiance to the race, as they often had to during segregation. For Ramona and for me, our Blackness, that key component of our identity, became more defined over time with each experience my parents created for us.

  Identifying with our Blackness couldn’t be pinpointed to a single moment. No one ever sat us down and said, “You. Are. Black.” We simply were Black. It wasn’t just explained to us in a picture of the Great Migration hanging on a wall, although it did include that. Nor was it singularly defined by Uncle Gil and his revolutionary lyrics. Our culture had infinite manifestations—and that’s just how I wanted our family to feel about gender. I wanted it to be normal and pervasive and beautiful. For it to be that powerful, it needed to be inseparable from who we were, indivisible from ourselves. Like coffee from its water.

  Fluidity was my goal—and it was a tough one to achieve considering how green I was in my own understanding. At home, I’d try my best to call Penelope “he,” succeeding most of the time but sometimes slipping up. Embracing new pronouns, again, wasn’t the hard part—I found that compared to the nightmares I had about Penelope’s safety, ones that jolted me out of my sleep, quibbling over “she” versus “he” felt silly. It was my brain’s default system that kept getting in the way. “She” rolled off my tongue so automatically, while “he” took an awareness and consciousness that required me to be connected to each moment. If I wasn’t focused, if I was tired from the day, or preoccupied cooking dinner, maybe, I’d slip up, sliding back into “she.” “Sorry, Pleppy,” I’d say, feeling guilty of betrayal—a sin no parent wants any part of. “It’s going to take Mama a while before I get this. You know I see you as a boy, right?” He’d nod, giving me a forgiving smile. “Yup, it’s okay. I know you’re not doing it on purpose, Mama.” I was glad Penelope took it in stride, knowing exactly which side my heart was on. It was just my brain that needed to catch up.

  In public, I fell short, too. As much as I supported Penelope in my heart, I also felt a strange obligation to the rules. In school and out in the world, Joe and I had a need to keep to the formalities. For teachers, administrators, doctors—or any official person or document—we’d revert back to “she,” as if we were answering to a higher authority. As if Penelope’s authority weren’t enough. Report cards would come back from teachers: “Penelope is an outstanding member of the classroom community. I am so impressed with the effort she puts forth and the perseverance she shows every day in her work.” And we’d leave the pronouns alone, glaring at us from the page. In those moments, it never felt one hundred percent right to stay silent, but it was what we thought we should do, so we did.

  There was also a third reality we lived, which complicated things even more. We’d started having small conversations about Penelope’s preferred pronouns, with my mom and some close family and friends—a next step from the “she’s just a tomboy” conversation we’d been having with them for the last two years. But when we were around certain people—folks we thought would resist too fiercely or take too long to adapt—we removed gender altogether. To simplify things for those people, Joe and I would stumble through sentences, zigzagging around pronouns, adding in unnecessary words just to steer clear of gendering. “Please make sure Penelope goes to sleep at eight o’clock sharp, Mormor” (our nickname for Joe’s mom). “Penelope needs a lot of rest. And if Penelope has a nightmare, try rubbing Penelope’s back.” In those awkward moments, it took more time to convey a simple bedtime routine about Penelope than it did with any other kid. More than once, I caught Penelope watching us with a look on his face as if to ask, Why am I such a big deal?

  But I was determined to get it right.

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t you think it’s strange, Joe,” I offered one night, cleaning up dishes in the sink after dinner, “that we don’t know any transgender people other than Penelope?” It was the first time I’d used the words “transgender” and “Penelope” in the same sentence.

  It felt as if we’d been containing ourselves in a bubble, not valiant enough to explore this new world we were learning about. But I was ready to start blending in new vocabulary, like transgender, cisgender, and gender nonconforming, into our everyday talk, and even incorporating transgender characters into our bedtime stories. In a year’s time, I wanted the immediate family to look and sound different and to think differently. That was my plan.

  “Whoa, babe—slow down a second with that word,” Joe jumped in, making me sound hasty and irrational, minimizing me. “We’re not going to just follow all those books you’re reading, Jodie.” He was making this into a fight, I could feel it coming.

  Joe, I knew, understood Penelope to be different, with unique needs unlike his brothers’. Over the last few months, he’d accepted that. But hard plans, definitive pronouns, prescribed language, were just not his way. He preferred to let things unfold on their own, never wanting to corrupt or taint what was organically happening. He remained firm in his approach to let things just be—with as little interference as we could get away with.

  “Labels are the last thing Penelope needs.” I hadn’t expected that response, actually. I assumed he’d say that I needed to stop indulging Penelope, be tougher, worry less. But the idea that I was restricting Penelope by using the word “transgender”—it shocked me. From where I stood, saying the word out loud was the first step toward tuning in to and supporting Penelope, not restricting him. Never that. I felt that using “transgender” made me,
and everyone else, pay more attention to his specific needs. I wanted to defend myself, show Joe how defining things, making deliberate and perhaps uncomfortable changes in our lives, was the right thing to do. But I thought better of it when I saw the look on his face, as if he was processing something he’d been working on for a very long time.

  “When I was a kid living in Boston, they’d call me ‘nigger.’ Then when my mom moved us to Ghana they called me abroni—‘white boy.’ It’s too much, Jodie. Labels imply that we’re not enough—not white enough, or not Black enough, not girl or boy enough. Transgender is just one more narrow box to put Penelope in. And I can’t. I won’t do it.”

  Joe had told me these childhood stories before, but never like this, in this context. They struck me in a different place. Maybe it was just a matter of learning a new and more delicate language, together—one that would make us both feel good about using it.

  “I get limitations, Joe, I do. That’s not at all what we want.” I turned off the faucet, placed the sponge on the counter, and turned to face him, trying to show with my body language that this was not a fight. “But what should we do when your dad comes from Ghana and stays with us for two months? We’re going to need to address it somehow.”

  Joe’s seventy-two-year-old father was arriving from Ghana in a few weeks for a long visit, and we both knew he would pose a challenge when it came to Penelope. He was the family elder—bold, unwavering, religious, and very traditional. The last time Dr. G visited, Penelope had been much younger, and a lot had changed since then. We could both see him disapproving of a girl wearing shorts and sneakers, possessing a “non-girly” attitude. Penelope definitely wasn’t going to sit by his side, patiently serving him food upon command or handing him his newspaper and his notebook, as he might have expected—things his daughter, Kiara, had done for him when she was young.