My oldest is now 10. Last year, or maybe it was two years ago, he went to a sleepover birthday party as kids do. At the time, I didn’t think anything of the fact that he was the only boy on the invite list. After the party ended, I forgot it had even happened.

I was at another birthday party a few months ago where the topic was “that party with the boy sleeping over.” The parents were sagely nodding to each other, relieved that one girl just went for the movie and didn’t sleep over. According to the group wisdom, her parents had done well.

“Uh, yeah,” I finally said. “That one boy there was my son.”

I was surprised mixed gender sleepovers would be whispered-about elementary school scandal. I honestly don’t see the risk at that age. I can imagine what parents might be worried about, but really? They’re 8- and 9-year-olds. There are parents actively hosting the party. Nothing is going to happen. Especially in our town of Berkeley, Calif., known for its liberal social and political views, where almost all of these kids have been socialized to have friends of both genders. This town is supposedly liberal and woke. My son isn’t even thinking about crushes yet, let alone anything physical.

These parents were even more surprised when I told them my mom let me have mixed gender sleepovers … in high school. The positive socialization aspect of boys seeing girls as viable friends and not just as potential hookups are why my mom, and the parents of my friends, didn’t care about our slumber parties. They knew we were friends. I’m still friends with all of them today. If we’re trying to create a world where men treat women as equals rather than only as objects of desire, we need to drop the taboos we put on their social interaction. We need to let them be friends.

There’s more, though. All your fears about mixed gender sleepovers assume your kids are straight.

Same-sex sleepovers and assumptions

Whatever you’re worried about kids doing at slumber parties doesn’t magically disappear for LGBTQ kids. Every parent I know at our school would be fine if their kids were gay, but I wonder what that would mean for their views on slumber parties. It seems like an unexamined aspect of parenting LGBTQ kids. A lot of kids seem to know their orientation at an early age and, especially where I live, they are more likely to talk about or acknowledge the existence and validity of same-sex relationships.

So if your 8-year-old son tells you he’s gay, what do you do about slumber parties? Only send him to parties with girls? Or just with straight boys? Is either really a rational approach? Should you approach things any differently than you would with your cishet (cisgender and heterosexual) son?

No. The fact is, you should trust your children to be children. And if you don’t, maybe it’s time to examine how you’ve parented them. Have you contributed to oversexualizing your children in ways that you’re not aware of?

My other question is this: If people are worried about co-ed sleepovers at this age, what does my transgender child do? Attend only sleepovers with children of the gender they were assigned at birth or with their gender identity? What if the child is gender fluid? No sleepovers at all?

My hope is that my trans child can sleep over wherever xe’s invited. And I hope those invitations come from friends of every gender.

We need to examine our own filters and realize that our fears for our children don’t always align with reality. My young son isn’t a predator, and your young daughter isn’t a harlot. My 8-year-old trans child doesn’t have internet access and is not yet steeped in hookup culture. If xe’s hanging out with your son or daughter, xe just wants to play make-believe or maybe Candy Land. Kids are innocent, and we shouldn’t intrude on that with our own fears or misguided jokes about their relationships with people of other genders. If you’re really parenting your kids, you should be able to trust them to hang out with their friends no matter how they identify.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Santiago could never decide on a job so he endeavors to have all of them. He is a writer, teacher, sign language interpreter, rugby referee and stay-at-home dad. He writes about the intersections of family, sports and culture at An Interdisciplinary Life.

Mixed gender sleepovers photo: © nimito / Adobe Stock.

“Maybe it’s just a phase.”

I said it to my wife while we were alone. I knew it was wrong, but I was feeling it so intensely that I had to let it out. I was feeling it because I really, really wanted it to be true.

Our middle child had recently come out as transgender. I wasn’t supposed to feel the way I was feeling. I was woke. I mean, I was “hella woke,” as we say here in Nor Cal.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area so I’ve been around LGBTQ people my entire life. In fact, if my child had said they were gay it would have been easy. I know how to move through that world. While growing up, my mom had gay friends who came over to our house. I’ve had gay friends almost my whole life. I’ve volunteered at Pride events and even played for a gay rugby team. Homosexuality would be easy to accept as natural because I could relate on some level. I have felt attraction. I have been in love. But I’ve always been very sure of my identity. As a man, as a person of color, as a cisgender heterosexual person, none of these identities have ever been questioned by me or anyone else. I think it was hard for me to accept the identities of trans people because I had never been forced to confront or question my own.

Also, my experience with transgender people has been quite limited. I’ve taught some trans students. They were the first ones I think I really knew as more than a loose acquaintance. I learned a lot just by having them in class. I thought of myself as a trans ally with a capital “A,” but even with that background I wasn’t ready for a transgender child.

Being trans harder on them or you?

So there I was: “Maybe it’s just a phase.”

I winced just hearing it from my own mouth. My wife gave me a look at once both disapproving and sympathetic.

At the moment, I wanted it to be true. I thought, “What if we just ignore it? What if we move on as if they hadn’t told us?”

I justified this by saying I was afraid for my child. I wanted their life to be easy. Being trans isn’t easy. It’s hard and I didn’t want my kid to suffer.

It made sense, but it was only a half-truth. What I really wanted was for life to be easier for me.

Parenting a transgender child, or at least the idea I had of it in that moment, isn’t easy either. I didn’t want to carry the burden. I didn’t want to do the work. I didn’t want to be called to defend them or to soothe their pain when I couldn’t. It felt like too much. It was a selfish thought.

My next thought may have been worse.

I began flipping through a mental Rolodex of things to blame.

It was the school’s fault. They had been so welcoming and accepting of that other transgender kid. They had made it seem cool!

It was our church’s fault. It had a re-naming ceremony for a transgender child in the congregation. That was what had made it OK for my kid to try this on!

I blamed Taylor Mac’s fabulous stage show, which my wife had taken our child to see.

The liberal media was to blame. So was the open political climate in our hometown and the entire Bay Area. They had all influenced my kid to be trans!

Yes. I know exactly how this sounds.

It’s not easy to admit these feelings. I carried them around for at least a week before expressing them to my wife. When we talked about it, I already knew how ridiculous every single one of these thoughts were.

These people and places and institutions didn’t make my kid transgender; they gave my kid the space and freedom to tell us they were trans. My kid isn’t trans because of their environment; they are open and happy because of their environment. The best parenting decision we made apparently happened two years before my kid came out: we moved to a community where they could feel accepted.

Non-acceptance of transgender child runs risks

Some well-meaning people have also said to me, “Maybe it’s just a phase.” Maybe, but what are the odds? More important, what’s the risk?

I thought back to an article I read that said you shouldn’t pigeonhole your child’s identity too early. Don’t make them the smart one or the funny one or the clumsy one because – whether it’s true or not – it will influence how they move through the world and how they see themselves forever. Once you have a role, it’s hard to break out of it.

So maybe the risk is that my kid one day decides they aren’t trans, but they are ashamed to admit it or embarrassed – thinking that they’d put us through all this for nothing – so they keep living as a trans person even though they didn’t want to. Honestly, this line of reasoning seems highly unlikely. Possible, but not plausible. Being trans isn’t easy so I doubt anyone would fake it for very long. There’s no ROI.

What if it’s not a phase? What’s the risk in treating it like it might be? A transgender child or adult tends to be at an extremely high risk of depression, anxiety and suicide, often as a result of oppression and abuse of their identities.

I’ve been around the LGBTQ community long enough to have heard more times than I can count the phrase, “I always knew who I was. Since I was a child, I always knew.” My friends always knew who they were. My child has expressed similar thoughts. If this is who my child is and if I don’t support them completely, then I’m the one doing them harm. I don’t want my kid to echo the other phrase I’ve heard from many of my LGBTQ friends, “My family never accepted me so I’m not really close with them anymore.”

I’m going to do all I can in my parenting to make sure that my transgender child feels accepted for who they are. The risk of anything less than total buy-in is a child at a greater risk for anxiety, depression and suicide.

So I’m in — outwardly at least. I still harbor doubts and selfishness and hope that things will change. Those thoughts are pushed to the background more and more, but they are there. I strive to keep them inside, or at least away from my children.

Pronoun predicaments of the gender-fluid

A lot has happened in the months since my child’s announcement. First, they decided they weren’t a boy, but they were not a girl either. They chose they/them as pronouns for a while. That gave us some cute moments from our 3-year-old trying to get used to the new pronouns like, “Mommy, they/them said a bad word.”

Later, my child decided that they/them didn’t always fit either. They settled on “gender fluid” as an identity. Now, they wake up each morning and select a sticky note from a selection my wife ordered. Each one has “he/him,” “she/her” or “they/them” printed on it. The kid picks which one fits that day and puts it on the whiteboard in the kitchen so we all know what to call them that day. Some days they just go by their name, no pronouns. As a dad, I’m tempted to make silly puns based on the day’s pronouns, but I don’t because I don’t want my kid ever feel like I’m making fun of them for who they are.

So far parenting a transgender child hasn’t been as hard as I’d feared. It hasn’t been difficult for either of us, really. School and church were ready for this. Living in this area made it easier than it would have been in other places. I haven’t had to defend them, not once

We’ve had some interesting conversations, though, like when they asked why no one ever assumes they’re a boy. We talked about gender presentation and societal assumptions around dress. The kid hasn’t changed their style at all other than mixing in more blue. They still wear leggings as pants, dresses, sparkles and feminine-style earrings. They got a shorter haircut, but it still isn’t a traditional boy’s style. Once at the grocery store, they were assumed to be a boy at a deli counter. We shared a smile and a giggle of achievement at that.

What I’ve come to realize is that I don’t have to be perfect in my thoughts or feelings to be the perfect parent for my transgender child’s needs. As long as I’m open and loving and willing to learn, I can consider what I’m going through “just a phase.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Santiago could never decide on a job so he endeavors to have all of them. He is a writer, teacher, sign language interpreter, rugby referee and stay-at-home dad. He writes about the intersections of family, sports and culture at An Interdisciplinary Life.

Like all first time expecting parents, I knew everything. Not as much as people who don’t have kids, they’re the true experts. But one thing I knew for sure was that my children would be bilingual.

My wife and I are both sign language interpreters. Her parents are deaf. On top of that, we both have backgrounds in education and linguistics. We understood language acquisition. Our kids were going to learn American Sign Language (ASL). It was a no brainer.

“Oh! You should look into baby signs!” people would say to us when they found out our backgrounds.

This would be the cue for my wife and I to give each other a subtle look. “No,” we’d respond. “We’re just going to use regular ASL, like how children who grow up with ASL learn it.”

This usually lead to a short back and forth involving this neophyte explaining that baby signs were much easier for infants to pick up, us countering that baby signs are easier for parents and that all language is equally easy for babies to learn. After a couple minutes we’d lose our patience and politely find somewhere else to be. We knew what we were doing, and it wasn’t baby signs.

Fast-forward seven years. It turns out that raising bilingual kids is harder than I thought.

It’s difficult to want to use your second language at home

Basically, I didn’t have the fortitude to stick with it. There were three issues. One is easy to explain: I’m lazy. The second is tough to admit: as an interpreter I associated using ASL with work. Interpreting is mentally and physically exhausting, and after working long days I just didn’t have the mental energy to come home and process the world in my second language. For a child to acquire a language naturally they have to be exposed to it for long stretches. What I wanted at the end of the day was to cook dinner, have a beer, and just chill.

Even baby signs gets lost in translation

American Sign Language is not English. It isn’t based on English. It doesn’t want to be English. It is a separate and distinct language like any other, and as such it carries its own conversational norms. When I started teaching, interpreting my mentor helped me realize this through one sad fact: I’m not funny in sign language. This became an issue because my attempts to be clever in class were causing problems as my students weren’t getting it. The witty rapport and high-context conversations that many couples enjoy in one language also get lost in translation. The result is that the ways that my wife and I were accustomed to communicating didn’t work as well in ASL. Inside jokes or references to previous conversations were lost and created frustration.

I’m not as capable as a native sign language “speaker”

I understand that when you do something your whole life it becomes second nature, like Ted Williams hitting a baseball or a Justin Bieber having those haircuts. Deaf people have the ability to converse in ASL and do other things at the same time, like drive, or eat. I can’t do that. Trying get home after work and do the things that need to be done, like cooking and cleaning, proved impossible for me while trying to communicate to my family in ASL. I couldn’t spare the eye gaze to have meaningful conversations with my family. I might have been able to figure it out, but being a new parent in a new house and a new job had me flustered. I let that frustration overcome my desire to raise bilingual children.

The kids know we can hear them

This might be the biggest bilingual issue we had. Because we didn’t set the best foundation for them when they were babies they got used to hearing us and having us respond to them when they made sounds. During the stretches when we had the discipline to enact our bilingual program, the kids would simply reply to us in English. We could rarely convince them to try to reply in ASL, in part because it usually required us ignoring them until they tried signing through their tears.

The result of these failings has been that my two older children have a hate/love relationship with their second language of ASL. Until recently, they mostly hated our weekly sign language days at home and occasionally rebelled against it.

Our saving grace is that they adore their deaf grandparents. Nothing motivates them to sign like having my wife’s parents around. When they planned to stay with us when our third child was due, my son woke up on the morning they were arriving and said, “I can’t wait for grandma and grandpa to come so I can start learning sign language!” I died a little inside.

“Son,” I replied, “you could have been learning to sign this whole time and then you could just chat with them instead of having to start learning now.” He looked at me like I’d just suggested rearranging the furniture in his room. “THAT’S BEEN THE POINT ALL ALONG!!!!” I screamed silently in my head. But I knew it was really my fault he hadn’t taken to signing.

I’m happy to report my kids have gotten more into learning ASL as they’ve gotten older. It’s not how we planned it, but at least it’s happening. They don’t balk at ASL days now. They’re more willing to copy us and pick up new vocabulary. They’re getting better at using contextual clues to figure out what we’re saying to them.

We still have one baby left at our house, and she’s our last chance to raise a kid who is bilingual, who is comfortable with manual language from the start. She’s a year old now and starting to communicate well. Because this time I started with baby signs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Santiago could never decide on a job so he endeavors to have all of them. He is a writer, teacher, sign language interpreter, rugby referee and stay-at-home dad. He writes about the intersections of family, sports and culture at An Interdisciplinary Life. 

Bilingual sign language photo credit: gfpeck via Foter.com / CC BY-ND

Editor’s Note: A cleft lip, with or without cleft palate, is the fourth most common birth defect in the United States, affecting one in 700 babies a year. In this guest post, Roberto Santiago writes about his inner turmoil reckoning his daughter’s quest to look “normal.”

It’s a weird thing when your 4-year-old gets a nose job.

Before you get upset, I’m not a pageant dad. This was a medically necessary nose job related to my daughter, Lou, being born with a cleft lip and palate.

Since the day she was born, our surgeon has repeated the phrase “normal by five” several hundred times. That phrase makes me uneasy. In my years working with people with disabilities, mostly as a sign language interpreter, I’ve come to distrust the term “normal.”

To many in disability and mental health communities, the word is oppressive. “Normal” creates a caste where a non-disabled person falsely assumes a superior position. The disabled person feels expected to aspire to normality, a state they may not be able to, or may be disinterested in reaching. “Normal” gives a statistical concept an inappropriate emotional connotation. I don’t want that burden placed on my little girl.

For Lou, we knew being “normal” would require three or four surgeries on her cleft lip and palate before she entered kindergarten. The latest one would be a lengthening of the columna, the external fleshy bit of the nose that divides the nostrils that her cleft caused to be very short and unable to grow. This gave her a vaguely cat-like look with nostrils more like little slits than round holes. It also caused folds inside the nostrils to easily clog.

Her recovery from that surgery took three weeks, two more than expected. She experienced discomfort rather than much outright pain during that time. The exception came when we had to clean the constant excretions and dried goop from her recovering nose. And at those times, the pain was not limited to her face.

“I hate how my nose looks!” she screamed. “I hate how it looks when it’s bloody. It looks terrible. I hate it. It looks gross and yucky and ugly. I wish I didn’t have a nose. I just look at my face and I wish I didn’t have any nose. Until today I just hate having a nose.”

This was my biggest fear before the surgery. I feared she’d hate her new look and want her old cat nose back.

My wife tried to reason with her, but Lou just kept yelling. Finally, I showed her a picture of Voldemort from the Harry Potter movies.

“See honey, this guy doesn’t have a nose. Is that what you want?” I asked.

“Oh. My. God,” she said.

She finally stopped protesting.

Still, the goop, the discomfort, the blood – none of that is what lingers with me. It’s how she looks.

When she was a baby we would speculate on who she would favor when she got older. She has my coloring, and she has her grandmother’s eyes, and we knew that her nose would be her own. It wouldn’t look like either of us because it was going to be created on an operating table. We knew we’d spend five years with one version of her face, and then it would change.

She looks like a different kid today. But she also still looks the same. This isn’t a Jennifer Grey situation here. The observation I keep coming back to is the one that makes me feel guilty for thinking it. She now looks “normal.”

Sure, the goal of the procedure was normal function, but the side effect was a “normal” look. I know I shouldn’t be using “normal.” I should use “typical” or some other term. But “normal” is the one that keeps coming to mind.

And I feel guilty about that.

I feel guilty about how relieved I am.

I feel guilty because the outcome for my daughter isn’t the outcome every cleft kid has.

We grow up being told looks don’t matter even while our peer interactions and media messages impress upon us that they do. Maybe my guilt is really just disappointment in myself. Disappointment that I’m shallow, that my daughter’s looks hold importance to me.

Lou will likely always have visible scars from her cleft lip surgeries. But each time she goes in she ends up looking more like a typical kid, and less like the baby we nicknamed Zoidberg after the cartoon lobster-man on Futurama. I’m happy to think she’ll be able to avoid being emotionally destroyed by her peers at school. I’m happy her social life won’t be hindered by deformity. (She’ll only have to face the usual horrible social pressures! Yay!)

It shouldn’t matter how she looks, especially not to me. That’s the message. That’s the ideal. But it does matter because I know how the world really works. So I’m conflicted over how her new face makes me feel. Because it’s a weird thing when your 4-year-old gets a nose job.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Santiago could never decide on a job so he endeavors to have all of them. He is a writer, teacher, sign language interpreter, rugby referee and stay-at-home dad. He writes about the intersections of family, sports and culture at An Interdisciplinary Life.