To the guy who called my nonbinary kid an It

Thank you guy, I needed to write this

When I was 8 my parents went away for a week and I somehow managed to talk my grandmother into shearing off all my curls and buying me boys clothes. As legend goes, I attended school as a new student named Jake for the entire week. And tho my grown self has a hard time believing I ever had such cahones, my report card from that year includes a week of unexplained absence for which I was penalized.

I was especially thrilled about the underwear. Like a loin cloth or a diaper. Something neutral, something covering and safe. Even at eight, girl’s underwear were branching into “low cut” and “bikini” which cut into my buns and rode up in a way I viscerally hated. The first time I tried on a boy’s pair I felt like a refugee making it over the border to Switzerland. Emphasizing nothing, espousing zero secret agendas.

At 10 I “came of age” in my church which meant boys entered the ministry and girls started training as hostesses. I put on a suit and petitioned the board to make an exception. I read my long list of changes and improvements we could make for young people’s overall experience in the church. That they tried to hide their laughter which was probably a kindness. They said no and that I would make a very lovely hostess. I proclaimed myself an atheist that very day, and refused to enter the church for years. That was the day I learned what it feels like in the body to try to exist in boxes way to fucking small for an unfettered human’s expression.

So when one of my children began to actively struggle with their experience of gender, there was an already prepped garden soil for the seeds of inquiry to land. This isn’t to say I was graceful or kind of flowful about how much their struggle brought up for me or how it highlighted my own complicated and mostly avoided relationship to gender. Of course I flailed, projected and blamed. I’m human. We are pathologically terrified of change.

We are so scared of it, it’s almost funny to watch the mind flail, like a toddler clutching at every door jam as you try to take them to bed until you have to tickle/pry them off of each one.

The first doorjam I clung to, in my own gender unmasking, was the grammatical incorrectness of nonbinary pronouns they/them. My early official stance (an absolute lie) was something like “I’m totally fine with all of this but it’s the inaccuracy I have a problem with. That’s what’s bothering me.”

Which reminds me of the scene in What About Bob where his therapist challenges Bill Murray’s assertion that he left his wife because “there are two kinds of people in the world, those that love Neil Diamond and those that do not. My ex-wife loved him.”

“[pause] I see. So, what you're saying is that even though you are an almost-paralyzed, multiphobic personality who is in a constant state of panic, your wife did not leave you, you left her because she... liked Neil Diamond?”

Grammar was my Neil Diamand because the tiramisu of fears I was hiding from actually became the soul curriculum for an extraordinary decade long pilgrimage to meet my essential, greenest self, unboxed and fucking unboxable.

And it went a little something like this

I’m a late 20’s mama at a playgroup, trying to bond with a fellow parent I cannot for the life of me identify the gender of. Each time I’d settle on one, “okay we’re moms. Sympatico. Sleeplessness, the laziness of partners, right.” Then they’d do something so masculine I’d blush in my mistake and swing to the other side. Flirting! And scanning to see if they’re attracted to me (I’m not proud of these patterns I’m just reporting here on how they play out) and wondering if they’re single. Then they snuggle their kid so tenderly I am sure it’s a mom again and resume horror at my wanton flirting.

None of this in response to their person, to their innate divine essence pouring through a human form, but all instead, to my opinions about gender in general. I was flirting with my own opinions. That person didn’t even exist for me. That day was born, a very fierce desire to actually be able to meet someone and take them in, not my preconceived notions of them (conceived before I ever met them!).

Later, my adult, nonbinary kiddo is crying and sharing with me how they currently understand their own experience, what feels good enough for now to work with as they continue to grow, meet themselves, decondition gender and try to be alive in a world gone mad. They have been fighting to make space to ask questions about gender conditioning and they feel exhausted by how it triggers literally everyone. They are a female bodied “ten” with no desire for canned, arbitrary male attention. They want distance from the nuclear-poisoned well of that dynamic. They/them works for now, a place holder for deeper inquiry, a jaws of life to keep the car from crashing in while you crawl out of it.

I realized as they were talking that if I wanted to be in flow, in collaboration, in intimacy with them I was going to have to accept how they understood themselves, and that we were going to have to make space for frequent updates on this because you cannot step in the same river twice. Rumi nails it

My best understanding of intimacy is that beneath the Going Ons of our outer relationship, our inner selves are trying to build an invisible house of cards. If you tell me something is okay for you (but it’s not), you’re giving me locational info on where your invisible card is and if I go to lean my card up against that card, my card is going to fall flat because the true location of your truth is somewhere else and we have now just built nothing with this moment. No traction, no soul revelations, no new platforms of shared truth to go higher and higher upon.

Those Folks in opposition to this unmasking often speak to how “exhausting” it is to check pronouns or how it requires a level of presence, attention and acceptance they are likely unable or unwilling to give anyone. To that I say good. Stop batching your interactions. Each of us is a cosmic snowflake, rare, unrepeatable and chock full of divine secrets and mystical delights which you’ll never have access to if you assume you already know this person before you’ve even met them.

Y’all what if we went to church in our relationships? And got down on our knees at the alter of whatever Real Love is (that’s a tall order and my lips went kind of numb writing it) or at least apprenticed ourselves to the sacred art of Being Human, together? And let the differences stimulate deep dives into personal healing instead of triggering our survival mechanisms which makes us “other” everyone who isn’t exactly like us?

Can we talk about symbols? Those lighthouses that are hailing us

across the choppy waters that we would otherwise not have the inspiration to cross, but the very waters that we need to cross and that our world needs us to cross, in order to evolve. I think the hyper masculine and hyper fem tropes have nuggets in them, calling us to reconnoiter our inner balance of those energies, strong and soft, accepting and boundaried according to love, open and safely discerning.

Those humans, at the forefront of the current gender deconditioning, are fundamentally trying to open space, to sift, examine, update, get more playful and more curious about and to begin to move towards a more unmasked and more innate way of Being.

When people ask me my pronouns I remember a funny story that happened at the end of a Play Church when I was swarmed by people wanting to connect and chat about their experiences but my oldest daughter just wanted to know when we could go get lunch. Amidst the din she tried everything to get my attention, “Mom, momma, mama, MOTHER. MAAAAA. Natalie. NATALIE MARIE. Nat MAMMMAMMMAA.” She eventually gave up, got quiet then said, in a small voice, “Steve,” to which I turned immediately and said, “yeah honey?”

DIGGING EVEN DEEPER - “there’s layers to this shit player/ tiramisu, tiramisu.” - Macklemore

I think it’s fucking awesome to get at a central anxiety, one which is never never going to go away until you receive and dialogue with it, and bring a high enough quality of awareness to allow the hidden truth nuggets to be revealed and received by you. These central conversations about the highly conditioned and unexamined nature of most people’s relationship to gender aren’t going to go away if we quash the “trans movement” or regress to thinking that men have the exclusive studio rights to divine masculine energy and women to divine feminine energy. The pressure of a question, whose time has come, will push on the fault lines of the society, that doesn’t currently have the capacity for the presence or frankness it needs to answer the question, and it will keep pushing on those fault lines until the society develops those qualities. The question is a skills developer, a carrot drawing us up.

I recently came face to face with the heart of that pressure when I read a substack comparing the “trans movement” to a fashion trend that they insisted would and is dying, and should. The writer identified no value to the questions being raised, they simply used their incredible writing skill to create a different kind of mental conditioning, which many people were happy to receive and agree with because this new way of hiding, from the core questions, gave a false sense of change without actually having to do the hard work of change or face the inner wobbly bits in ourselves, who have become frail along the false gender lines, frail from false use and doing performative toxic gender, or from avoiding it, the me too stuff, all of it, just paralyzing us because authenticity isn’t safe or valued.

The writer Rilke advises:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” It’s very on brand to note here that his mother named him Rainier Maria Rilke because she was really hoping he’d be a girl and was bummed he was not.

When we rush to false, unripe conclusions, we’re likely trying to abate the discomfort of not knowing or to keep ourselves from realizing that we don’t actually know how to live our questions. And this impulse waking in the whole human line - towards more authenticity of lifeforce expression is a big question to live collectively. Because it’s not just waking in gender but in relating to everything and everyone. As this pulse to evolve, to ask big questions, and to clear shitty life-killing patterns emerges in a young person that comes from and lives in a highly conditioned family that pulse only has certain lanes to flow down, like water at a waterpark.

In a culture obsessed with the fantasy that an outer fix could ever cure (it might temporarily relieve but never cure) an inner misalignment, it makes a whole bunch of sense that the gender conversation is currently tangled up in surgery and sports injustices.

A society stuck in its pathological adolescence, one that can literally only value or participate in ONE season of its total life (and a twisted version of the season at that!) will cancel, auto-correct and auto-tune anything that doesn’t immediately and easily fit its teenage fantasies about life, such as: one can avoid suffering, avoid old age, and avoid feeling profound and lingering dissonance over personal expression, the very expression that is constantly and necessarily evolving and sometimes contradicting itself.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” I love Whitman’s loosey goosey self acceptance that dances naked inside the paradox of being a full human.

No outer fix can ever deal with the sense of being achingly out of rhythm with your own Oceanic Ride.

IT CAN FEEL SO FUCKING PERSONAL

When you have been running a pattern, like a belief system or a set of expectations, and you realize it’s not a pattern that is life giving or good, it can be so hot and messy as you examine and excavate that pattern. It’s difficult and sticky work and I’m proud as shit of whomever attempts it at all.

Because this is about conditioning, y’all. It’s about developing our capacity and willingness to excavate to where are true inner responses are trying to be heard by us, beyond the wailing wall of our conditioning and who we think we should be in order to maintain the status quo. It’s also about learning to use the stimulus of life (ie. your feelings about “trans movement”) in order to go within and meet and love open all you find there. It’s NOT about trading one mental ideology for another. That’s limbo. We are pilgrims, journeying ever deeper into the mysteries of the Universe. Sideways steps take us off that path.

Speaking of personal, a quick word about kids because if I don’t say this I’m going to go nuts. I have a vague and mostly metaphorical rule as a parent: I won’t help kids, who want to climb trees, to actually get into the tree. I see the time and process of them actually getting into the tree as a period of skill building the very skills they’ll need to be able to climb the actual tree. Childhood is a space of safe skill building to be the person they came here to be. I tend to draw a circle around those high risk experiments with things that may kill or hurt them so much it removes future choices. I would not help or endorse a child getting any voluntary surgery, nor would I help them to become a professional race car driver! Not to be reductive but to highlight a key distinction around risks that are hard to walk back and the joy of giving kids choices they are psychologically fully prepared to engage with love and awareness. Instead I’d surround them with curiosity and acceptance of the impulse that are emerging and help them dialogue with and journey with it.

If anyone greets any soul-emerging spark with a conditioned, mental response, acting on it will always lead to where we have already been. Learning how to make space to live the question that a soul-spark is inviting us to explore is a whole different skill. I want all kids to learn how to be uplifted and expanded by the soul impulses arising in them, to use them to clear the clutter of conditioned responses.

This isn’t to say I think surgery is out or wrong but that I believe it belongs in the realm of those who are developed enough to even conceive of the choice. Because at a species, we are still babies, evolutionarily speaking. We kind of poop on everything and don’t have many elders or true adults weighing in anywhere. And I believe that learning to discern, embrace, grow up inside of, and nurture those evolutionary urges towards More Betterness for All is as fundamental to growing up as a species as it gets.

I have a dear friend who had top surgery and who feels that gender neutrality is the right space and shape for their expression. I wish I had one iota of the self love, confidence and embodiment they have. They also run mutual aid hubs out of their house, help everyone they meet and are one of the most generous and service oriented people I’ve ever known.

Another friend I have is in a middle school where they aren’t allowed to ever mention or reference how anyone looks. It’s just off the table. I see this as a way of lessening the pressure of having to relentlessly think about how you look, and just turning it down a bit, creating a little softness, a little quiet from outside approval to be able to discern what’s really going on for us, deep down.

Because we can’t actually access our joy or sense of fun with life if we’re pretending to be something we’re not. The sense of something feeling fun is a biological reward or feedback of you directly interfacing with Life, now, sans artifice or armor. If you’re pretending to be somewhere you’re actually not on the map, you haven’t actually started your journey.

So it might even be a little fun to see the spicy gender conversation as a chance to have more frank fun about and with your life expression and everyone else’s too. Speaking of being frank! As that is the name of my nonbinary adult child, who is honest about everything, all the time and always has been (I can say this about very few people) we use the phrase “please be frank” to mean both say what you mean and keep saying it when it gets hard and people start pushing back because your truth is interrupting their conditioned unexamined places in themselves.

I want to be part of a crew jaws of life-ing open a space for this conversation to continue to move through the briars of deconditioning and carry us home via some core questions about what it really means to express fully, frankly and in a win/win/win manner (www= win for you, win for others, win for earth). What expression feels right for each of us, from our deepest places, so that we can get down to the joy of doing OUR GOOD WORK that our world vigorously needs us to get down to.

When I was a wee lass my blonde curls and blue eyes made me very chasable. I often spent my recesses just. running. away. Until one day I found a tree that was so high that no one could or would follow me up as high as I was willing to go, I just kept climbing higher and higher into the sky, desperately seeking (and eventually finding) a place to just.

Be.

May we become such spaces, for each other.