July 2024

My 18-year-old grandson was born with female genitalia and was assigned female at birth. He never felt at home in or at peace with his body, and he had shared ill-defined feelings of discontent with his father from an early age, before he had any vocabulary or knowledge about gender identity. As an early teen, he declared himself bisexual; perhaps this was a flare he sent out to test the family response. He went through a brief phase of “they/them” pronouns, before firmly settling on “he/his.” From his mid-teens on, he identified as transgender.

As the shower water heats up, I help my eighteen-year-old trans son remove the post-surgical compression vest he’ll be wearing for the next six months. I unzip the front, unhook each of three hooks, and unstrap the velcro from each shoulder and take it off.

During a recent trip to Manhattan, I attended a matinee and found a survey from the theater taped to my seat.  As I carefully filled it out, the woman seated next to me—a senior citizen like myself—loudly took exception to a question on it about gender identity. “There are only two genders,” she proclaimed, “female and male.  These ‘binary’ or ‘trans’ choices are nonsense.” I perhaps should have confronted her about her closed-mindedness, but I remained silent.

Dear readers,

I adapt slowly to new things. I’m skeptical of new technologies, the latest fashions and the most recent fads. While I like to think of myself as progressive when it comes to matters of politics and social justice, the truth is my gut is often conservative about interpersonal matters and the stuff of daily life.

So in recent years, I’ve been astonished at the rapidity with which something that was invisible when I was growing up–a person changing their gender–has become commonplace.