So, this past Saturday was my birthday. Part of my birthday celebrations – as I’ve been doing different things when different people have been available – was a picnic in a park on my birthday, which, of course was fabulous – the weather was beautiful, we all brought yummy food, my birthday cake was amazing, and a bunch of friends made it.
One of my younger friends – the young child of one of my other friends – asked where the birthday girl was, and he got the answer of, “there isn’t one. There’s a birthday [anarchafemme].” To which he replied, a little disbelieving at first, “[anarchafemme] is a boy?” This led to a conversation where several people tried to explain that I’m not a boy or a girl, which he had a little trouble with at first, but eventually got. One of my friends, apparently worried that I was getting hella stressed by having my gender discussed, moved in for the reassuring physical contact thing she does when she thinks I (or other people she’s close to) are stressed out. But it really wasn’t stressful.
First of all, I was thrilled that after realizing that his initial assumption that I was a girl wasn’t the case, he was equally able to accept the idea of me, in all my femme glory, being a boy. And, he did get it pretty quickly, with all of us pretty much explaining that not only do people get to decide for themselves if they’re a boy or a girl, some people aren’t either, and that’s fine too.
I’m much better with kids asking questions that way; children are people too, but they are people who see the world differently and communicate differently than adults, and part of learning about the world is asking questions, and a child asks questions differently than an adult. And it was a perfectly comfortable situation, because I knew his mother wants her child to not only know binary gendered trans people, but also genderqueer people, and to have adult friends in his life be honest about who they are. She approached me later, saying she thinks it’s really good that he knows me, because he needs to know all the ways he and other people could end up being in the world, because he certainly gets taught that gender variance is wrong enough by the outside world, and made to feel badly about it.
This is part of what I love about my community, we can be honest and visible in age-appropriate ways to the children in our community about the fact that we don’t all fall in love with the people society says we should, that we decide what our genders are, and that there are options beyond what society tells us exist (and a lot of other things, too). We want children to participate in honestly getting to know the people in our community, and not in a tokenizing way, not in a “you’re not like this” way, but in a way in which we are equally valid, and our differences are seen as a vital part of the community.
So often in the past, being able to interact with the children of friends and family has been predicated on my hiding as much queerness and gender difference as possible. It is wonderful that in the present, that I not only have adults in my life who understand who I am, but also children…there’s one I know who has never, ever messed up my pronouns. Ever. That child just turned three this past summer, and I’ve known that particular child for ten months. There are very few people I can say that about in my life, and that should serve as a good argument against genderqueer pronouns being too hard to use.
