Kids and Identity Crises: One Parent's View

My Godzilla Princess playing with dinosaurs

Just a couple months ago, my 13 year old daughter came home to inform me that one of her best friends, who was 12, had decided that she was a lesbian.  And the boy that lives not too far away that is her same age?  Well, he was pondering whether or not he was gay.   Being someone who has never really made someone's sexuality or gender identity be a gauge of our friendship, I wasn't alarmed by this seeming neighborhood epidemic of gender and sexual preference questioning in a bunch of kids that were just reaching puberty.  Instead, I was humored and half glad to see these kids pondering these questions because I'd come to the conclusion a long time ago that they really should be questioned.  We've finally become a society where a kid who is thinking of whether they like the same sex or not can freely question it without fear of (too much) abuse from their peers.   I think that's awesome.

As a little contrast, I was born just a few days after Woodstock, which my mother always reminded me about because that meant that she couldn't go.  If there was anyone who was gay in my high school back in the 80's,  I sure as heck didn't know at the time.   In fact, the idea of a transgender or gay classmate didn't even cross my mind until I went to a gay nightclub as a straight girl (greatest nightclub ever) in 1995.  That night, I ran into an old classmate and recognized them right away through the make up, the great dress and wig.  This old friend of mine from high school?  "He" (actually she) was gay and transgender and she was absolutely petrified that I recognized her.  I just gave her the biggest hug that I could with tears in my eyes and told her that she looked gorgeous.   It crushed me to see her distress at the thought of somebody from school knowing these things about her.  All I could think about was how long she'd kept it hidden and, in doing so, kept herself at arm's length from all of her peers the entire time she knew them.  That's tragic.   Men's style clothing can be fashionable for women--but god forbid a man wears female style clothing.  That's hypocrisy really when one thinks about it. 

Today's kids are growing up in a different world that accepts diversity in all of its forms, including sexuality and gender--very unlike the world that I grew up in.  While some might scream that we're going to descend into Sodom and Gomorrah, I wholeheartedly disagree.  There have always been gay and transgender people in various societies around the world.  Whether they were apparent or not simply depended on the majority of society's view of them.  Secondly, I think that what many of these kids are actually questioning  is the very stereotypes that make up a small portion of the fabric of our society.  If you're a girl, you can only like boys and not think another girl is attractive or vice versa.  If you're a boy, you can't cry or be emotional because, well, then you're a girl (and that is somehow bad).   We have so many stereotypes about what boys do and what girls do that at the end of the day, it's hard to imagine that anybody really fits into the sum total of those stereotypes.  When are we going to learn as a society that, unlike physiological sex most of the time,  "masculinity" and "femininity" are, well, full of crap? 

For example, my daughter loves her pink bedroom which we have decorated with bunches of flowers, faux feathered birds and more to make it a girly girl paradise.   She also loves video games, was a dinosaur junky, ate up more Godzilla movies as a 4 year old than you could possibly imagine (hearing her sing the Mothra song was really adorable), and, oh...did I mention that she loves bugs?  Yep, she identified every bug that she encountered and can name almost every species of bug (I mean, "insect", as she would correct me) indigenous to the Willamette Valley.  These things aren't anything that I ever pushed her into.  She simply ignored the dolls and grabbed at the dinosaurs early on.   I even bought her plenty of dolls and what did she do?  She took their accoutrements and applied them to animal toys.  Her dollhouse?  Filled with toy snakes, spiders, dragonflies, and other critters like a permanent haunted house sitting in that pretty pink and soft green room of her choosing.  Some days she'd dress in a dino t-shirt.  Other days, it was all about big bows in the hair.  Sometimes, it was dino t-shirts with big bows in her hair (kind of loved that look, truth be told).  I've called her my little "Godzilla Princess" for years and she never quite got it until that day that she brought up her friends and their personal quests to comprehend their identities, both of gender and sexuality. 

Gender, I told her, is not being just one thing or the other.  She is neither stereotypically feminine or riddled with aberrant masculinity.  She's just the girl who loves what she loves, no more and no less, without being judged or confined to any label of what she can enjoy and can't.  In my mind, I explained, gender is a spectrum like so many other things in nature.  Nature loves diversity and if it made all of us be girly girls and macho boys, then we would be going against our very own natures and robbing nature of its diversity.  And the sexual preferences?  They're 12.  Their hormones and emotions are running amok.  As my own beloved put it, he'd get stimulated by a breeze passing by when he was in middle school. 

Are her friends gay?  Who knows--that's certainly not for me to decide as that is the flushing out of a personal truth for themselves about themselves.  It could be that they think someone of the same sex is attractive, they think that must mean that they are gay but instead, they're really just appreciating beauty where it's found.  That kid was me and I'd be lying if I didn't have a few panicked nights that worried that I was gay because I thought some girl was so amazing and pretty.  The ultimate truth for me was that I didn't want to date them.  I wanted to be them. Or it could be that they really are gay.  Or perhaps that even sexuality and attraction are, like gender, yet another spectrum and things that a lot of people ponder at some point in their adolescence.  I've lost count of how many times I've had talks with close friends who admitted about wondering about themselves at some point in their youth.  We cannot be that strange of a bunch  (okay, maybe we can be).  Maybe all of this is not as clear cut as we think but at least kids today feel safe enough to broach these questions unlike my many high school friends who have since come out of the closet after so many years of hiding who they truly are.  Isn't that worth some openly questioning?

Whatever it is that these kids decide for themselves as they grow older, I can only hope that they are given the space and freedom to ponder and explore those questions.  The last thing that I told my daughter is that no matter what it is that her friends decide about themselves in the end, it doesn't matter.  They're still the same people as they were the day before but just that much truer to themselves without fear of not being accepted for who they are by their peers.  If such questioning shakes the pinnacles of our society, then perhaps they needed to be shaken so that we all can have the ability to embrace our unique differences that nature granted us without fear or feeling like we have to conform to outdated and perhaps erroneous labels.