The Best American Newspaper Narratives of 2012

“I Boy”

“I Boy” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel December 2, 2012 By Mark Johnson Isabella, a pink-cheeked lightning bolt in a Dora the Explorer shirt, uttered her first sentence around age 2; it was nothing her parents had expected. The two little words foretold a struggle over a fact of her birth. “I boy.” When those two words had a chance to sink in, the child’s mother, Jennifer, remembers thinking: Well, that might explain the interest in Matchbox cars. Maybe, Isabella just wanted to be like the other kids at day care; most were boys. Or maybe the child was simply confused. At least it was only a phase, the mother told herself. It would pass. That summer, clothes became a problem. Isabella kicked and screamed when Mom adorned her in pretty pink dresses. The child spilled salsa all over them, something that never seemed to happen when Isabella wore shorts and T-shirts. 196 TheBestAmericanNewspaperNarrativesof2012 Jennifer arranged her daughter’s long brown hair in ponytails and pigtails, inserted bows and barrettes. And the first chance she got, Isabella yanked out the bows and freed her hair. When mom grabbed the brush, Isabella pushed her arm away. When they shopped for clothes, Jennifer would hold up a dress, a sporty girls’ outfit, a bright red T-shirt. No, said Isabella. No. No. Then came the tears. Then the walk over to the boys’ department. Don’t you want to be a pretty girl, the mother would ask. The child would not say, I want to run like a boy, or throw like a boy, or climb trees like a boy. Just: “I boy.” One day last fall, two years after that first sentence, Jennifer made a decision. She took Isabella to Cost Cutters. We need a short haircut, the mother said. I mean razor short. Like a boy. She began dressing the child in boy’s clothes. Isabella became Izzy. Of course, the name and haircut were just the beginning. Gender dictates how we see children in the most fundamental ways— everything from the toys, books and clothes moms and dads buy, to the proms, weddings and other milestones they imagine. While girls and boys attend school together, they are conditioned to separation in bathrooms, locker rooms, gym classes, sports teams, even sections of the cafeteria. These social conventions operate on a pair of assumptions: that there is always certainty about who is a girl and who a boy; and that every girl and every boy will look and feel and act the part. But suppose you found yourself, as Jennifer did, dealing with a child who does not fit the assigned role—what would you do? Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 197 Her dilemma, while rare, appears more common than you might suppose. A large study of Dutch twins published in 2006 found that between 0.9% and 1.7% wished they were of the opposite sex. A national advocacy group estimates that between one-quarter of 1% and 1% of the American population—780,000 to 3.1 million people—believe they have been assigned the wrong gender. Still, experts say there is really no reliable figure. The census does not have a category for people who live on these margins and even if it did, many would just as soon avoid the label—and the stigma. One problem is that the public tends to confuse gender and sexuality . Desiring to be a different gender is not related to homosexuality. It isn’t about sexuality, but identity, says John Kryger, chief of pediatric urology at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and the Medical College of Wisconsin. “Gender is who you go to bed as,” he says. “Sexuality is who you go to bed with.” Blurring of the two may explain the visceral reaction many have to transgender, a word first coined in the 1960s and now used to describe people who have crossed, or wish to cross, the gender border. This dividing line is not, as we often assume, between the legs. “Gender lives in the brain,” says Stephen Rosenthal, medical director of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at University of California, San Francisco. “Gender is defined as your perception of who you are.” J. Michael Bostwick, a professor of psychiatry at the Mayo Clinic, agrees that gender identity is “brain-based,” but adds that researchers have yet to learn much about the specifics. “I think we have...