Do your children know that transgender people exist?

Do your children know that transgender people exist?

I ask because one of the most frequent negative interactions I experience in public (and there are many kinds, my dears) involves children who are either titillated or angry at what they see. And I believe that parents have control over whether these interactions occur, simply by how well we prepare our children to deal with the different types of people they’ll encounter in this world.

When my own daughter entered pre-school, her indoctrination began. This wasn’t the result of any conspiracy, or the considered policy of any particular institution. A lot of what she learned was from her peers, who constantly correct and instruct each other on how to be, though a good deal also comes from adults’ cultural insistence on greeting children as “girls and boys” and continuing to divide them, subtly and overtly, throughout each day of their lives. By the time she’d been in that world a few months, her notion of what boys and girls were, and what each group could do, was rigid.

I saw it as my duty to instruct her about all sorts of queer people, however closeted I was. She didn’t believe that gays and lesbians existed until I showed her adorable pictures of gay and lesbian marriages, with little double-brided and twice-groomed cakes, as proof. Our conversations about gender, as you might imagine, have been more involved — but she got all of it very quickly, and by now will school you directly if you misgender me in her presence.

It was important to me to teach her these things so she’d know that my friends were regular people before she met them.

A lot of parents don’t want to have these conversations with anyone, much less small children. A great number of straight and cis people simply don’t care about making this world better for people like me.

I’m not really talking to them.

I am concerned with those who consider themselves allies to queer and transgender people, but haven’t taken the steps to create a culture of acceptance in their own homes.

When you don’t talk to your children, they’re encountering American constructs of gender on their own, out in the world and in the media. In day-to-day life, their punishment for transgressing gender roles is condescension, scolding, humiliation, or bullying — even outright violence.

On TV, if children are exposed to transgender characters at all, they’re trans women who are used as the butts of jokes on shows like Powerpuff Girls. Trans men are functionally invisible, and the only time I’ve ever seen a non-binary character in adult or children’s programming is on Steven Universe — a show that’s generally a blessing for queer and queer-friendly parents, and a great place to start all sorts of other conversations besides.

When you don’t talk to your children, you’re ratifying this world, which has no place for people like me. You’re leaving the shock of realization that things are not the way they’ve been described to the moment your child encounters someone like me.

Many children don’t care. But for those that do, the response is always exactly the same, though sometimes they only say it once, and sometimes they repeat it like a chant while they follow me around.

“You look like a girl,” they say. And then, hilarious or furious:

“You’re NOT a girl.”

It’s really not their fault that this is happening — they’re kids, and all they know is what they’re taught.

And it isn’t mine, either. I promise you that I’m allowed to exist, and that this conversation does not belong to me.

Care to step in?

Gabriel Squailia is the author of Dead Boys (2015) and Viscera (October, 2016), both available from Talos Press. You can find out more about their work at their website.