Genderwonky

It's My Transition, Too!

2011-11-19T08:18:00.001-08:00

Friends,

Several years ago I decided to put together a book in which several people I had come to know, both online and IRL, would contribute a chapter telling their stories about living with a spouse or partner who is contemplating, or undergoing "transition" from one gender to another. Well, as these things go, the book got stuck on the sidelines while I pursued other projects, including writing a book of memoirs and essays. Now I have decided to go back to my original idea--slightly modified--to present more personal accounts of trangendered families. However, instead of thinking about it as a book, I've decoded to use the medium of the present: my blog.

So, Genderwonky is going to start being a place for spouses, partners, children, parents and other significant others (SOs) to tell their tales. I will call this series of contributions to Genderwonky by the title I intended to use for the book I began those years ago: It's My Transition, Too! Implied in this title is the notion that every SO of a transitioning person must go through their own transitions. If a family (or business, or friendship) is to survive the social and personal struggles that might be raised by transitioning, then the transition itself must be a family affair.

"Transitioning" in this case does not necessarily include just the physical changes of gender reassignment surgery or hormone treatments undergone or desired by transsexual persons. I intend to include stories by anyone whose loved one "comes out" as any flavor of transgendered or bi-gendered or even anti-gendered.

I already have a small collection of writings to get the ball rolling, but if you have a story to tell, then please write it and send it to me (danmouer@gmail.com). I ask only that you write carefully and thoughtfully about your own personal experiences without generalizing. Some of these stories will be full of anger and pain. Please feel free to express yourself clearly in these areas, but this should be a place for us to learn from and help each other. It's not meant simply as a place to vent or rant.

If you submit your story to the blog, I will assume I have your permission to publish it here. I may also later ask for permission to publish it in book form. If so, I promise that any proceeds from such a book will be donated to an appropriate charity. My own personal favorite for this sort of work would be PFLAG, but any large organization devoted to combating ignorance about and supporting transgendered families would be fine. If I do eventually publish It's My Transition, Too!, I will ask contributors for other suggestions of appropriate recipients for any profits from sales.

I am asking now only for the right to publish your writing on this blog. Authors will retain complete control over their own writings and may republish anywhere in any form they see fit. I will, of course, announce copyright to the blog entries in order to protect your copyright.

Public comments are allowed on all entries to Genderwonky. Be assured that I will not permit nasty or intemperate comments to disturb the peace here. Any such comments will be removed quickly.

When the medicine makes it hurt even worse...

2011-05-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

By Dan Mouer

May 30, 2011

It has been too long since I last contributed anything substantial to my bloglet on the weird and wonderful world of Genderwonky. However, as the American Psychiatric Association enters the final phases of public comment on proposed changes to their diagnostic manual, I feel compelled to speak up and speak out, as a social scientist, and as a person whose life is affected daily by society's ways of dealing with gender dysphoria. As an anthropologist/professor, I have long understood and taught about the cross-cultural nature of gender roles and of humanity's diverse approaches to persons who exhibit traits and behaviors that don't conform to institutionalized gender norms. It was nearly eight years ago I learned that my spouse is transgendered, had suffered considerably as a result of that condition, and intended to “change sex,” if I could live with the changes and what that would mean for our personal and social relationships.

My response was to expand my own knowledge by delving into “the literature” of the social and mental-health sciences, and to quickly seek out information and support from hundreds of trans people and their partners/spouses through a variety of “real-life” and “on-line” forums. Now, all these years later, I find myself surrounded by dozens of good friends and acquaintances who are either transgendered in some form or who are life partners with someone who is. Additionally, I work to offer peer support to other partners of trans people, and to offer friendship and understanding as an ally to folks who, themselves, are transgendered.

The DSM-V Debate about Gender Identity

My concern here—and it is a concern shared by most transgendered people I know—is about a proposed change in version 5 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM is, literally, the “Bible” of mental health diagnosis in the US. The changes proposed for this new revision are largely positive for transgendered people and their families. A new, clearer, more humane treatment of “Gender Identity Disorder” is in development, and that is generally well-received by the trans and mental health communities alike. Nonetheless, the new manual also continues and expands the diagnostic criteria for what it calls “Transvestic Disorder” (TD). TD is listed among the “Paraphilias,” the most common laymen term for which is “sexual perversions.”

A person could be diagnosed with TD is he or she experiences:

“over a period of at least six months, recurrent and intense sexual arousal from cross dressing, as manifested by fantasies, urges, or behaviors.”

In addition, these experiences must cause the person to have:

“clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning.”

Furthermore, the diagnosis can be specified with certain qualities, including:

“With Fetishism (Sexually Aroused by Fabrics, Materials, or Garments)
With Autogynephilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Female)

With Autoandrophilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Male)”

{Quotations are from the proposed DSM-V, http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevision/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=189#, as of May 30, 2011.}

So what is wrong with this proposal? It appears to define a condition which is “abnormal,” and which causes serious problems for the person who is experience it. Surely this is simply meant as a tool that would allow clinicians to properly identify and treat persons who are having sufficient psychological and emotional problems that they have come to seek professional help. Well, maybe so, but it is ill-conceived at the least.

I don't personally know of anyone who slips into the clothing of “the opposite sex” just to get sexually aroused, but I have learned that for many trans folks, their gender dysphoria expressed itself in just this way at some point in their lives. In other words, for some people, this form of “perversion” is one of the early stages in a development that may lead to a person's eventually permanently changing their gender through surgery, hormonal treatments, cosmetic treatments, and by modifying personal behavior. For many such folks, this form of sexual expression, or indulgence, does cause disabling “stress and impairment.” Such stress typically is due to feelings of guilt, a sense of moral depravity, interference with one's relationships with a spouse or lover, and the intense fear of being “discovered” and shamed in the eyes of family, friends or the public.

The authors of this proposed revision want to specify whether such behaviors are accompanied with Fetishism, Autogynephilia, or Autoandrophilia. Sexual fetishism is something that most people understand at least a little bit. My thoughts here are, if it is truly fetishistic behavior that is causing a problem—that is an intense obsession with “fabrics, materials, or garments,” there is already a diagnosis and a range of traditional treatments available for dealing with individuals who are obsessive or generally fetishistic (e.g. U 01 Fetishistic Disorder, http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=63). Why single out the cross-dressers (transvestites) as having some specially “paraphilic” form of pathology? That sounds to me like a moral judgement, not a medical diagnosis.

Autogynephilia is a word made up by one of the principal authors of this revised “Tranvestic Disorder” diagnosis. It is a term and a concept that has been nearly unanimously rejected by trans people themselves, and by a large component of mental health specialists who work with trans people. The word is defined as referring to a male-bodied person who is “Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Female.” Let's think about this. If one is transgendered/gender dysphoric, then by definition one's inner sense of who they are as a person is in conflict with the objective image of who they are as a body. In other words, while they have a man's body, they feel as though they are actually a woman, or vice versa.

Is it not completely “normal” that one's sexual fantasies or arousal might include mental images of one actually having sexual activities? And if one feels female, wouldn't it be “normal” to feel like such sexual activity included the typical use and stimulation of one's own female genitals, even if said genitals only exist in one's imagination? Essentially, “Autogynephilia” implies that it is perverse (paraphilic) for a male to fantasize making love to someone as a woman with a vagina and breasts.

Autoandrophilia is an even more newly coined word. Here the paraphilia comes about when a female-bodied person is aroused by thoughts or images of themselves as a male. This one seems to have been made up just so the DSM-V can stay politically correct by assuring all that the APA recognizes that female-bodied persons can also be “perverse” by imagining themselves with penises and flat chests.

Gender Dysphoria

One of the true high points of the proposed revisions to DSM comes in the treatment of Gender Dysphoria (one's feeling like they are “in the wrong body,” in somewhat simplified terms) and Gender Identity Disorder. The latter term, which tended to render gender dysphoria as a pathology needing to be “fixed,” has been replaced by more neutral terminology in the new DSM. In other words, the APA recognizes that it is not necessarily a mental illness to feel like you are “the wrong sex.”

So, if the APA recognizes that Gender Dysphoria is not necessarily pathological, then where is the logic that leads to arousal by cross-dressing as a pathology? If a patient/client presents for clinical help because they are seriously distressed about their sexuality, is it more useful to diagnose them with a mental disease or to help them find and cope with the root causes of their distress. If the cause is, in fact gender dysphoria, then humane treatment for gender dysphoria is called for.

If the cause of distress is in fact shame about varying from social norms or moral precepts, then the appropriate treatment seems to be one that deals with social and/or moral “dysphorias.” If a counselor is asked for help with someone's shame or guilt about an extra-marital affair, or about homosexuality, or about having some physical deformity, they know how to offer such help in a humane way without judging the character or morality of their client. If a person finds him- or herself depressed or anxious because of their “abnormal” sexual behavior, then clinicians know how to treat for anxiety or depression.

The great fear of many transgendered people, is that some clinicians will latch onto this new diagnosis of Transvestic Fetishism and try to “cure” people of the “sickness” of cross-dressing and/or gender dysphoria. It feels more like a morality judgement than a medical diagnosis. It feels more like a desperate attempt to require individuals to adhere to cultural norms of gender behavior or be treated as outcasts. It feels, to me, like the driving forces of conformity behind the Salem witchcraft trials, which ruthlessly persecuted women who did not act like “proper ladies.”

The possibilities for abuse of this diagnosis are just too great. No matter how we clean up the language, this diagnosis labels a person who becomes sexually aroused while cross dressing as a pervert. What's more, the diagnostic criteria include a specification for “in remission.“ This suggests that, should a person suffering from problems due to sexual cross dressing loses such urges or, perhaps more likely, goes on to recognize their own gender dysphoria and undergo gender transition, they could potentially remain classified as a “pervert.” In fact, such as diagnostic label may eventually inhibit their receiving proper treatments for dysphoria, including hormonal or surgical treatments.

What can be done?

The American Psychiatric Association team charged with producing DSM-V will be accepting public comments on their proposed revisions until June 15^th. That's just two weeks away. If you are a transperson or have a friend or family member who is transgendered, please go to the DSM comment site at:

http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevision/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=189#

Register to leave comments and then leave a comment stating your position. If you have friends or colleagues who are in the medical and mental health fields, please ask them to do the same. We need to enter the 21^st century fully and leave, once and for all, the epoch in which norms of gender behavior and harmless sexual activities are enforced by brute force, violence, shame and medical stigmatization.

The proposed diagnosis of Transvestic Fetishism is redundant, so far as the treatment of fetishistic behaviors and gender dysphoria are concerned, and it is potentially harmful and simply inappropriate for the treatment of guilt, shame, depression, or anxieties created by a person's divergence from social, cultural, or moral norms of sexual behavior.

"The Queens are Bashing the Cops:" Forty Years Later

2009-06-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

“The Queens are Bashing the Cops:” Forty Years Later

by Dan Mouer

It was mid-1969 and I was making a living selling my writing and photography to the “underground” and alternative press in New York City. I was working on a story about Norman Mailer's bid to win the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York. For me that was an easy gig, because it basically meant hanging out at one of my favorite West Village watering holes, The Lion's Head.

My full-time job was Managing Editor of an innovative tabloid called The New York Review of Sex and Politics. Sam Edwards was the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. Sam had created the NYRS&P out of the demise of his former rag, The New York Free Press. The “Freep” had pissed off the City's Finest—understandably. On the back cover of each weekly issue, Sam and the gang had featured a virtual rogues' gallery of photographs of New York's undercover narcotics agents. It was 1969, after all, and the pursuers of youthful alternative lifestyles often perceived the great struggle between good and evil to be most manifest in the struggle of “heads” versus “pigs.” For the “heads,” busting the narcs was a blow for freedom. I'm quite certain that the “pigs” saw the Free Press as endangering the lives of officers.

It happened this way: quite suddenly the Free Press had begun to disappear from newsstands throughout the city. The following week our distributors were told that most of the newsstands would not accept the paper at all. A few confessed that they had been bullied into that decision by police officers who threatened to fund ways to take away individual stand owners' business licenses. These guys were not willing to lose their livelihoods for the potheads' cultural revolution! Without distribution outlets, the Free Press died and, two or three weeks later a new underground rag with a flashy and classy look and feel appeared in its place on the city's newsstands. It was the New York Review of Sex & Politics.

I came to the NYRS&P in the moment of its birth. My wife had been working as the “Freep's” secretary, and when Sam said he wanted some new talent working on the new paper, she suggested I go talk to him. I was hired on the spot with the provision that we all worked under at the time: actually getting paid would depend entirely on how many papers we could sell. Well, as it happens, having “Sex” in the title of the new rag helped to sell a lot of papers, so not only did we get paid our salaries, but the paper could afford much classier production values than had been previously seen in the underground press. Good paper, lots of color, and top-notch talent became the hallmarks of NYRS&P.

I had gotten a lot of essays and articles into print during the previous year, not only in the underground press, but also in several national magazines; although these were generally second-string men's magazines like Rogue and Cavalier. In fact, had referred to me as “one of the most sought-after writers in the underground.” Well, that was a bit fanciful, but I had become “established” in the anti-establishment. I had been a photographer since childhood, and I had served as my high school newspaper's official “man with a camera.” In New York I was often seen running around with one of my fast-working little Leica M3s or, conversely, a big old Mamiyaflex.

As an aspiring 23-year-old writer with a mind to elevate my career above the limited fortunes of the underground, I had begun hanging out with other, more established writers. One of my favorite spots was The Lion's Head on Christopher Street in the Village. The bar was near the offices of The Village Voice, New York's old-line liberal weekly. As such, The Lion's Head was haunted by some of the top leftist writers in the city. One could always hope to find a way to strike up a conversation with Nat Hentoff, Pete Hamill, Norman Mailer or other writers who watered there frequently. Always looking for, or cooking up, a story, I had used my visits to the Lion's Head not just as opportunities to enhance my journalistic karma, but to capture images of some of “the greats” with spilled scotch on their starched collars. After all, for those of us in the underground press, the Voice had come to represent backward and uptight points of view. Among other things, this paper, the first of New York's “alternative” weeklies, was hardly friendly to New York's gay community. This was ironic as Christopher Street was clearly the Main Street of the city's queer world at the time.

On the night of June 27th I was drinking scotch at a table waiting to see my friend and NYRS&P colleague, Ray Schultz. While I thought of myself as a “writer,” Ray had inherited the “journalist” gene. He was a sharp investigator and interviewer, and he was our ace political reporter. Sam had assigned Ray the job of the year, to follow the rapidly unfolding story of the mayoral candidacy of Norman Mailer and that of his running made for City Council President, Jimmy Breslin. We had long ago given Ray the nickname “The Jimmy Breslin of the Underground,” a title he clearly identified with. I was also hoping--even expecting—to see both Mailer and Breslin at the bar that night.

As it happened I don't think Ray or the quarry of our aspiring journalistic dynamic duo showed up. I do know that I hung out way too late and had at least one too many glasses of scotch. I had shot up all but a couple frames of my 12-shot roll of film making what would surely be blurry and grainy dimly lighted images for my growing story on The Lion's Head and its literary tipplers. Just as I was about to call it a night and head home to my apartment in downtown Brooklyn someone came into the bar and shouted out “The queens are bashing the cops!”

Up the street near Sheridan Square stood the Stonewall Inn, one of the Village's gay bars...except, technically, there was no such thing as a “gay bar.” Homosexuality was illegal and public display of sexual or gender variance was grounds for arrest. It was completely “normal” for police to roust customers in gay bars and to harass the bar owners with threats of losing their licenses or being fined with sanitation violations and the like. I knew where the Stonewall was so I headed in that direction with my camera. It wasn't hard to find the place because it was quickly turning into a street circus scene full of flashing police car lights and angry, taunting customers defying orders to disperse.

I couldn't really figure out what was going on, but apparently, I was told, the Stonewall's customers got angry at some routine police harassment and decided spontaneously to strike back. They had barricaded some of the officers inside the bar and were now throwing beer cans and taunts at newly arriving police cars. There were drag “girls” doing a chorus line dance right in front of a police car with offers inside with windows tightly shut. I quickly shot my last couple frames of film and moved on towards the subway station to head home.

It was simply ironic. Now the harassers were the harassees. It was a moment of poetic justice. An interesting asterisk to place alongside the perennial history of gay persecution. Or that's how it seemed to me. I really didn't expect it to be seen as a very big deal. But I was wrong. The press was full of stories about the “riot” at the Stonewall, and that, in turn, ignited the spark of rebellion throughout New York's gay and lesbian community. For the next two nights gays and their supporters converged on Sheridan Square to demonstrate forcibly for gay rights.

Of course, the NYRS&P had to carry the story! Now, between Norman Mailer's run for the Mayor's office and the Stonewall demonstrations we had all we needed to fill our pages with newsworthy sex and politics! And the politics of sex! The weekend-long Stonewall riot clearly led to an escalation of the gay liberation movement in New York. Over the next year I would cover the city's first “Gay Power” parade, and I would find myself working a new gig with pioneering gay activist Jack Nichols and his partner Lige Clarke in our mutual offices at Milky Way Productions, publishers of Screw, The Sex Review and Gay magazine.

The emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement was the beginning of a new awareness for me personally. It was everyday interaction with gay activists as fellow counter-culture denizens that led to my growing acceptance of my own bisexuality. Now, 40 years later, we have a president who has promised to work for full rights for LGBT people and I find myself happily married to a transman. It wasn't all because of Stonewall, of course, but it certainly makes what was simply an interesting footnote in my personal history worthy of landmark status in the history of American civil rights.

Manhood, part one: The Killing Thing

2009-05-10T17:47:00.000-07:00

Post removed by the author in preparation for publication.

Pink or Blue? A War Veteran Learns to Knit

2009-03-04T17:42:00.000-08:00

My mother taught me to knit. Mind you, I didn’t learn how to knit from my mother, but she taught me nonetheless. She also taught me to sew. I don’t know why. My brothers weren’t taught these things, as far as I know. I don’t even think my sisters were. Maybe I was the only one who seemed interested. Maybe I just tended to hang around Mother too much…

I think I was probably about 8 or 9 or 10 when she taught me to knit, but I didn’t actually begin learning how to knit until I was 58. I enrolled in knitting classes at a local knitting shop. Richmond, my hometown, has at least five knitting shops. For reasons I can’t fathom, I chose to take lessons at the oldest, best established store in town: the “West End” shop, whose habitués are mothers of children enrolled in the city’s exclusive local private academies. They are the wives of lawyers and doctors and politicians—no that’s not quite right. They are the wives of judges, chief surgeons, and governors of the Commonwealth. I drive to my lessons in my ratty little ’72 Beetle. They drive in humongous Lincoln Town Cars, 700-series Beamers, and Range Rovers.

There are other places to learn knitting and to buy yarn. There’s the store with all the high-fashioned glitzy yarns and the workshops taught by international knitting stars. There’s the newer shop full of hip, high-end luxury fibers, all natural of course, down in what passes for Richmond’s version of Greenwich Village. Then there’s that newer shop with the laid-back, crazy, funny women who smoke too much and, I wager, keep bottles of whiskey or brandy tucked away with their stashes. They are fun-loving yarn-addicts, pure and simple. But, for reasons still unclear to me, I wound up in the high-brow shop with the tennis-club and equestrienne set. Go figure.

Let’s make one thing very clear. I am the only man taking these lessons. I continually hear rumors of other men who knit, but, so far, they are just rumors. “Lots of men knit these days,” says one of the shop’s owners. “But Dan’s the only straight guy, isn’t he?” Straight guy? But I knit! Some would say I can’t be straight by definition.

I point out to all who will listen that men do the knitting in Peru, that men were traditionally knitters at various times in “The Old World,” and that male soldiers in World War I routinely knitted their own socks! I get quiet, knowing smiles. No sense trying to tell anybody anywhere anything about gender. It is, after all, completely “natural,” and everyone knows all about it practically from the day they’re born.

I am working a cable row in the front on my alpaca sweater. I hope to complete it by the time it’s cold enough to wear an alpaca sweater. The “ladies” of the shop love to talk about the multi-colored socks I knit myself last year. “He even wears them,” one hastens to add. While I quietly knit away, my teacher, the shop ladies, and the other students all talk about babies. Always. Someone at the table is always knitting a baby sweater, or baby booties, or baby blanket, or a baby hat. Sometimes these items are being knit from a pure-white soft cotton or washable wool. More often, they are either pink or blue.

The talk invariably turns to when “the baby” is due, and whether the mother or grandmother in question yet knows “what it is.” That means, in case you didn’t get it, whether the fetus in question is on its way to becoming male or female. Even in this day of sonograms, lots of people don’t know. The parents-to-be all know, but they’re not saying. So even the expectant mothers are not revealing the big secret: they knit in white, or they make one item blue and one pink… “just in case.”

“Why don’t you make something green? Or purple?” I ask, playing the devil’s role, of course. Nobody bothers to answer. It can’t possibly be a serious question. I don’t follow up, because I’ve tried dozens of times. That conversation just doesn’t go anywhere, and, anyway, I’ve just dropped two stitches in the middle of a “cable back,” and that demands all my attention.

When the conversation isn’t about babies, which is rare, it’s about the older children: the boys in St. Benedict’s and the girls in St.Catherine’s. They don’t talk about the students’ grades or their sports accomplishments. Instead they discuss their summer art programs in Florence, and their intensive language programs in Moscow, and their pending appointments as Congressional pages. But the real concern is not for this ascending generation, but for the babies, for what is being knit for them, and “what they are.”

***

My cousin recently needed someone to accompany her to the hospital for a surgical procedure. I knew I’d be stuck in the waiting room for three or four hours, so, naturally, I took my knitting. As time passed, other patients and their drivers/helpers/loved ones arrived. And every so often one would have a bag of knitting. Each of these knitters gravitated to my side of the room, made friendly inquiries about what I was making, gave their compliments, then took up an adjacent seat. After a couple hours, we had a phalanx of knitters, all sitting along one wall of the waiting room, chatting away merrily.

Knitters don’t just knit when they get together. We shared knitting stories. We shared knitting tools. We commented on color combinations and yarn choices. All the other knitters were women, of course. One of them noted my wedding ring and asked me if my wife were also a knitter. Of course I (and all the other women) took her question to really mean, “So, are you married or available?”

And so I comfortably lounged away a few hours, surrounded by women of all ages, knitting, knitting, knitting. Were I to suddenly find myself single, it would never dawn on me to go seeking company in a bar, when I could find myself a corner in any public space—say, a Starbucks Café—open my knitting bag, and soon have plenty of company.

Of course, not everyone is happy to see a man knitting in public. There is clearly something odd, suspicious, maybe even frightening about such a scene. I remember one time taking my knitting to the clinic at the VA hospital. It always takes my doctor way more time than seems reasonable to see me on appointment day. No sense complaining, though. I might as well just plan on getting some knitting done. And so I do.

On the day in question, I noted that my knitting had just the opposite effect as what I had experienced the day of my cousin’s surgery. I soon found I was sitting surrounded by empty chairs. Other patients were giving me a rather wide berth. But then, none of the other patients was also knitting. You see, most of the other patients were men: men my age or older. Men wearing their veteran’s hats, their combat colors, their manly accomplishments on their proverbial sleeves. These guys don’t knit. Or, if they do, they damn sure don’t do it in public! I’m the odd man out. I’m also a war veteran, and I’m wearing my colors, too. My combat engineer’s hat is set off nicely by the colorful stripes in my latest silky-soft scarf.

Finally, into the waiting room came a couple. They were much younger than I. Both were wearing some indications that they were in or had served in the military. I later learned they had both served in Iraq. She carried a knitting bag. After registering at the desk, she walked directly over to me, asked about my project, asked if she could join me, plopped down beside me and pulled out her work. Her partner—her husband, I soon learned—stood across the room glaring at me. He stood! He couldn’t even bring himself to sit. My knitting companion kept gesturing to her hubbie to come join us, but he insistently stood and glowered.

After a few minutes, a nurse appeared and called the wife’s name, then took her back into the clinic to test her vital signs, etc. The man slowly approached me. I stopped knitting, met his eyes, and held my hands with the long #3 needles angled just enough to suggest that they could serve as defensive weapons if need be. (For some reason, I tend to knit a lot of things with sporting weight yarns and small needles. For once I wished I had been working on a bulky Icelandic sweater. I would have been holding # 13s instead of # 3s!)

He stared into my soul and, I suppose, something he found there told him I was not really a threat to his marriage or his masculinity or anything else. Or perhaps he decided I was too dangerous, or too deranged, to tangle with. He grabbed a hot rod magazine off the rack nearby and walked back across the room to sit by himself.

What would happen to our planet if, all of a sudden, infant girls were swaddled in baby blue blankets? And what disastrous consequences could ensue if baby boys came bedecked with little pink pom-pom hats? What in the world can the world possibly find frightening about a 6’2” 200-pound man with a bag full of wool and knitting needles? What in Heaven’s name leads some people to a murderous rage at the very thought of a man in a dress and panty hose?

A former high school friend is a highly accomplished and respected poet. He’s 60 years old and holds a professorship at an major New England University. He has published numerous books and won many awards. Lately he has been writing to some of us, his former classmates, online, pouring out his heart full of hurt and his still-hot fury about how he was treated by the bullies in high school nearly a half-century ago. I, myself, harbored a fantasy of taking a baseball bat to one punk’s head for more than 30 years for beating me up and calling me a sissy. A recent study suggested that the rash of violent school shootings we have experienced in this country over the past few years were almost all perpetrated by boys who had been bullied and hounded and terrorized for not meeting some arbitrary norms of masculinity. In our culture we seem to think that violation of gender codes is an egregious offense upon society, punishable by torture and death.

It starts, innocently enough, by choosing to knit pink or blue. It proceeds from there by making girls who would rather have a Jedi’s light saber play with Barbie Dolls. And if the gender variance hasn’t been shamed out of our children by the time they reach high school, we find it acceptable to let society’s goons try to beat it out of them. Besides school-yard bullies, we have skinheads, good ol’ boys, queer-rollers, tranny-bashers, and many other sorts of “concerned citizens” waiting to finish the job. Call me Pollyanna, but I think we could end this sort of violence by knitting the rainbow for babies without first stopping to inspect their plumbing.