Ellie and I just had our second ultrasound and discovered our five-month-old womb-farer is a girl, whom we shall call Sonya Magdalena Rose. Interestingly, young Sonya has already produced something on the order of 7,000,000 oocytes, or basic egg cells—which means that when Ella was the age that Sonya is now, she was already harboring the egg that would become one half of her eventual daughter. If Sonya were a boy in the hidden hamlet of Las Salinas, she might look exactly the same as she does now. But she'd be clandestinely producing testosterone instead of oocytes, because deep down, she wouldn't be the same. Sometimes Nature gets the wires crossed and the outside doesn't seem to match—but that doesn't mean the inside doesn't matter.
I hope Maggie Rose does not suffer from gender confusion. I hope she's not bipolar, or deaf, or left-handed. (Kidding, I'm a leftie.) If any of those difficulties should transpire, I will surely not love her any less, and I will spend my last breath striving and yearning to make her happy and whole. If she should happen to be gay or to feel that she ought to be a man, then we'll work together and try to figure things out. Even if she comes out absolutely "perfect," in this or that or anybody's sense of the term, we'll still have to piece together how the hell she's going to fit into a bent and fractured universe.
But here it is. . .
I won't be helping her if she suffers some fundamental confusion and I pretend she doesn't. If my girl decides that she's a wolf, she might need a bit of support in accepting the truth. If she decides that she is actually a boy, then it's a lot more complicated; but it's still a problem, and it can't be fixed by throwing out her skirts and playing along. There just isn't a way to say this without sounding dogmatic, but there's such a thing as things. There's such a thing as truth, and things being what they are.
Sonya's a girl. I'm extremely excited to have a little girl, and I will teach her all about sports and trucks and martial arts as well as music and cooking and whatever little girls might stereotypically enjoy, if she enjoys them. El and I both have jobs, and we both do the chores; I'm not that concerned about Leave It To Beaver gender roles. I am concerned that Sonya Rosa should have a sense of empathy and nurture, and feel happy and proud to be a woman. The other day, I felt my daughter kicking in my wife's stomach for the very first time, and I do have a bit of envy for Ellen's power to carry and grow an actual person inside of her. Mind you, I'm also glad that I have a stronger upper body and can more effectively punch anyone who might try and steal her purse while she's busy carting around embryonic people in her torso. But I have no illusions about my gender being superior to hers. It seems—
God
—just so, so obvious that we need each other, that each gender pines for the other, that we're both here because we're neither of us complete without the other. I don't wish to seem disingenuous, but I'm a white guy and can't become a Polynesian female merely by wanting to be. Nor could our Magda become a man, or an Egyptian, or a hippogriff, however desperately she might wish it.
I deeply believe that, for all the moral advantages the Greatest Generation may have had over us, we're far better off in that we tend to talk about our feelings. If my daughter felt that she was my son, I certainly wouldn't try to sweep it under the rug and forget about it, as our grandparents might have done. My God, I don't want my child, my love, to think she's unloved if she feels she ought to be a man. We'll do all we can to help her understand and cope with those feelings. But the fact is, the truth is, that she isn't. She's a woman, and if she feels otherwise then there's something wrong that needs to be talked about. No matter how tolerant, how understanding, I wish to be, I cannot help her by pretending that A is not A.
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