Horticulture of English Ivy
[A note to trans readers of this newsletter: this particular issue of hyperfocus is, eventually, about the onslaught of horrific legislature that’s lately been directed at trans kids. If you’d rather, say, jump into a swimming pool filled with mayonnaise and wasps than read anything more about that, I completely understand, and please feel free to skip this one in favor of doing something that brings you joy, or screaming into a paper bag, or whatever the hell else you want.]
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I was a dramatic child.
This isn’t, strictly speaking, a particularly fair description; what I actually was as a child was bright, talkative, and possessed of the kind of ADHD that wouldn’t be diagnosed until I reached adulthood, but that would, in retrospect, would make my childhood make a lot more sense. This combination of traits was responsible for comments like “Keeps the other children awake during naptime,” on my absurd little child report cards, and, presumably, for a lot of frustration from the adults in my life who wanted but one single moment of peace. It wasn’t quite dramatics, because “dramatic” implies the intention to create drama; I was Just Like That, whether I wanted to be (which I didn’t) or not.
As I was neither athletic nor capable of remembering to practice an instrument, there was nothing to do with me except enroll me in an after-school theater program. I burned off excess energy in the exciting role of “A Bum,” in a pint-sized production of Oliver!, waving around a tankard full of imaginary beer and wearing a child’s version of the sort of thrift-store blazer I’d end up rediscovering in the early days of my transition. I kept myself busy memorizing the songs a chorus member needed to know in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, our production of which I found so forgettable that I retained only one line from one song, and that one line was, itself, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” And, shortly after hitting a 10-year-old growth spurt and reaching the lofty height of 5’1”, I took a turn as a munchkin in The Wizard Of Oz and then simply never grew again, which I still feel, in my heart, may have been some sort of curse at work.
The person in charge of the program at the time was a petty tyrant of a woman I will call Ms. G. In researching this piece I discovered she is not longer involved in theater at all, but instead runs a small interior design business that doesn’t require her to work with children; this is for the best. Ms. G had talent when it came to casting, choreography, set dressing, and blocking, but she was not so good at the whole, “Be kind to the small humans,” thing. She was well known amongst the regular members of this program as volatile, someone who would single out and scream at even the youngest of children, though the bigger kids did their best to protect the smaller ones from the more severe verbal blows.
I did not run afoul of her in Oliver!, perhaps due to my wild-eyed overcommitment to quaffing my fake ale, and I did not run afoul of her in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, probably because I found the whole production so boring that I was basically asleep whenever the company met. But in the early rehearsals for The Wizard Of Oz, she gathered all of us would-be munchkins — thirty-some irrepressible little children — and lined us all up on tier risers as the rest of the cast lounged in the theater seats. She had us sing the iconic, “We’re Off To See The Wizard,” and frowned when we finished. She had us repeat the middle bit — you know, the “Because, because, because, because, becauuuuse, because of the wonderful things he does,” part — and frowned more deeply. Then she had just me sing that part.
“Ah,” she said, pointing at me, “there’s the problem. You: don’t sing! You just mouth it.” The whole room laughed, and I did what kids who are embarrassed by adults usually do — I took the note, folded myself up around it, and tried to pretend it didn’t bother me.
But, of course, it bothered me enormously; as a result of this incident I did not sing in front of other people for a very long time. I was not content to simply mouth it through “We’re Off To See The Wizard” and then go back to business as usual — no, I was lip-syncing through every elementary school concert, every High Holy Day, every catchy song on the radio. Even when I was listening to music alone, and someone else was just somewhere in the same building, I made sure to keep my voice to myself. I got through my Bar Mitzvah at 13, which kind of necessitates chanting a bunch of Hebrew in front of a live audience, by telling myself that chanting and singing weren’t the same; I got through 8th grade chorus, where my teacher prided himself on spotting children who weren’t singing, by carefully sitting next to the loudest person in the classroom every single day. In high school I didn’t dare join in when my friends were enjoying a popular song. In college, I appointed myself designated driver at any karaoke night, and then insisted I simply wasn’t drunk enough to participate in the singing, so sad, maybe next time. To this day, I can only sometimes bring myself to sing in the car in front of my own husband.
I didn’t know I was trans as a kid — I didn’t even really know trans people existed — and so I can’t speak to the experience of being a knowingly trans child. But I can speak to the experience of being emotionally wounded as a kid and then carrying that wound around with me into adulthood, because of course I can, because we all can. Whatever our experience has been, we were all children once. Everyone deals with the hurts of their early life differently — some people even pretend they’ve never felt pain, or that it’s okay to displace their pain by putting it on other people — but I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t, at some point in their childhood, experience something that left a significant mark.
Whether it’s the halls of an elementary school or the stakes on an emotional exchange, everything seems bigger when you are small. Things that an adult could brush off and set aside can crush a child, someone by definition too young to have built the suite of haphazard coping skills that carry most of us through our fully grown lives. If you want to talk about irreversible damage to children, about scarring that will follow someone into adulthood — that shit is emotional more than it’s not. Just look at your own childhood trauma if you don’t believe me; most of the time, it’s the emotional pain that gets us. Even when something objectively horrible happens, something that has significant physical consequences beyond its emotional impact, the bulk of working through that experience is typically grappling with what it makes us feel. That’s doubly true for kids, who are always listening and always learning, and who pick up more than adults give them credit for.
I want to be clear at this point that I did not write this essay to try to compare my ridiculous little singing story to what trans kids are experiencing right now. In fact, the reason I chose that particular story is because it so utterly does not compare; I chose it to illustrate that even something small, a single moment of embarrassment facilitated by one non-family, known-to-me-as-volatile adult, had a lasting, outsized impact on me. I am quite sure that Ms. G did not intend to stop me from singing for the better part of the next two decades. She just wanted to stop hearing the off-note in the song, and instead of teaching me to sing it right, she shut me down, either not considering or caring about the consequences. There was no malice aforethought there, but it changed me anyway, because that’s how it works sometimes, with children. That’s the reason we, as adults, are supposed to be careful with them.
Trans kids are watching their very existence get litigated in the public sphere right now. I, a trans adult, feel like I’ve been steamrolled flat as I check the news each day; how much bigger does that steamroller feel to these children? In Arkansas, they’ve banned gender-affirming healthcare for kids; on Wednesday the Florida House passed a horrific bill that will not only ban trans kids from sports if passed into law, but also subject kids suspected by others of being trans to genital examination, an outcome so utterly disgusting and dangerous for everyone involved that I was half afraid my fingers might burst into flames as I typed it. There are attempts to legislate against trans children happening all across the United States. Even if you set aside the intended (and horrifying) outcomes of the various proposed laws — how many kids have, in watching this unfold, already taken the note that because they’re trans they’re unacceptable, tragically confused, harming their own parents/families, or doomed to a life of pain and shame? How many kids have folded themselves up around the idea they that they shouldn’t exist?
There are two significant things that I think most adults forget when they talk about children. The first is how it felt to be a child, which is an act of mental gymnastics I almost admire — how could anyone forget? But people do, and that’s part of why so many adults act as though children are delicate hot house plants that have to be carefully pruned and trimmed into an acceptable shape if they are to have any hope of growing at all, when in fact what children are like is English ivy. They’re here, they’re growing rapidly and single-mindedly in whatever direction they like (sometimes several at once), and while you can do you best to try to direct them, hedge them in or hold them back, ultimately they will defeat you in the quest to be who they are unless you more or less destroy them entirely. Children don’t feel, inside of their heads, like they’re just little babies who don’t know anything; they feel like they’re people, because that’s what they are. Small people with stuff to learn, sure, but people all the same. And this is a big part of why it’s so important to be gentle with kids, to avoid emotionally terrorizing them — they’re meeting the world at face value, feeling like fully grown souls, while their brains are still frantically accumulating information and drawing conclusions about the world. Even if you wanted to (which you shouldn’t), there really isn’t much you can do to change the essentials of who a child is — people in general, after all, pretty much are who they are — and, as illustrated in the story above, it’s easy enough to accidentally do or say something that you think nothing of, but which a kid holds onto forever. But I have to say I think it’s fairly simple, to stretch the ivy metaphor absolutely as far as it will go, to avoid actively ripping a child’s roots off the wall. All you really have to do is let the goddamn kid grow.
And that brings me to the other thing people always seem to forget about children: they grow up to be adults! Pretty quickly, too! Every time one of these eras in human history comes up — every accursed decade where there’s some moral panic and people begin to gasp, “Think of the children!” — we talk about “the children” as though they are some large grouping of permanent nine year olds, forever offering a gap-toothed smile on the sandlot of life. But this is not the case! With every passing day time marches forward, unceasing in the face of any panic, relenting to nothing and no one. In ten years, an eight year old trans girl who today just wants to play sports with her friends will be eighteen; in five years, a sixteen year old trans boy whose healthcare is being taken away right now will be twenty one (this, of course, assuming they survive that long in a world so bent on hating them, and teaching them to hate themselves). The adults those trans kids become will still be trans, because being trans is not actually the kind of thing that you can change by being sufficiently cruel to someone, or by denying them enough basic human rights. They’ll just be trans with a lot more trauma to work through, a lot more internalized guilt and pain churning around inside of them, a lot more relationships where their trust has been damaged or totally broken, a lot more fear and shame about living as themselves, than they would have had to deal with otherwise.
Of course we should continue to fight horrible transphobic legislations with absolutely everything we have; that should go without saying, but I’m saying it anyway just in case. But I encourage you, especially if you are cis, to try to look at this with a wide view lens. What is happening right now is an attempt to legislate trans people out of public life, to make things so uncomfortable for us that we hide ourselves away. It’s targeted at children because they are vulnerable, without the tools and resources to protect themselves, and we are already past the point of total harm prevention; significant damage has already been done. But this attempt to remove us from the world by way of cruel laws codifying our discomfort… the only way that will actually WORK is if the entire cis community gets swept along in the tide, thinking “Well, what can we do?” as trans people watch our access to existing in the world as ourselves get stripped away.
You want to help these kids? Stop wringing your hands and fight for them. Fight the legislation; fight the wave of aggressively transphobic thought being pushed through seemingly every media channel. And fight, starting right now, to make space for trans kids, and for the trans adults they will be in just a few short years. Fight to make sure there is a place for them. If you don’t know how to do that latter part, I can tell you that it starts with asking yourself some questions. Questions like: do you work at a business that could be made explicitly trans-friendly with something as simple as a sticker in the window, or a statement on a website, or adding a sentence like “We welcome and encourage trans and nonbinary applicants,” to your job postings? Do you have friends or family members whose transphobic assumptions you could challenge? Do your local libraries and bookstores carry any trans lit, especially trans lit that might be helpful for trans kids with parents who don’t support them? If they don’t, what if you requested some? Are there local or national organizations you could support that help trans people (let me answer that one for you: yes)? Are there individual trans people you could support (also yes)? Could you be doing some research into trans life and on issues that affect us, making an effort to engage with content created by trans people, so that you can be an informed voice speaking up in the many rooms we aren’t invited to step inside? Are you in a position to hire some trans people, always but especially in the context of jobs that involve… actually talking about trans issues? The list goes on and on, but for convenience all these questions boil down to the same one, which is: what are you or could you be doing, right now, to make your own little patch of this world safe for trans people?
Here’s the last thing I’ll say — the acts of kindness and affirmation we offer to children (and, quite frankly, to anyone) can also have a larger impact than we ever imagined. I know it’s easy to feel helpless in situations like this, situations where the cruelty is the point, but you are not helpless! You still have the ability to make a difference, to shape your corner of the world, to change minds, to create space, to be kind. The consequences of what’s happening here are hideous and far-reaching, spilling out beyond what any of us can imagine, but even the most formative wounds can heal — scar, but heal — with enough care. That’s why we, as adults, bear here the obligation that all adults have to all children, the same one that far too many of us fail to live up to: to build with our choices and actions a future where healing is possible.