This Is How It Always Is(27)

“We’ll have to wait and see.” Mr. Tongo shrugged but not unhappily. “Exciting! But wherever it goes from here, the best thing about gender dysphoria is this. Ready? Claude’s not sick! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Yes, but—”

“We don’t have to worry yet about who he’ll be when he grows up. He’s only five! But since he’s only five, he can’t fight the entire weight of his culture alone. You know who has to do that?”

“Who?” Penn asked, though he knew.

“You must pave his way in his world. And that’s very hard, I’m afraid.”

“It’s not hard,” said Penn. “It’s parenting.”

“Or it is hard,” Rosie clarified. “But so is all parenting.”

“At which you’re more experienced than most”—they felt worse than when they arrived, but Mr. Tongo seemed overjoyed—“so you’re perfect for the job. Let’s start with journaling. Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”

*

Penn did not imagine it was going to be fun. But of the directives with which one left a child’s doctor’s appointment, journaling was more palatable—and more firmly in his skill set—than most. Every day, they were to write down Claude’s boy behaviors and his girl behaviors. That’s all they had to do for now, Mr. Tongo promised. Step one was gather information. Step one was waiting and seeing but with an emphasis on the seeing. Since in this case, seeing looked a lot like writing and waiting looked a lot like parenting, gender journaling was something Penn felt equipped to do.

But he was wrong. When Claude came down to breakfast that Saturday in a dress made from a belted nightgown of Rosie’s, Penn understood that this went in the girl column. When he spent the hour following breakfast driving trains around the track in the opposite direction Rigel and Orion were driving trains around the track so that they crashed into each other and both trains exploded off the track and all three children collapsed in giggles then did it again, he understood that this was meant for the boy column. But then they moved on to LEGOs. Then Rigel and Orion’s friend—girl friend—Frieda came over wearing jeans and a T-shirt to help crash trains for an hour. Penn was not prepared to say that LEGOs were male or female. Penn was not prepared to say that playing with a friend was male or female. Penn was gratified to see a little girl in pants crashing trains whom no one, so far as he knew, was accusing of gender dysphoria. Penn made a third column …

Other

Both

Unsure

Unclear

Unfair

None of Your Fucking Business

Ways in Which This Exercise Is Asinine

… before he finally landed on:

Maybe.

Maybe what, he could not say. But that was the beauty of it.

After dinner, after storytime and bedtime, Rosie and Penn opened a bottle of wine and compared lists. Penn had kept his only halfheartedly. The list of maybes was long. The list of maybes was nearly everything. Rosie’s list was more revealing, broken into two columns, not three, and seeing much of what Penn missed. Nearly everything fell into her girl column. While Rigel and Orion built LEGO cars and LEGO trucks and used LEGO Batman to smash LEGO police stations, Claude built LEGO vacation homes and pony ranches and populated them with LEGO mamas and babies. While Rigel and Orion set the trains back up for their recurring race toward inevitable doom, Claude tended to the victims.

“I don’t understand your list,” said Penn.

“I understand yours,” said Rosie.

“What does that mean?”

“Same thing. You don’t understand my list because you don’t see how someone like me could have made it.”

“That’s true.”

“I know.”

“You’re a scientist, Rosie. Women aren’t scientists. So that goes in the boy column. You’re a doctor—an ER doctor, not a girly one like pediatrician or gynecology. So that goes in the boy column too. Your so-called husband is a writer, an artist, and not the kind who makes money. The other kind. He cooks dinner—”

“I cook dinner some nights.”

“Not that well. He folds laundry—”

“And puts it away.”

“And puts it away. He does homework duty. He does bedtime duty.”

“He is very girly,” Rosie agreed, kissing his neck.

“It’s very boy-column to be married to such a girly fellow as this.”

“It’s very girl-column to use the term ‘fellow.’”

“It’s very boy-column even to be attracted to such a girly fellow as this.”

“Who says I’m attracted to him?” Rosie asked, sucking his earlobe.

“You initiate sex”—Penn was unbuttoning her shirt—“which is hardly ladylike.”

“Who said anything about sex?”

“Though these,” Penn admitted, undoing her bra, “make a pretty compelling case for your feminine nature.”

“They are persuasive,” Rosie agreed.

“You’re willing—nay, eager—to have sex on the sofa while your kids are upstairs sleeping. A more canonically feminine mother would never risk their walking in on us and imperil her children’s emotional equilibrium in this way.”