Gender-Nonconforming Children’s Classics

They’ve Been Under Your Nose the Whole Time

I wouldn’t put kindergartners in a circle and read them I am Jazz, less because I think doing so would harm them, but because the book’s dull. Its generically clinical language boringly fails to reproduce individual experience. Sample: “I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender. I was born this way!” and “At first my family was confused. They’d always thought of me as a boy.”) Here’s what some conservative moms think. I’m concerned about the lack of literary imagination in these books—with one exception: Julián is a Mermaid  at least believably presents a child’s language and fantasy about becoming a mermaid. We see Julian decorating his hair with flowers and greenery from one of his grandma’s potted plants, and draping himself with one of her window curtains.

But livelier gender-nonconforming children’s books have been around since my childhood. The following are literary, funny, artistically superior:

(1)  Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand, which has always attracted controversy. When it first appeared in 1936, Hitler and Francisco Franco resented it for being pacifist. The book just happened to appear three months after the start of the Spanish civil war. And Ferdinand the bull was deemed “a sissy” (Ernest Hemingway even wrote a parody) because while

All the other little bulls

He lived with would run and jump

And butt their heads together,

Ferdinand doesn’t join in. He prefers to “sit quietly” under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers. His mother asks why he doesn’t want to run and jump and butt his heads with the other little bulls but Ferdinand just goes back to the flowers, among which he is pictured, in Robert Lawson’s lovely illustrations, batting his ladylike eyelashes. Finally, his mom doesn’t insist, since she sees he’s happy. When the men come to pick the toughest bull to fight in the bullring in Madrid, Ferdinand heads for his cork tree to smell the flowers—but accidentally sits on a bumblebee, who stings him, and that’s when, for the very first time, Ferdinand runs and jumps like a maniac on a combo of speed and testosterone. They want him for the ring! By the time he gets there, he’s recovered from the sting, and, as usual, just sits there and smells the flowers. The Story of Ferdinand remains a far more sophisticated portrayal of a non-conformist, of the kid who doesn’t fit in, than any other recent book I’ve seen about trans or nonbinary children.

(2)  Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona. Forget the film. The book: Beezus, a potholder-sewing, mother’s helperish conventional girl, has a little sister, Ramona, four, who wears overalls, likes to show off scabs on her knee, loves steam shovels and demands to be read a picture book about one, Big Steve, also enjoying what was then known as strictly a boy’s book, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. 

Such classic children’s books as The Story of Ferdinand and Beezus and Ramona are just by the way. There are others, and any child questioning his or her gender would find inspiration among these and plenty of other far more delightful children’s books—like everything by Dr. Seuss: now there’s a writer who says you can be absolutely anything, even a Moth Watching Sneth, he writes in his unfairly banned book, Scrambled Eggs Super! Oh, the places we’ll all go if Random House returns to sanity and starts republishing the banned Dr. Seuss books.

Children do not need to be told they can choose their gender—they’re not idiots. If they feel like they don’t fit some norm, they’d like to figure that out on their own. Adults can offer help, but only when the child asks for it. Offering a load of terminology to five-year-olds—genderqueer, non-binary, genderfluid, cisgender, two spirit are among the many terms offered in the newer books—bewilders them and deprives them of their right to make up their own theories about sex. They prefer to do so. When my then two-year-old asked where he came from and I said he’d grown inside me and come out when he was big enough, he frowned. “Nah, you ate something and pooped me out.” He was happy with that theory; I did not contradict him and, gentle reader, he grew out of it.

Too many of today’s stories and books touting gender-nonconforming ideologies offer little about what it feels like to be a child—although the market’s flooded with picture books and novels for gender-nonconforming children. But these books tend not to explore the fanciful ideas or passionate inner torments that only a child could feel, for instance, Ramona pretending her doll is the witch Gretel shoves in the oven, and ruining Beezus’s birthday cake, and poor Beezus condemning herself for not always loving the irascible Ramona.

Would I read my two-to-five-year-old Being You: A First Conversation About Gender?  Mentioning that when a baby is born, grown-ups might say, “it’s a girl” if their [the ideology’s already there—not “her” but “their”] body has a vagina; likewise “it’s a boy” if “their” body has a penis,  a sample page adds: “Sometimes grown-ups aren’t sure, but they choose the words “girl” or “boy” anyway.

Oh, dear. Banal, boring, inaccurate, ungrammatical—one hardly knows where to begin. This isn’t a story about the experience of an actual child; it’s a lecture on possible sexual identities for beings who are on the cusp of discovering sex. If it has a special appeal to Americans, perhaps that’s because it’s a throwback to the pieties of the New England Primer.

Returning to Julián, the boy who loves mermaids: he is a feminine boy, perhaps a boy who will grow up gay, but this book, like I am Jazz, unfortunately presents the child as transgender, implying the need for Lupron and cross-sex hormones and the possibility of surgery, all of which cause anorgasmia, infertility, bone density problems. As Blair Weiss, a transgender man remarked, “A transgender four-year-old is like a vegan cat; we all know who’s making the lifestyle decisions.” (about 2:56 on video) No child can comprehend the irreversibility of hormonal and surgical treatments, as recent (and increasingly growing! At least 53.3K on a subreddit) detransitioners say. The horrors of Jazz Jenning’s infertile and anorgasmic young adult life are matched only by her mother’s threat to forcibly dilate her artificial vagina.: “You take this, and you put it in your vagina, or if not I will.” (about 7:20 on video).

All to say: if your child is gay, that’s nature taking its course. If your four-year-old son asks when the good fairy is going to come and change his penis into a vagina (Jazz Jenning’s mother’s recollection of what her child said) then you can ask him why he’d like that and consider whether to let him pretend to be a girl or to take another approach formerly recommended—to try to encourage traditionally masculine interests, “snips and snails and puppy-dog tails” as the old rhyme has it, and in either case to “watch and wait”—the standard approach until what seems five minutes ago.

I appreciate—and admire the bravery of—transwomen Jennifer Finney Boylan and Dr. Marcy Bowers, both of whom transitioned as adults and experienced relief and no regrets. Boylan is the trans writer who articulated, with humor, how it felt to know his mother meant well when she said, “someday you’ll wear shirts like daddy’s,” as she ironed them. He records his surprise: why would a girl want that? Bowers, known also for groundbreaking surgery restoring sensation, and sometimes orgasm, to women who have endured female genital mutilation, has expressed doubts about pre-pubertal medical transitions. She’s said she’s no fan of it, that children on hormonal blockers are essentially chemically castrated, if they’ve been denied puberty.

Should any human being be denied puberty? Has anyone really studied neurological and psychological developments during puberty, and how puberty blockers affect these? That’s the question Marci Bowers is raising.  

It’s not a question transgender children’s books either approach or begin to answer.