bender

i consider myself fairly aware when it comes to gender variance. my son has long hair and my girlfriend is occasionally called 'sir' from behind. so, needless to say, i don't see myself bound to gender norms in any way. perhaps because of that, or perhaps in spite of, i've found myself mistaking boys and girls, men and women, more than once over the past couple of years. when it happens i smile to myself. i get a certain sense of pleasure when i see folks expressing themselves outside the norm. i feel comforted that we're all different and yet, we're all the same. we all want to be understood for what's inside, where our true self really is.

in the synchronistic way things always happen to me, yesterday was a crash course in gender empathy. i read a disturbing article about a 17 month old baby boy who was beaten to death by his mother's boyfriend for being too feminine.
a 17 month old baby.
a baby.
the man was trying to 'toughen him up' he claimed. i read the article on my phone as i left work and couldn't stop thinking about it, all the way to bedtime. i wanted to share it with haley and weep over it, but i didn't bring it up.

after dinner, we all piled up in the living room to watch a movie i'd rented a couple days prior. billy elliot. i rented it because i heard it was a wonderful dance movie and a hilarious comedy. nobody ever told me that it would be a study in gender typing. a touching and heartwarming exploration of gender, even. (at least from what i could make out of the film, with the crippling dialect and less than stellar speakers on my tv.)

combine that experience with the article i read earlier and the gender stumper that todd and i puzzled over at the orthodontist (we never did decide male or female..) and i was definitely having a gender bender of a day.

i'm still sad this morning. as i sifted through my closet of girlie clothes and selected the perfect earrings to go with my outfit, and as i considered what color filmy skirt i wanted to buy for ballet class, and as i applied my mascara at the stoplight waiting to get on 400, i felt grateful and then guilty for being grateful. grateful that my gender is so simple. and guilty because it seems unfair to celebrate that simplicity when the very most innocent among us are being killed because theirs is not.

[sidenote: of course we don't know if aforementioned baby's gender would have been simple or not. a 17 month old baby is not expressing a gender. they are in fact expressing innocence.]

d: a compassionate society
b: my compassionate heart
g: there but for the grace of god go i...