Listening to NPR yesterday I caught this story on the air, about two families taking two different approaches towards the apparent gender identity confusion of their sons. The remarkable thing about the story is how young the boys are - both boys were just two years old (!) when the parents report noticing something amiss. The parents of the first child encourage Jonah to live as a girl, under the supervision of therapist Diane Ehrensaft, who takes a radical approach to cases of childhood gender identity. The parents now refer to Jonah as ’she’ when they speak of her, and dropped the ‘h’ from her name so that she is now ‘Jona.’ They enrolled Jona in a school accepting to her situation, let her grow out her hair and wear pink dresses. As of now, Jona appears to be thriving in school, popular with the kids and comfortable with her new self.

The parents of the second child have a different therapist who suggests a more conservative approach: Ken Zucker argues that no child under at least ten years old can be said to have gender identity disorder. Children are flexible, he says, and would a therapist ever suggest changing the race of a black child who insisted she was white? Why should gender be treated differently?

To be perfectly honest, liberal as I may be, the skeptic in me would agree with Zucker’s initial assessment of things. I doubt that most children, especially as young as two years old, have a sense of any identity, let alone gender. And having read John Colapinto’s “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl”, and the tragic life resulting from a highly ill-advised gender transition, I find myself reluctant to believe that well-meaning therapists and parents don’t have any influence over a child’s reported gender identification. Does a two, six, even ten year old really have enough self-determination to say that he is definitely a girl trapped in a boy’s body? Especially if the adults in his life suggest and thus reinforce the notion that he is really a girl? I’m against overly medicating developing children anyways, let alone administering drastic hormone treatments. But without the hormone treatments, then what will happen when the new girl reaches puberty? There are so many complications with this issue that I do agree with Zucker, that gender transition should not be treated lightly.

That said, I find Zucker’s therapy methods alarmingly barbaric. Taking away the child’s favorite toys? Isolating him from other girls his age? Shielding him from the color pink? I get that the parents were concerned about other kids bullying their son for not being ‘normal’, but let’s face it: this kid is probably not going to be ‘normal’ no matter what, and the last thing he needs is his parents bullying him in addition to the outside world. The mother was concerned about her son leading a double-life, hanging out with girls at school, and lying to his parents when he came home. That, I suspect, would cause much more psychological damage to him over the long term. The precedent has been set - he already can’t trust or communicate with his parents, and he’s only what, six years old? What about when he’s a teenager?

Also, I find both philosophies, Ehrensaft’s and Zucker’s, to be lacking in that they both assume rigidly defined gender roles, if not necessarily sex. Why can’t Jonah just be a boy who plays with Barbies and wears dresses? Why can’t poor Bradley, the one undergoing Zucker’s treatment, love the color pink? Why does ‘boyhood’ have to entail playing with Transformers, guns, baseballs and monster trucks? Nobody balks at tomboy girls nowadays, but a tomgirl boy (tommy girl?) is still unacceptable.

Let me clarify - I am not ruling out the possibility that gender dysphoria exists as early as Ehrensaft says it does. I think I’ve seen it in my own family. I’ve observed one of my cousins over the years, and maybe about five or six years ago I went back home for a family visit and thought: “who’s that boy running around with my cousins?” It took me awhile to realize who she was. When they were much smaller (kids grow so fast these days), I remember the cousin in question often wearing the boyish equivalent of what her sister wore, but thought nothing of it.

Lately when I’ve come home, Marissa (not her name, but trust me, it’s just as unfortunately girly), now thirteen years old, has adopted the posture and gait of a teenage boy. She’s always wearing baggy jeans, anime t-shirts and has her hair cut short. I don’t think she’s just a tomboy, as she flat out just looks and acts like a boy. I’ve even noticed that her voice sounds a little deeper these days when she talks. It doesn’t seem like she gets much flak from her parents or other relatives, but I am admittedly not around all that much. I get the feeling that our relatives think of her as a bit of an odd duck, she likes boy things but hey, whatever. It might turn out to be problematic when she gets older and starts dating, or if she suddenly starts adopting male pronouns.

But for now, she’s more or less accepted as who she is, no urging one direction or the other. And that, I say, is natural.

** Update on the NPR story today: Parents Considering Treatment to Delay Son’s Puberty. I guess hormone blockers are preferable to actual hormone injections (estrogen or testosterone), as the aim is to buy time until the child is mature enough for self-determination. But this method of treatment, pre-puberty, can also render the recipient sterile.

So many decisions, so many issues to consider. I definitely don’t envy the parents in this situation. I’m not sure what I would do!

Finally, an interesting and decently-written article in the campus newspaper: A question of identity, concerning the controversy surrounding KU professor Ray Pierotti’s claim of native Comanche heritage. This isn’t just a matter of a person embellishing their familial history to sound more interesting, like a girl I know who showed up at a multicultural affair and said she was Scottish (yeah, like two hundred years ago). His academic career is heavily steeped in the context of this identity. He not only gets funding and grants using claims of native status - his classroom curriculum revolves around a story that may not actually exist.

Now there’s a back and forth discussion over whether or not Pierotti can claim this cultural identity. His supporters offer valid points, saying that the blood quantum rules by which we define native identity are flawed: they doom tribal communities to extinction in the next few generation, what with tribal members marrying outside the community, and families spreading further apart and losing track of their own histories. They also argue that Pierotti has contributed so much to the native community - obtaining grants for the Indigenous Nations Center, mentoring students, vocally campaigning for native causes - that he’s basically Indian, even if he’s not a card-carrying member.

But Pierotti has a lot of detractors within the native community, with very real qualms. Tribes are the determining authority on membership, and by bypassing the tribal authority, Pierotti’s claim diminishes their sovereignity. In fact, people’s suspicions first arose when several Comanche students asked him questions about his family, where they were from, etc. Community building questions, which he couldn’t answer. It’s kind of like a stranger crashing your family dinner, pretending to be your long lost uncle. I can see why natives would be suspicious of identity-crashers invading their communities, already strained under the weight of a history of injustice.

The other issue, of course, is exploitation. Is he, as his brother alleges in a fairly brutal email, faking being native to benefit from affirmative action? I’m not quite sure about that. I think if his motive were purely greed, why would he be so vocal about it, instead of keeping under the radar to avoid suspicion? Why invest all that effort in bettering the native community? Similarly, if he was motivated purely by interest in the community itself, he certainly could have done a lot of his work without the fraud. One of my favorite professors, the late Bud Hirsch, contributed greatly to local native community groups, and he never professed to be anything but a literature loving Chicago native (identity confirmed by his accent and love of Bears).

My theory: maybe he started out with purely financial motives. Jobless and increasingly desperate, he seized upon this long-shot plan to land a tenured job. It worked so well that he gradually convinced himself he really was Comanche. In that manner he could rationalize away the initial lie, and gain a cool new identity in the process. He could make a name for himself in the community, and be something much greater than just a low-level professor at a Midwestern state university.

Whether he really is Comanche or not, I am certainly inclined to think that the guy is nuts. When I saw who the article was about, I had to laugh. I actually met Pierotti during a Native American Lit seminar that Prof. Hirsch taught; Pierotti sat in on a few sessions. Here was this kind of grizzled, rugged cowboy man sitting at the table, wedged in the tiny conference room amongst the rest of us bratty college students. Pierotti didn’t contribute much to the discussions from what I can remember. He did have on him a rather alarmingly big knife, sheathed but prominently on display at his hip. On campus. I didn’t think weapons were even allowed on campus, but maybe they make exceptions for native persons (though, as far as I know, none of the other native professors go around wielding giant knives). In general, we all thought he seemed a little, um, off.

Doing some more research into Pierotti’s background, I’ve found he is no stranger to controversy - or lawsuits. He and his wife have filed lawsuits against the university; she claimed to have been denied tenure on the grounds of sexism, he claimed to be discriminated against because of his ethnicity (I’m not exactly sure what the nature of this alleged discrimination was). He’s been vocal about promoting equal opportunity hiring on campus, and actively opposed the hiring of a professor I know, solely because there were other non-white male candidates for that position (well, unless they were faking it too, hehe).

And then there’s this article from the Journal World, back in 2000, describing a bizarre incident that took place after Pierotti’s wife was denied tenure. Pierotti had to take medical leave for part of a semester due to an eye surgery. Instead of arranging for someone else in the department or a TA to cover his classes, his wife simply covered for him. Letting someone not employed by the University, and thus not bound to the rules and regulations imposed on University instructors, for some reason didn’t fly with the administration. Imagine that! And would you let someone you recently fired sit at the front desk of your office, or handle important paperwork?

There are a lot more layers to peel from this onion of madness, to be sure. I’ll update with new developments.

p.s. - Here’s a bit of fun Lawrence history for you. While looking up his wife’s name on the LJWorld database, I found this letter to the editor she wrote in defense of the Borders tree protestors. The Borders tree, for those of you not from here, was this giant tree in a parking lot next to a Borders. The tree had been suffering from Dutch elm disease and was certainly dying, if not fully dead, at the time developers planned to cut it down. That didn’t stop area hippies from organizing sit-ins and candlelight vigils to save the tree. Now a good number of the supporters were using the tree’s felling as a symbol of protest against town sprawl, and I certainly sympathize. But frankly, all this fuss about saving an already dead tree probably did the anti-sprawl cause more harm than good. (I personally think that Lawrence hippies wanted to feel important, like they were saving the rainforests. Why should West Coast hippies hog all the endangered trees?)