http://www.slate.com/id/2261929/The face of a young man in a baseball cap fills the screen at the center of a circle of 30 or so children. "It's Johnny!" they yell, meaning Johnny Weir, the "flamboyant," figure-skating Olympian.* The kids are part of an annual gathering of gender-variant and transgender kids—kids born boys who look and act like girls. Outside of this camp weekend, it's rare for them to hear "how great I think you all are … being true to yourselves," as Weir tells them. He says he loves the electric-blue spandex suit with the lime-green lightning bolt designed by one boy. He tells a 6-year-old that, no, he doesn't have a girlfriend, but one day he would like to have a family of his own. And, yes, "Bad Romance" was his favorite song to skate to. "I've fallen," he tells them, referring to the ice, not sin. "I've screwed up. The thing is just sparkle so much that nobody notices. Yeah, that's it. Sparkle! We've got to sparkle!"
Welcome to the guarded world of families with gender-variant kids, where a word like sparkle can move you to tears. Started by a parent support group out of Children's National Medical Center, this year the camp hosted 25 families and was held in a rural retreat a three-hour drive from Chicago. Most of the "Camp I Am" kids will one day end up somewhere in the GLBTQ spectrum—maybe cross-dressers, gender queer, or another term yet to be invented. But if past experience is any indication, the majority of our girly-boys will one day consider themselves straightforwardly gay. For the kids who turn out to be truly born in the wrong body, their parents will continue to wrestle with pronouns, possible hormonal intervention, and possible surgery down the road. In the meantime, many of us have learned to accept ambiguity, "holding all options open," as some supportive therapists say. Many of us attempt to avoid labels for something that may or may not fade away in a year—or 10.
Of course, humans—and particularly parents—despise ambiguity, and things without labels. In my family, we have wrestled for a decade with who to tell and when, exactly, to tell them. Gendered bathrooms in public places? Women use stalls, and so does my son. Teachers? Definitely, every year, the full debriefing. Summer camps? Yes. Family members? For us, everyone was cool (the gay brother-in-law had paved the way with the Christian mother-in-law); for others, disclosure has meant losing relationships with grandparents, brothers, sisters, churches. Of course, all nuance and delicacy would fall apart when my younger son would tell strangers that the older child with the hair to his waist and the pink hello kitty shirt was his brother, not his sister.
I stumbled on this while looking for info on what happened at this year's Camp Trans.
I hadn't heard of Camp I Am before... what a great experience for those kids. Sounds like an amazing group of parents.
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