Karen Dolan has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest
I had seen the penis on the ultrasound, I knew I was having a boy. What I didn’t know was that I was wrong.
“Stop it with all the questions!” the midwife barks in response to my questions about a possible epidural. “This isn’t a think tank.”
This is a dig at me and my employment at–indeed–a Washington, DC think tank.
I feel like I’m in a medieval torture chamber and my captor is commanding me to shut up, lay back, and enjoy the rack.
The hospital room is gleaming stabs of stainless steel and porcelain white and I’m naked and sweating, with just an embarrassed flimsy piece of blue paper over me, aware of its inadequacy to cover my enormous, undulating belly.
Our “labor playlist” included my favorite singer-songwriters, meditation music, and Spanish ballads. “The Sound of Silence” was playing, but I heard nothing but my own screams and the rants of this judgmental midwife.
I’m thirty-eight hours into a difficult labor with my first child. My frame is too small for the nearly eight-pound baby trying both to escape and to stay cocooned inside. My wilful child would perform this same dance of opposites eighteen years later.
The midwife then makes a derogatory remark to my Cuban immigrant husband about Fidel Castro. Unlike the wealthy white Cubans who fled Castro’s regime in the ‘60s, my Afro-Cuban husband, born and raised in the outskirts of Havanna, was more appreciative of Castro’s efforts to dismantle U.S.-backed racist imperialism in the island nation. He had emigrated with his sisters to Miami when he was twenty-five years old in 1991.
“Stop your screaming because I have doctors ready to break down the door and cut you or perform a C-Section if you keep it up,” she said mercilessly.
I lost all patience with my tormentor at that moment. We had chosen to go with a birthing center because we felt midwives would be a kinder, more holistic choice than doctors in an indifferent hospital environment.
But due to my labor going on longer than the Nile River, I had already cycled through two gentle, midwives, been transferred from the birthing center to Shady Grove Hospital in Rockville, Md., and ended up with the least gentle midwife on offer.
I grabbed the smiling, soothing nurse, Katherine—who, serendipitously, had also once been a midwife at the birthing center— by the collar and pulled her face in toward mine:
“Please get that woman out of here. I am in enough pain without the added agony of being lectured by her. I want you to take over from here . . . please!”
Nurse Katherine expertly helped my beautiful baby make her long-awaited, triumphant entrance on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 2000, into an ignorant world that she would take by storm. She was a herald of the brand new Generation Z.
“It’s a boy!” the doctor confirmed.
My baby looked up at me with a recognition that spoke of the many worlds over the countless centuries that we had known each other. Then those little cherub lips latched right onto my nourishing breast and didn’t let go for nearly three years.
“I will not make the same mistakes with you, my precious little one, that my mother made with me,” I promise.
The first mistake I make with my daughter happens the second she’s born: I think that she’s my son.
I had no idea. I was unprepared.
Even though I had read books and taken fancy birthing and parenting classes. I wrote down every gram of protein I ate to meet my daily prenatal goal.
I cooked so that each bite of food I swallowed would have the right combination of nutrients and amino acids that would optimally aid my gestating baby’s developing brain. I met with midwives and a lactation specialist.
I made a holistic birth plan and had a birthing playlist, designed to soothe the baby in its perilous journey leaving the warm sea of my womb to the cold world of breath.
I journaled my dreams for what a loving and excellent mother I would be, despite never really having had one myself. I sang songs and read books to my unborn child. I took this growing baby in my belly to protests and rallies, to Congress and the White House so she would have a jump start on fighting for justice in an unjust world.
I knew all about “attachment parenting” and knew that I would attach with a bond that would avenge the lack of maternal love I had experienced.
I had degrees in philosophy–the actual study of knowledge. But I had no knowledge of how to parent the magnificent child who burst into the world at the turn of the new millennium announcing that she wasn’t at all who everyone thought she was.
An aura of the “Twilight Zone” blanketed my being in those days. No one, least of all me, understood what was happening with my baby–my precious, perfect boy who was intensely insistent that he was a girl.
“No, Mama! I’m a girl!”
(Why don’t you understand, Mama? Why are you so dense, Mama? Why are you putting me in these boy’s clothes when I want beautiful dresses and toy strollers for my babies, Mama? Why are you such a failure, Mama?)
My husband, Roberto, wasn’t a particularly serious person in those days (which is what I initially found attractive. My bad.) and left the harder work of parenting largely up to me.
I, on the other hand, despite my best efforts, had inherited some of my mother’s judgmental and controlling personality. We were a bit like two dysfunctional opposites when it came to the more serious aspects of a partnership.
Roberto was fun, attractive, good for laughs, the center of attention at parties, worked hard in his job as a construction worker. He played well with and deeply loved our baby. He was generous and was a loving son and brother, and loved me to the extent he was capable. But he partied too much and his deeply immature emotional state wasn’t what one needed in a parenting partner.
Our psychologist had said to me two years earlier–after Roberto and I had been married for one year but two years before Grace was born, “The easiest way to understand Roberto’s way of being in the world is to understand it as something like ‘arrested development.’”
That’s not a diagnosis. It’s a short-hand way of understanding how my husband was functioning in our marriage. We had gone to see Dr. L because of Roberto’s infidelity–which he said he regretted and wished to save our marriage.
Dr. L didn’t think diagnoses were particularly helpful in treating psychological issues, but he felt that term was a useful one for me to understand my husband.
Roberto was then essentially a thirty-one-year-old teenager, unable to delay gratification or see much beyond his immediate wants. He admitted as much.
There were some possible reasons for this. He had grown up with very little in the outskirts of Havana. We might say he grew up in poverty, but I think that was a relative term in Cuba in those days. They had a home and good food, good schools and quality, free medical care.
It wasn’t the same kind of poverty we have in the U.S. with our obscene rates of homelessness and hunger, high racialized child poverty and maternal mortality levels, environmental racism, lack of access to affordable quality healthcare, contaminated water, and under-resourced schools.
He did describe it as a relatively good childhood, with lots of freedom to run the streets and party with his amigos. You develop survival skills when there is relatively little in the way of material comforts. You also work in the sugar cane fields and have to serve a stint in the army if you want a free college education. You also pine for things you can’t have–the high-end Nike sneakers, Mercedes Benz, and Bel Air mansions you’d see on television shows from America that showed a grotesquely distorted picture of the U.S.
He had a strong female family, but his dad had left the family when Roberto was five. Indeed, Roberto as a boy believed that he was the reason for his father’s desertion. Because little Roberto told his mother about his father’s latest affair.
I think that alone left deep scars and even more scars from the ensuing paternal rejection. His father’s absence was a huge presence in Roberto’s life.
He was a savvy survivor, relying on the humor and charm he shared with his friends and siblings as positive coping mechanisms. But on a deeper level, it seems his psyche was wounded and hadn’t healed by the time I met him.
When our child was a baby and toddler, there wasn’t any information about babies being born transgender. This was when the “world wide web” was still relatively young and all my searches about “transgender children,” turned up nothing.
We were all still clueless “flat earthers” about gender. Some self-described right-wing “culture warriors” in this country still are–clueless about both gender and the shape of the globe.
There was “no such thing” as a transgender child in 2000. Except of course, all over the world, there were millions and always have been.
A beautiful, precocious trans baby played make-believe with dolls fashioned from trucks and dresses made of terry cloth towels in my very own house.
I remember scouring the bookstores in those days–Borders Books, Barnes and Noble, and One in a Million in Dupont Circle, D.C. for answers. I pulled every single parenting book, turned to the indexes, and searched for “transgender” or “boy who believes he’s a girl,” or “gay children.” And not one thing came up.
I felt so deeply alone like the only person in the world with this mad quest to find out why my baby boy insisted he was a girl. And maybe I was.
I recalled my mother, in her better days, standing with me at the school bus stop across the street from our house when I was six. The bus stop was up against a small field that was desolate and bare and windy in the winter.
She and I would jump up and down, our homemade red kerchiefs in a bow at our chins, to keep warm and sing “Here we stand like birds in the wilderness . . . ”
Now my child and I were birds in the wilderness. Waiting for everyone to realize that the earth is round and for experts to tell us why.
All I could find on the concept of “transgender” were reports of one of the earliest professional transgender athletes, Renee Richards, who sought to compete as the woman she knew she was in 1976, and the 1993 film The Crying Game about a tragic adult transgender woman.
I remembered a person in the Admissions Office at the University of Maine who transitioned from her assigned male gender when I was in attendance there. That seemed so odd to me then. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t try. I wondered why anyone would choose to open themselves up to mockery that way.
Transgender babies and children appeared nowhere in parenting books, literature, or the minds of pediatricians in the early 2000s, though mine was right in front of me, telling me who she was from the beginning.
When she was thirteen, she became the first child that our Prince George’s County, Md. school system to socially transition in eighth grade. The journey was painful, but as she would say, nothing was more painful than not being seen for who you are. She was hit and mocked and denied use of the girl’s bathroom.
But she preserved and became a fierce advocate for the rights of young trans people all through high school. She spoke at the White House and gave guidance to then-President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan about how to respect the rights of trans children in schools and writing for publications like Teen Vogue and the Washington Post to educate an ignorant world.
Because of our daughter and other courageous, defiant young transgender people, the world now knows that trans children exist.
The especially well-informed now know that a baby’s gender identity is formed in utero, somewhere on the gender spectrum, depending on the cocktail of hormones produced by the reproductive system in the first half of pregnancy and how much of those hormones are absorbed and transported by their endocrine system to the brain in the second half of pregnancy.
The formation of gender is a normal, fluid, biological process with a great deal of variation in all species, including humans.
A 2010 research paper from The National Institutes of Health describes the process succinctly:
It is believed that during the intrauterine period, the fetal brain develops in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. According to this concept, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation should be programmed into our brain structures when we are still in the womb.
However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in transsexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no proof that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.
The fundamental mistake I made about my child is one she fought hard and successfully to correct. Not just for herself but for other young people.
Thankfully, the future is in their hands.
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