Late-19th-century medical literature described female “inverts” as appallingly straightforward, with a “dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework” and “an inclination and taste for the sciences” male inverts were “entirely averse to outdoor games.” By the mid-20th century, doctors were trying “corrective therapy” to extinguish atypical gender behaviors. There have always been people who defy gender norms. Of course, had Alex been a girl who sometimes dressed or played in boyish ways, no e-mail to parents would have been necessary no one would raise an eyebrow at a girl who likes throwing a football or wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt. On days he opts for only “boy” wear, he heads off with a little swagger. Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man. When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself “a boy and a girl,” but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways.
For good measure, their e-mail included a link to information on gender-variant children.
After consulting their pediatrician, a psychologist and parents of other gender-nonconforming children, they concluded that “the important thing was to teach him not to be ashamed of who he feels he is.” Thus, the purple-pink-and-yellow-striped dress he would be wearing that next morning. Alex, they wrote, “has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).” They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents’ ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time. The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates.