Sarah & Ian Hoffman

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Pink Orchids

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Last week I published an essay about Sam on the parenting website babble.com. “Parenting My Explosive Child” is the first piece I’ve written about aspects of Sam other than his penchant for pink. And without condemning Sam’s pink boyhood in any way, I am compelled to explore the link between Sam’s mood and behavior problems and his different gender expression.

I belong to a list serve for parents of gender-nonconforming boys hosted by the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. On the list serve, parents share information, support, and advice about raising pink boys. There is also a strong current of parents reporting their sons’ hypersensitivities, overreactions, explosive tantrums, and other sensory, social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. Catherine Tuerk, co-founder of the list serve, says it’s not uncommon for parents to report that their pink boys were hypersensitive and difficult as infants.

Once, a parent posted a link to the website of Elaine Aron, author of the book The Highly Sensitive Child. The website offers a parent questionnaire, a checklist of 23 questions relating to physical and emotional hypersensitivity. Aron says that if a parent answers “yes” to 13 or more of the questions, “your child is probably highly sensitive.” Sam scored 22 out of 23. Other parents took the quiz as well and their children all scored above 20. Yet this is a list serve for parents of gender-nonconforming boys, not parents of highly sensitive children. Why are so many children clearly both?

I don’t know what the link is between hypersensitivities, mood issues, and being a pink boy. I just know that for Sam, and others like him, the three often exist together.

David Dobbs’ recent article in The Atlantic, “The Science of Success,” reviews new research identifying gene variants that increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other issues—genes that produce so-called “orchid children.”  Orchid children need far more care and attention to thrive than their “dandelion” counterparts—those normal, healthy, resilient children who do well in most any environment. (My daughter Ruby is a dandelion; the joke around our house is that we could raise her in a mud puddle and she’d be just fine.) Dobbs reports that orchid children are those who suffer the most when raised in negative environments, and profit the most from positive ones.

Are gender-nonconforming boys more likely to be Highly Sensitive Children—orchids? Anecdotally, it seems so. So what’s the connection between these different traits?  Nobody knows. Yet.

What I do know is that these pink orchids are special kids. They thrive on parental acceptance and support; as their parents, we need to give them all the love we can. They lead lives that are, in many dimensions, far more challenging than most. They are not only swimming upstream against the currents of mainstream culture, but navigating other perilous waters as well.

The Omni-Gender Bathroom

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Recently, while visiting the library of a small east coast college, I found myself in need of a bathroom. I encountered this one:

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Later that day I sought out the bathroom I usually use on campus: a nondescript single-user loo in the social science department, a place I’ll call Bathroom B. I wanted to visit Bathroom B partly because I had to go, and partly to see how it had changed since my last visit to the college at the end of the summer. Unlike the Omni-Gender Bathroom, Bathroom B is still trying to figure things out.

I work at this college several times a year, and have enjoyed observing Bathroom B’s evolution.  Every time I visit, Bathroom B sports different signage.  When I first encountered Bathroom B, it had a sign that read “Women.”  On my next visit it bore a hand-lettered sign: “Unisex.” The next time I saw Bathroom B it was simply identified with a glyph not unlike that of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

That afternoon, I found Bathroom B marked with a strip of duct tape and the word “Women” in black marker—a return to its roots.  Given that I only visit quarterly, I imagine I’ve missed at least a few iterations of the bathroom’s identity.

What I appreciate about this particular campus is the students’ and faculty’s willingness to change with the times–only to reevaluate and change again. On the one hand there are transgender students who require a safe space in which to answer nature’s call.  On the other there are female students and professors who wish to use a cleaner bathroom than that typically frequented by male users. What’s the resolution?  No one knows.  But this once-banal bit of signage on a small room meant to satisfy a physiological function is now the hotbed of a series of wrought questions spanning biology, identity, safety, and selfhood.

Duct tape is sturdy, but not permanent, so I’m guessing Bathroom B will continue to evolve.  The Omni-Gender Bathroom seems to have found a more stable identity for itself.  Who’s to say which is the better destiny?

The Moment (or…Telling Steve)

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“What sweet sisters!” Steve the Realtor says. Sam and Ruby are curled up in a rocking chair in a house we are looking at. Sam giggles. Ruby says gleefully, “We’re not sweet sisters, we’re sweet brother and sister!”

Steve blinks. “Right!” he says cheerfully, in the tone that adults use to humor children who say things like “I saw Santa outside kissing the tooth fairy!”

Steve has met Ruby, who I bring on my house-hunting expeditions, but this is the first time he’s met Sam. I’ve talked about Ruby’s big brother Sam, but I suppose Sam’s gender had not really sunk in for Steve.

It’s The Moment, the time when I decide whether or not to say, “Actually, Sam’s a boy.” I look at Sam, who is wearing a pink-striped dress and pink Crocs, his long blond hair in a ponytail. I wonder if we will stick with Steve or find another realtor (if the former, it makes sense to tell him; if the latter, it doesn’t). I weigh how much Sam likes it when people think he’s a girl (a lot) against how much he doesn’t like it when I tell people that he’s a boy (a little). I wonder if it’s possible to teach Ruby not to say anything when people comment on her “sister.”

I think too long; The Moment passes. It will be back soon enough.

Praise for our books

“Jacob’s New Dress is a brilliant and beautifully illustrated book and a must-read for all of us.”

Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D., Director of Mental Health, Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF and author of "Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender Non-nonconforming Children" February 9, 2014

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