Sarah & Ian Hoffman

Building a culture of kindness. One book at a time.
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The Tide

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Lately, requests have been coming in from religious organizations for me to address their members. I’ve been asked to write a blog for a national group of Christian clergy, to speak at a Unitarian church, and to give a sermon at a Jewish synagogue. I haven’t sought these opportunities out; they’ve just fallen in my lap.

The synagogue where I’ll be speaking this Friday night, Sha’ar Zahav, was founded as a space for LGBT people and their families; as they’ve grown, their membership has broadened to include many straight families. Increasingly, synagogues, churches, and other places of worship in our country are opening their doors and their liturgies to include gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people. In response to a culture that is starting to accept its LGBT citizens, religion is changing, too. Not everywhere, certainly. But as the unexpected invitations float in, I can feel the strong current that brings them to me.

Sha’ar Zahav invited me to help them commemorate International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a memorial to those who have died from anti-trans violence. Names will be read of all the people who have died in the past year, and the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, will be said. The Day of Remembrance is a deeply sad and wrenching day. But I have been asked to talk about my son and the work being done to make the world a safer place for children like him. I’ve been asked to speak about hope. Even as we speak of violence and hate and loss and all that is wrong in the world, this congregation also wants to talk about hope.

Dip your toe in the water; you can feel the tide changing.

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What’s Dumb and What’s Not

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“You know what’s really dumb?”

Pink pajama-clad Sam was cuddled up next to me on the bed, his long blond hair freshly brushed and damp from the bath. While Sam won’t admit at school that he likes pink things anymore, he still enjoys his pink pajamas at home. He looked me in the eye before going on: “It’s really dumb that it’s OK for girls to wear whatever they want, but it’s not OK for boys.”

I told Sam that next Friday I’d be speaking at a synagogue about this very issue (in honor of Transgender Remembrance Day, which memorializes people who have been killed because of anti-trans hatred). I reminded him of what we have talked about many times: that standards have changed for girls, and they will also—in time—change for boys. “Good,” Sam said. “Because if they don’t, I’m going to yell at those people who keep wanting it not to change.”

I told Sam I do that for him by writing and public speaking (and that I try to use my inside voice). I told him he’s welcome to do that too when he gets older, and until then I would do it for him. He asked about other parents who were working on changing things too, and we talked about the new book My Princess Boy. I decided to show Sam an interview with the author and a supportive therapist, so he could hear other people talk about making the world safe for pink boys.

Sam and I watched the video together. But when the therapist said, “there’s more than one way to be a boy, [and] there’s more than one way to be a girl,” Sam told me to turn the show off. “That’s wrong,” he said, surprising me—I’ve always liked and used that phrase. “They should say that there are lots of ways to be a kid, and people shouldn’t worry about if you’re a boy or a girl—that’s only important for making babies.”

That was the least dumb thing I’d heard all day.

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Purim, Part 2

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Karen, a mom from Sam’s school, emailed me after my recent blog post about our head of school dressing up as a woman for Purim last week. Karen’s son, Jacob—not a pink boy like Sam—dressed as a girl for Purim. Karen felt conflicted about the meaning and effect of cross-gender dress-up. Was it mocking? Was it funny? Was it educational? She wanted to be respectful, and worried that her son might offend kids like Sam.

I told Karen that, in my opinion, well-intended cross-gender dress-up is useful because it furthers the conversation about gender. That sometimes we simply dress up as things we are not—a bumblebee, a giant sponge, Frankenstein. And that sometimes we dress up as things we aspire to be—Superman, Queen Esther, a fairy princess. So I saw her third-grade son dressing as a girl as, if not a desire to be female, a benign expression of pretending to be someone different from his usual self.

Humor often relies on contrast. It’s funny when the head of Sam’s school dresses as a woman, because he is a masculine man. If Johnny Weir dressed up as a lumberjack, that would be funny too, because he’s usually so femme (it would also be a sassy retort to the Canadian Olympics commentators who said Weir should undergo gender testing.)

Above all, humor is situational; intention and audience matter. It’s certainly possible to be offensive if one tries. But Jacob was not dressing up as a girl to make fun of anyone. In fact, I think he served a useful purpose, as the head of school did, in making people momentarily aware of the gender behaviors so ingrained in us that they’re usually invisible.

But maybe I’m wrong. In an interesting post last week on Salon (which you should read for its commentary on the color pink and its plucky reference to “engorged ladybits”), author Kate Harding refers to “the enduring comedic value of a man in a dress.” Is the head of our school in a dress—or Jacob—making a mockery of women, or, more to the point of this blog, of feminine men and boys?

What do you think?

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