“We can’t. Penn, we can’t. These aren’t our decisions to make. If she can’t make these decisions for herself, she’s going to have to wait until she can.”
“She can’t wait.” Penn was surprised to find his hands clasped in front of his chest, not quite pleading but not so far off either. “The younger you do it, the less of the wrong puberty she goes through, the better it works, right? If we wait until she can decide for herself, we’ve taken the choice away from her because we waited too long.”
“Penn, there are reasons they don’t do surgeries like this on minors, and only some of them are physical.” It felt like playing dirty to pull doctor rank, but this was important. “She cannot consent right now. She has to consent before procedures like these. So she has to wait. And so do you.”
“This is our job as parents, Rosie. You didn’t say we couldn’t pull Roo’s wisdom teeth because he was a minor. You didn’t say Ben couldn’t get his ear pierced because he was only fifteen. As parents, we make a thousand decisions a year with life-altering impact whose implications our kids couldn’t possibly get their heads around. That’s our job. That’s what parenting is. We decided to move across the country via some insane calculus that concluded Poppy being safer outweighed Roo being crankier because Ben might be happier and Orion and Rigel were a wash. We had no idea if it would work. We had no idea if it was the best thing. We researched. We thought about it. We discussed. And we made the best guess we could with the information we had on behalf of our children whose lives we thus changed indelibly forever.”
“Penn, tell me you see how vaginoplasty is different from ear piercing. Tell me you see how removing a penis is different from removing wisdom teeth. Tell me you see that equating gender reassignment with address reassignment is an absurd comparison.”
“Of course. Clearly. I’m just saying we make decisions for our kids all the time. We do this because we know they aren’t as smart or experienced or informed as we are, so they can’t make these decisions for themselves. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
“You’re scaring the shit out of me, Penn.”
“Why?”
“You’re going too fast. She’s just decided to re-become Claude, and your response is to turn her into Linda Lovelace. Maybe she doesn’t mean it. Maybe she’s not really changing her mind. But we have to slow down and figure it out, let her figure it out. You’re ticking off boxes here because it’s something you can do, and I get that, believe me, but she’s got to be lost for a bit, and she can’t be lost if we’re leading her out of the woods.”
“She isn’t lost, Rosie.” Penn took her hands and, though she tried, would not let her pull away. “We made this decision long ago. We made it when Claude was in kindergarten, and Poppy’s never regretted it, not for a day, and neither have I.”
“Then why’d she shave her head?”
“I don’t know.” His face looked worn, wan.
“Penn, in so many ways, we’re so lucky. In so many ways, I’m grateful this is what our kid got, gender dysphoria instead of cancer or diabetes or heart disease or any of the other shit kids get. The treatment for those isn’t necessarily clearer. The drugs are harsher and the prognosis scarier and the options life-and-death but never black-and-white, and my heart breaks every time for those kids and those parents. But those are more or less medical issues. This is a medical issue, but mostly it’s a cultural issue. It’s a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue. Maybe we need to medically intervene so Poppy doesn’t grow a beard. Or maybe the world needs to learn to love a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt.”
“But that’s not going to happen.” Penn spoke so softly she wouldn’t have heard him if she didn’t already know what he was going to say.
“In which case maybe she—and you and I—need to learn to live in a world that refuses to accept a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt and be happy anyway. Maybe our response to that world should not necessarily be to drug and operate on our daughter.”
“How?” He looked up at her. It felt like a long time since their eyes had met.
“How what?”
“How do we learn to live in that world and be happy anyway?”
*
Rosie woke from fitful sleep sometime well predawn to send Howie a text: WILL GO TO THAILAND. IF I CAN BRING POPPY.
PART
III
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