Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 15 December 2022 – Genspect
In my recent conversation with Benjamin Boyce, we covered a lot of ground, including suggestion and the belief that many ‘gender-affirming’ providers (not to mention gender-affirming parents, teachers, and social workers) hold: the belief that you can’t ‘make’ somebody trans.
Take Johanna Olson-Kennedy’s parable of the cinnamon and strawberry Pop Tarts. You can read the full rundown at 4thWaveNow, but here are the highlights:
An eight-year-old kid comes into my practice, and this is the story with this kid. Assigned female at birth, eight years old, was completely presenting male, whatever that means—short haircut, boy’s clothes. But what was happening, is, this kid went to a very religious school and in the girls’ bathroom, which is where this kid was going, people are like, “why is there a boy in the girl’s bathroom? That’s a real problem.” And so this kid was, like, so that’s not super working for me, so I think that I wanna maybe enroll in school as a boy. This kid had come up with this entirely on their own.
When the kid came in, mom was like, “oh, we don’t know what to do, so please help us,” and so we started talking about it and what was interesting is that, you know, some kids come in and they have great clarity and great articulation [sic] about their gender. They are just endorsing it: “This is who I am, and yes, there’s gender confusion but it’s all of you who are confused.” So, there are those kids. So, this kid had not really organized or thought about all these different possibilities.
You know the mom had shared this whole history, and said, when the kid was three, the kid said, “Could you stroll me back up to God so I can come back down as a boy” and the kid’s like, “Ah, I didn’t say that.” You know, 8-year-olds, so I’m like, “I don’t think your mom made that up, that’s crazy.”
So, at one point, I said to the kid, “So, do you think that you’re a girl or a boy?” And this kid was like, I could just see there was, like, this confusion on the kid’s face. Like, “Actually, I never really thought about that.” And so this kid said, “well, I’m a girl ‘cause I have this body.”
Right? This is how this kid had learned to talk about their gender, that it’s based on their body.
And I said, “oh, so—and I completely made this up on the spot, by the way, but—I said, “Do you ever eat Pop Tarts?” And the kid was like, oh, of course. And I said, “well, you know how they come in that foil packet?” Yes. “Well, what if there was a strawberry Pop Tart in a foil packet, in a box that said ‘Cinnamon Pop Tarts.’? Is it a strawberry Pop Tart, or a cinnamon Pop Tart?”
The kid’s like, “Duh! A strawberry Pop Tart.” And I was like, “So…” And the kid turned to the mom and said, “I think I’m a boy and the girl’s covering me up.”
And the best thing was that the mom was, like, [squeals] and she goes and gives the kid a big hug and it was an amazing experience. But I worry about when we say things like “I am a…” vs “I wish I were…” because I think there are so many things that contextually happen for people in [sic] around the way they understand and language [sic] gender.
So, I don’t think I made this kid a boy.
I don’t THINK so.
Olson-Kennedy plays this line for laughs and the audience obliges…