Bending gender

When I was an eleven-year-old boy I had a friend from school, a round-faced boy whose shirts billowed out at his middle and whose fingers were always a bit sticky. Cal was his name, short for Calvin. Our friendship solely focused on our near addiction to horror comic books— Vault of Horror, Weird World, Haunted Horror, Beyond, Eerie, Tomb of Terror. He somehow was able to cobble together a growing assortment of such titles and we would pore over each issue after school, our sessions always called to an end by his mother advertising the preparation for dinner. 

Much later I realized that these afternoon sessions with Cal also featured a Billy Elliot moment: While I was sitting eyes screwed to the comic book pages Cal would wander off and re-appear dressed in a skirt, a girly top, Mary Jane shoes, and frilly socks. The image of Cal dressed and parading around the room must have registered but was clearly subsumed by the horror images streaming out of the comic books and aiming into my frontal lobes.

I am not sure how our friendship ended. I recall hearing that Cal and his family (his mother) may have moved away. And by then I had abandoned my brief dip into horror comics for TV and Tom Corbett Space Cadet.

I wonder about Cal, even worry about him, now that we have entered a period where gender identity has risen into wide focus. The possibility of considering one’s gender identity has passed the realm of pathology and now becomes an issue demanding serious consideration.

As a medically focused person I am concerned about the emergence of trans as a particular identity. Binary is a more fluid identity but trans is gender specific. 

And trans becomes a medical issue when children discover their identity does not match the physical form they had at birth. Now the ideal transition seems to argue for puberty blockers that will prevent the secondary sexual characteristics of their birth form from developing and would allow for its opposite characteristics to evolve. Surgical configuration remains an option, usually for a later date. 

There seems now to be almost a rush to transition that some experts, medical and psychological, believe may be fueled by social media, glamorizing the potent possibilities of transitioning as offering special status and notoriety. Trans men and trans women are appearing in the world of fashion and the arts, often crowned as celebrities.

I look back at my young friend Cal. What would he do if he were eleven years old today? Would he be considering re-defining himself as binary and/or would he begin thinking of transitioning? Or would he outgrow the phase of cross-dressing (as people use to wish that gayness in adolescence would be just a passing phase)? Would he become a kind of fetishist, dressing as a woman as a specific erotic pastime? Would he have grown up blocked and frustrated about why he was stuck in an identity that did not match his sense of self?

The freedom of gender choice, while offering the possibility of a profound corrective, may entail social pressures and social aspirations that make such extremely critical and intensely personal decisions difficult to maneuver through.

I wish I could ask Cal.