Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders Read Online Free PDF Page B

parenthood, without having any particular desire for pregnancy and menstrual cycles and breast-feeding? I am nervous about admitting this, for fear of suggesting that my quest for identity was opportunistic. Surely it does seem more than a little facile to want all of the perks of womanhood without having to experience the drawbacks—the tedium of a period, the endless come-ons from boys, the swelling dreariness of pregnancy, which, the sisterhood notwithstanding, most women will tell you gets more than a little old after a while. I am fairly certain that admitting this exposes me as a fundamentally shallow person, someone who talks the talk but won’t walk the walk.
    And yet, I’ll say—with more than a little defensiveness—surely a woman cannot be defined solely as a person who has borne children, or who has a menstrual cycle, or who has nursed a child. As the years have gone on, I’ve come to accept that womanhood —like manhood —is a strangely flexible term. I’ve met “genetic” women who have a Y chromosome, who have a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome that makes their bodies unable to absorb the information that that Y chromosome contains. I’ve met women who were born without a uterus; I’ve met women who have exactly zero interest in babies orchildren, or, for that matter, Brad Pitt. All of these women, however, are unmistakably women, and were anyone to suggest otherwise it would seem ridiculous.
    And so I hope that if there is room in the wide spectrum of women’s experience for all of these different lives, surely there is room in it—somewhere—for me.
    That is, until I remember my Irish grandmother—“Gammie”—watching some television show with transsexuals on it, possibly Donahue , or The Dinah Shore Show . This was back in the seventies. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said, sucking on her Kent filter king, “those people aren’t women.”
    “They’re not?” I said. She, of course, had no idea that I was a woman just like the ones she was dismissing.
    “Of course not,” she said.
    “They have breasts,” I pointed out. “They have—you know. Vaginas.”
    She shot me a look. Ladies of her generation didn’t say vagina or vote for Democrats.
    “That’s not what makes someone a woman,” she said authoritatively.
    “Really?” I asked. “What does make someone a woman then?”
    Gammie took a long drag on her cigarette, then blew all the smoke into the air.
    “Suffering,” she said.
    W HEN Z ACH WAS about six months old, I met my former student Veronica Gerhardf in a Portland bar called Gritty McDuff’s one Friday afternoon. She’d spent the years since graduation working in Vice President Gore’s office. But she was ready for a change, she said.
    “Seriously?” I replied. “Because if you want you could come back to Maine and work as our nanny. That would be awesome.”
    Veronica lifted her pint and drained it. Then she put the glass down on the bar. “Okay,” she said.

    F EMINIST SCHOLAR Sara Ruddick, a pioneer in the field of motherhood studies, writes that mothering is about nurture and protection—her trinity is “preservation, growth, and social acceptability.” To Ruddick, motherhood focuses on the ways moms protect their children from the world even as they slowly move them into it. More interesting—to me at least—is her suggestion that it’s not a job limited to women. According to Ruddick, men, too, are capable of “mothering,” when they act to shield and educate their young.
    This makes plenty of sense. Still, if someone had shared this theory with me when I was a father—and I identified as a feminist even then—it would surely have hurt my feelings. At the heart of this theory seems to be an assumption that caring for children is something women do. If you’re a man and you’re trying to nurture and protect your kids, it seems to me as if you’re being called an honorary woman.
    There are lots of men who don’t feel that