Dear Sons, We Have Receipts

I am in a couple of online groups where parents of ROGD boys meet. We say that we are different as parents but we all have the same son. This boy is typically very intelligent, nerdy, non-athletic, and as a child was interested, no… obsessed with specific “boy” toys and interests. Surveys of ~ 300 parents indicate that almost 92% of our sons fit in this category.

I know that there is a risk of being accused of equating gender conformity or having interests that are typically found in boys with “being a boy”. That is not my intention. A boy is 100% a boy regardless of whether he is obsessed with trains or tiaras. Likewise, a girl is 100% a girl regardless of whether she is a ballerina or a tomboy who plays rugby. This post is not about how gender conformity or non-conformity makes one more of a boy or a girl. This is about challenging our sons’ false post-trans identification narrative that they always knew that they were girls because they never liked boy things and their interests were more aligned with stereotypically girl behavior.

As toddlers, our boys were fascinated with wheels (cars, trains, Tonka trucks, etc.) and toys with buttons that would light up and make noises. Our son loved for us to ride along the train track when the trains were going by. He stayed glued to the train exhibit at the museum for hours watching the model trains go round and round the village. We took a vacation when he was 18 months old and visited the city’s children’s museum. Unfortunately, the train exhibit wasn’t working on that day. He proceeded to have a 30-minute screaming meltdown because he wanted the choo-choo to run. His favorite TV shows were Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder. He loved reading old comic books. His favorite was the Donald Duck comic and his favorite character was Uncle Scrooge. As he got older, he became fixated on building elaborate Lego and K-nex structures which he would complete in a couple of hours. His favorite outdoor adventure was riding his battery-powered jeep.

When he was seven years old, his best friend had a DSI, which they played when they spent time together. Our son begged to get one too. We gifted him one for Christmas and he became instantly hooked on Mario Bros and Minecraft. In hindsight, it was a mistake putting an electronic device in his hands at that age. He also played with circuit boards and started coding when he was a pre-teen. When he hit middle school, he joined the Robotics team and in high school he competed in Science and Engineering competitions. On the weekend, he and his nerdy friends from the Engineering magnet school would meet in the country to create elaborate tools and devices to destroy the villainous vegetables and fruits, have triple-dog-dares such as eating ghost peppers, riding three wheelers, shooting guns in the forest and generally behaving like wild boys. Every Halloween they had an epic smashing of the pumpkins’ event. In his late teens he got into playing Dungeons and Dragons. He had a wild imagination and spent hours crafting story lines for the game. He wasn’t into organized sports but he and his dad would go to the gym to lift weights. He was stronger and could lift heavier weights than many grown men at the gym.

So, when my son came out to me at 19 and told me that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, I nearly fainted from shock. What happened since that initial declaration, was that my son, like many of our boys, changed the narrative about his life, his story and the interests he had as a boy and teenager. He started acting differently to try to force himself into fitting into his new “female” identity.

Last week, I decided that it was time to go through the items my son left behind when he moved out of our home and changed his identity as our son. There were containers full of toys, videos and video games, all attesting to the fact that his interests were always those of a typical boy. I found thousands of Legos and K-nex pieces, dozens of Ben Ten and superhero figurines, piles of superhero DVDs, car racing video games (he took all the Mario games!), train, trucks and matchbox car collections, strategy-based board games, etc. I texted my mom friends, “I have receipts!” while sending them photos of the items. We had a funny exchange where we found out that our kids had the exact same toys and many of the same interests when they were growing up. Several of us still have Thomas the Tank train collections, Legos and circuit boards. I am hanging on to those toys. I can’t bear to part with them. Those are receipts that I plan to keep, just in case…

Sons, we have not only the memories but also the receipts of who you were as you were growing up. Deep inside you are still the boys who loved going to construction sites to watch excavators digging dirt, who built computers from scratch and who went to the movie theater with Dad to watch the latest Marvel movie. You may fool the whole world, but you can’t fool us.