While there’s no doubt that, as a society, we’ve made incredible strides in the area of tolerance and inclusion, I can’t help but wonder if in some ways we have over-corrected.
My two adult
children have grown up in an era where, in the quest to promote acceptance, the
lines between conformity and individuality have been blurred. It’s a privilege to grow up knowing
you will be accepted for whoever you are; yet privilege should never be muddled with
choice. And some young people today
truly believe that they need to decide who they want to be, as opposed to
figuring out and embracing who they actually are.
My son Trever, 21, still doesn’t know if
he’s straight, gay, bi, or possibly asexual. And Nate, 20, --though he’s
positive he’s only sexually and romantically attracted to females--isn’t sure
if he’s a cis male or a transgendered female (for brevity, I’m only listing the
general terms for how young people identify these days, since the vocabulary is
constantly expanding and evolving).
I’ve always been drawn to the outliers of society--the musically gifted, the transgendered, the savants—and I openly shared that mindset with my children as they were growing us. This legitimately wasn’t a conscious decision on my part to, say, raise my kids in a progressive way. My parenting style has always been more follow-my-intuition than anything, so this was simply me sharing my fascination and respect for the exquisite diversity that exists in our world.
Did my candor inadvertently
add to their confusion?
It’s truly a paradox when, in the spirit embracing diversity and acceptance, one loses the ability to know what it is they actually prefer. Some young people are becoming so focused on embracing diversity as a social construct that they go numb to the idea of individuality. They mistake freedom of expression with an obligation to invent a persona.
I’m seeing that many young people today are so intent on micro-labeling themselves that in the process, some of them completely lose sight of the whole point of our society’s shift towards acceptance and inclusion.
Yes--it’s completely normal for some people to need more time, or more experience
before they completely understand their true natures. But let's not lose sight of the fact that sexual preference and
gender identity are, by and large, instinctive.
Navigating Nate’s identity issues has taken quite a toll on Ray and me as his parents. Knowing that your child is lost and being unable to ‘fix it’ quickly is agonizing. But it’s more than that.
Ray and I legitimately
struggle to wrap our brains around it all. Besides Nate being my second son, I was an
aunt to 6 nephews before either of my kids arrived; I can say with confidence that
I was very familiar with the diverse likes, tendencies and personas of little
boys, and without a doubt Nate was the stereotypical “All-Boy”. He was playing
with Matchbox Cars at 9 months, and was obsessed with dinosaurs before he was 2. For Halloween he was Buzz Lightyear, Woody, or
the Red Power Ranger. He quickly bonded with other little boys from preschool onwards,
had typical boy mannerisms, and, most importantly (and perplexing, for us), he liked
being a boy. Not just tolerated it, not was neutral to it, but specifically had
expressed that he was glad he was a boy. So when we learned he was questioning his gender identity at the
age of 17, we couldn’t help but be baffled.
Being LGBT when I was growing up wasn’t nearly as taboo as it was in my parents generation (or before), but--without a doubt--there was still a stigma there. If you weren’t born straight and gender conforming you had a few choice--none without a downside.
You could go the ‘façade’ route, meaning, you married and had children in a hetero relationship. Or, you could go rogue, and keep your romantic partners a secret while choosing a ‘perpetually single’ label for the rest of the world. Both of those options meant completely denying your true self.
The third option was to embrace it and be openly gay, which was, by far, the scariest choice, as you were so much more likely to face discrimination, judgement and condemnation than you would be today. The progress I’ve seen in the past 30 years is phenomenal, and we should never, ever go backwards when it comes to acceptance. No human being should be forced to deny their true identity or live an unauthentic, secret life with a theme of shame running through it. At the same time, finding oneself should be a process of discovery, not invention.
Hate and discrimination undoubtedly still exist when it comes to LGBQT+issues. Yet many young people--especially over-thinkers and those prone to OCD--are finding themselves stuck in their heads and overanalyzing what they feel, which can lead to unnecessary confusion and doubt.
Along this journey in our quest for tolerance, countless minds have been opened, and lives have been changed for the better. Yet at the same time, progress can become paradoxically repressive. We need to be careful when talking to our kids about diversity and acceptance, and be sure they understand the real meaning of being your true self.
One doesn’t need their own ‘alphabet soup’ of identities to be politically correct. Likewise, rejecting the constraints of traditional social construct does not equate to “I need to construct a unique identity”.
Just as it’s absolutely okay to be statistically in the minority, it’s also absolutely okay to be statistically average. We are who we are. That should never be confused with ‘we are whoever we want to be’.
