Before he died, my father imparted advice I first misunderstood. Now, it's come clearly into focus.
A few Saturdays back, I was the only father at a watercolor workshop in an Allegheny County community room, turning a sheet of white paper into brown sludge while my six-year-old daughter painted something decent and, as is her wont, imperiously waved off my help. I’d brought her in place of her mother, who had something better to do, despite trying to skip these snooze-worthy arts-and-farts-and-crafts events on principle.
The mothers around me—a passel of well-meaning, well-off women who had plainly done the required reading that circulates on their newsfeeds—were deep in the real work of gender. The $64,000 question (now $773,000 with inflation) was their own concern about their kids’ gender, which struck me as more than these rising first and second graders were worrying about such matters. One described scrutinizing her son for “signals,” the sort of thing the more religious among us might call “signs and portents,” and stood primed to affirm whatever surfaced, while also keeping him current on an orthodoxy that seemingly revises itself every election cycle. Another remarked that she wouldn’t put her child in a Boy Scout troop unless the troop was properly versed in trans issues—not merely “accepting,” she clarified, because there is a world of difference between toleration and thorough understanding. A third had worked out a way to read picture books aloud that kept every animal’s gender and race an open question until her son ruled on it. Not wanting to make a pest of myself and content to continue painting an obese brown cat, I nodded along and thought of this famous dril tweet: “This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender,” he hollers, overturning his uncle’s barbecue grill and turning the Fourth of July into the Fourth of Shit.
My own approach to all this has been no approach, which I confess without pride because so many of the big cultural questions about The Way We Live Now have had no bearing on my homeschooled and now work-from-home existence. When my father was dying in 2014, he gave me one piece of advice about the daughter I did not yet have but somehow presumed I would. Raise her like a boy, he said, which to the extent I thought about it at all I initially misunderstood. What he meant was not to mandate she become some sort of tomboy, but rather to be there and even things out, to stand on whatever side her mother wasn’t so the kid had access to the whole field instead of half. It certainly never crystallized into a system because there are no systems in our house. There is no gentle parenting in my house, no attachment parenting (apologies to Dr. Mayim Bialik), no trad parenting, no other method with a catchy name, TED Talk, and virtual merch table.
In place of grand systems, we have two parents and a fiercely independent kid who picks between them. She comes to me for sports, for exercise, for video games, for pizza and hot dogs, for chores, and for the Pokémon games. She goes to her mother for art, for shopping, for the cutesy stories about the Babysitters’ Clubs, and for gossip about her peers (I can name the current Rizin MMA champions and the last dozen or so sumo champions but can’t recall the names of friends’ kids, especially friends’ babies, to save my life). On matters of discipline, she does what I say because we both follow precise routines; with her more easygoing mother, she wages open war. By the lights of that community room, the whole arrangement smacks of gender, and is also entirely fine.
Her current life plan, announced with the certainty of an AI company CEO promising his company will change everything you know, is to train cats like Pokémon and get jacked. Her starter is Hilde, our tubcat of a 14-year-old Maine Coon, who did not consent to a training regimen and already outweighs most of her bracket save for her stepbrother and future “rival,” the gargantuan three-year-old Siberian cat Freddie Pancakes. The getting-jacked part she gets from me. I have spent much of life on the function-over-form side of the ledger, hefting barbells in assorted basements, and she has decided our basement—with the gymnastic rings where she does pull-ups, dips, L-hangs, and skins the cats—is the most interesting room in the house.
The reading she taught herself. She beat Pokémon Scarlet and its DLC nearly solo and after taking several of these ball-imprisoned beasts to level 100, no small feat in a game with no voiceover, only text she pushes through line by line. When she’s not doing that, she’s reading every Pokédex entry in every Pokémon encyclopedia she can get her hands on (“can you believe that girl at school said her stuffie’s name is Camper? That is Yamper! Some people just don’t know their stuff”). The cat-training scheme came from nowhere I can point to. It is hers, and I would not swap it for a hundred validated milestones.
Outside the walls of our comfortable little brick house, panic about the kids seems to be running in every direction at once. There is a left-coded version, where Sherlock Holmes-like parents catch and reaffirm each flicker of identity as it surfaces. The right-coded version, which I have heard more often given my time amidst the post-left and based right, wants to legislate boys back into boys and girls back into girls by force of nostalgia and more bathroom bills than my plumber uncle ever wrote. Both camps read the child as a document to be corrected. My daughter, meanwhile, like the lost-in-his-own-world kid I used to be, is just running her own race, the advice Bluey’s mother Chilli gives her in one memorable episode.
I must confess I am not studying her for signals, signs, or portents of anything in particular. Instead, I am in the basement letting her pretend to spot a barbell she cannot yet lift, or upstairs as she referees standoffs between our two enormous cats. Letting her be exactly who she wants to be, without the kind of scrutiny or theorizing that tends to tangle those things up.
Given that my day job is in employee experience research, I know about as well as anyone that her generational cohort, like the ones immediately preceding it, are cursed. More than 42% of recent college graduates are working jobs that did not require the degrees they sought, the worst underemployment in the nation’s history, and the entry-level roles that once trained them on the job are thinning out first as senior employees assisted by AI, like yours truly, are ordered to assume that work. I am not going to pretend this doesn’t worry me. I also understand that this non-method method is somewhat of a privilege—something not afforded to all kids. But my daughter spent the whole drive home from our art event narrating the next gym battle move for move, correcting me when I got a fact wrong about a move’s effectiveness or an elemental weakness. The kids may not be alright, but I am glad this one is.