Episode 2: What I Didn't Know

My son was not quite three when he first started telling us he was a boy. He had been assigned female at birth. At first my wife and I chalked it up to one of those “kids say the darndest things” comments. When he kept asserting it, we thought maybe he was telling us he preferred doing boy things — kind of a tomboy. He consistently chose toys we associate more with boys. That wasn't a stretch.

But that wasn't it either. He didn't say “I want to be a boy.” He didn't say “I want to be like a boy.” He said, “I am a boy.” And he kept saying it. Patiently. Insistently. With the directness that very small children bring to the things that matter most.

Back then we hadn't even considered he could be transgender. The only transgender people we knew were adults. So we hadn't really thought about gender identity emerging at this age. But Jacq knew. He didn't have the word for it. He didn't need the word. What he was telling us was that someone had gotten something important wrong about him. The designation made at his birth, the box he had been placed in, the pronoun he had been given — it didn't fit. He was a boy. Not wanting to be a boy. A boy.

This episode is about what I didn't know. And what it took to find out.

Let me be precise about the nature of my not-knowing, because it is more instructive than many of us give it credit for. I was not a man who believed transgender people were confused or disordered or mistaken. I was something simpler and far more common. I was a man who had never had a reason to think carefully about this. Gender had presented itself to me as a settled question — not because I had evaluated the evidence and reached that conclusion, but because I had never had any particular reason to look. My children had arrived, been assigned their sexes at birth, and grown into themselves. Or so I had understood it.

What my son was telling me, at age not-quite-three, was that I had been working with a model that didn't fit the data. And I had spent my career being trained for exactly this situation.

To be a little more specific about my education, I have a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Kettering University and a master’s in electrical engineering and optics from the University of Michigan. For more than three decades I have designed advanced aerospace systems — from satellite-based sensors and docking mechanisms for spacecraft, to optical air data systems and clear-air turbulence sensors for aircraft, to long-range atmospheric measurement systems for rocket launches and weather forecasting. Systems that must operate in harsh conditions I cannot directly observe, under conditions I cannot fully predict.

The cardinal sin in my discipline — the failure mode that ends careers and, in less forgiving metaphors, brings bridges down — is not ignorance. Every engineer operates in conditions of partial ignorance. That's what makes the work hard and interesting. The cardinal sin is pretending not to be ignorant. It's applying certainty you haven't earned to a system that will eventually, under some condition you didn't anticipate, test that certainty and find it insufficient.

When the model doesn't fit the data, you revise the model.

My three-year-old son was data I had not anticipated. I had two choices. Force him into the model I had inherited. Or update the model. The engineering training made one of those options obviously correct. The fear — and I won't pretend the fear wasn't there — made it feel harder than it sounds.

The fear deserves to be named, because it was real, and because I think it is recognizable to any parent listening. I was not afraid Jacq was wrong about who he was. His certainty was transparent and total. The honest certainty of direct experience. I was afraid of what it would mean for him in the world. I was afraid of the cruelty he mi