It's a BOY!

A week ago we got a new member of the family - a kitten.  It is black and super fluffy and came to us by a series of unfortunate events that turned out most fortunate for us in the end.

You see, my sister's cat snuck out of my mom's house about 3 1/2 weeks ago.  She's not the smartest cat (although perfect in every other way) and definitely not an outdoor cat in any way, so when Puff went missing and didn't return within a few days, we started grieving.  Then, about 2 weeks into Puff's disappearance, my mom heard about a stray kitten that some friends had picked up, and they could no longer keep the kitten.  One of their 3 dogs tried to eat it.  So Lily and I went with Mom to check out the kitten.  It was a total keeper!  Great with kids, good with other animals (as long as they didn't try to eat it), and at the perfect fun stage of being litter trained and able to eat dry kitten food, but still adorable and SO fluffy!

So Mom took the kitten home on a Tuesday night.  We visited the kitten Wednesday, and then Mom had my kids Thursday and Friday because Chase and I were out of town.

Friday afternoon I got the call:  Puff was back.  PUFF WAS BACK!!!!!  Skin, bones, and fur; dehydrated; dirty; back.  SO exciting!!!

But this meant my mom now had 3 cats - my brother's cat, my sister's cat, and the kitten.  She likes cats, but 3 seemed excessive.  We didn't think we would be able to take the kitten, because we rent for now, and cats aren't permitted.  But we took the question to our landlords, who graciously agreed to let us keep the kitten! ...as long as the kitten did NO damage.  And amazingly, this kitten has done NONE.

That was a week ago, and what a marvelous week it has been!  Lily christened our little kitten, "Whitaker." The only "problem" with the kitten is that it is SO fluffy, it's impossible for a non-vet to tell whether it's a boy or a girl.  Our friends took it to the vet soon after they picked it up and before the dog tried to eat it, and their vets office was split.  One vet thought it was a boy, one vet thought it was a girl.  The verdict at that time was, "You'll have to wait and see."

So we took it to our vet yesterday.  And, as you have probably guessed from the title of this post, the answer was definitive (though it did take some effort to arrive at):  kitten is a BOY!!!

Which for us was a relief!  I mean, Whitaker is totally a boy's name.  But all week we'd been calling Whitaker "her," mostly because all of the cats I grew up with all through my life were girls.  So we've spent the last two days retraining ourselves to use the pronouns, "he" and "him" and "his" when referring to the little fur ball.

Yesterday after the visit to the vet, I had this conversation with my 3 year old daughter while we were on the way home:

Lily: Mommy, is Whitaker a boy or a girl?
Me: He's a boy.
L: But I think he's a girl, Mom.
Me: But, honey, the vet looked and told us he is a boy.
L: But I want him to be a girl.
Me: Well, you know how God made you a girl and me a girl, and God made daddy and your brother and Frazier (our dog) boys?
L: Yeah.
Me: God made Whitaker a boy.  We don't get to just choose.  God made him a boy.

That is the conversation I really had with my 3 year old.

All this build up brings me to what I really want to write about.  Actually, I don't want to write about it, because it's touchy, and weird, and it makes people crazy.  I'm not trying to offend or frustrate or condemn or alienate anyone.  But I do need to write this.  For myself.  For my kids.  For my family.  For my future.

I have a huge problem with the transgender movement telling everyone, eventually trying to tell my kids, that they can select their gender.

Before I go any further, let me again say, I am NOT out to cause more pain! For goodness sake!  Anyone who is in a position of physically being one gender and feeling like they are the other is enduring serious pain and heartache.  And if that's you, I hurt for you!  I am sorry that you are facing this very difficult situation, and I pray that you find help and healing.  And if that's you, you will have to find help and healing in a way that truly heals you.  I mean that.  And with what I'm going to say next, I don't want you to hear that I know how you'll find healing.  I don't.  I'm no expert on such things at all.

But I do know one thing: true healing doesn't come through believing lies.

True healing, the real deal, the kind that lasts, comes always, ALWAYS with the foundation of truth.

So, let's get back to my conversation with my 3 year old.  Let's imagine that she's not 3 anymore, but 13 or 23.  And let's imagine that we're not having the conversation about her kitten, but about her friend, or about her.

(I pray that she doesn't struggle with this herself, and I pray that her friends don't either, but in this day and age, I have to face the reality that I need to equip her and all of my children to deal with these questions.  Because if I don't, someone else will.  And while I will do my best to help her reason through things and search always for truth, someone else might simply tell her what to think.  And if she doesn't know how to discern if their answer has a foundation of truth, then she might believe lies, and that could cause her a lifetime of agony.  I desperately want to help her avoid that.)

Last week, there were moments when I really felt like Whitaker was a girl.  His little personality is so sweet and cuddly.  He has exactly the perfect temperament to put up with my littles who are "learning" what "gentle!" means.  I'd look in his eyes and somehow imagine him as a her.  So strongly did I have this feeling that I ordered a purple collar for the kitten.  Not that only girls wear purple, but in my head, he was a female cat and needed a purple collar as opposed to blue or green.

While what I felt about the kitten affected what I put around his neck and which pronoun I called him on a regular basis, it doesn't change the fact that genetically, he is a male. (PS We're keeping the purple collar, because purple isn't a boy color or a girl color.  It's a color and it's a pretty color for a collar!)

My mom admitted that if she had kept the kitten, she would have wanted him to be a girl.  Her other two cats are females.  Mom is a female.  They kind of have an all-female thing going for them in the house.  Adding a male cat seemed out of place.

But despite what Mom wanted to be true about the kitten (that he would be a girl), it turns out that Whitaker is a boy.

I read an article on the Matt Walsh Blog a while back that, while more crude and aggressive than I tend to be, I totally agreed with.  It was titled You are born a man or a woman.  You don't get to choose.

In the article, Matt talks about a male who has a transgender surgery and takes hormone replacement therapy, to achieve a feminine physique, and then fights in a female combat competition of some sort (not really my kind of entertainment, so I'm sorry if I'm butchering the lingo).  The transgender movement was thrilled by the fact that this man woman person beat the tar out of his/her female competitor.  But when it really comes down to it, the truth is that the DNA of this person is male, no matter how he changes the outside or how many hormones he pumps into his body to change the tissues inside.

(Have you ever been on hormone therapy of any kind?  I've been on birth control and coming off of it was a nightmare!  Again, these surgeries and medications and therapies that are part of the transgender choice are NOT fun.  I believe that a person must be hurting very VERY badly to make the choice to undergo all that physical pain.  I am so sorry that these people are hurting so badly!  But the truth remains... or does it?)

I used to think that if something could be scientifically tested and proven true over and over again via the scientific method, then we could all agree about it.  So let's talk blood draws.  There is a blood test, used at this time very rarely, for moms in the very early stages of pregnancy whereby the mother can learn the gender of her baby.  Except, I guess, if the doctor tells the mother she is having a boy, and the mother really wants a girl, then the mother can simply change the baby's gender because of her own desire?

But I'm sure that's not acceptable in any ideology, because that would be impressing the mother's view on the baby.  So perhaps it's instead that the baby should get to determine their gender after they're born?  But at what age do we start believing them?  My 3 year old switches back and forth between telling me she's a girl and telling me she's a boy sometimes 20 times a day.  When do we settle on one if we don't go with what DNA tells us?

(Side note - it's strange to me that all of this transgender movement is hitting at the same time as the "Gender Reveal" fad.  I mean, finding out if you're having a boy or a girl at about 20 weeks gestation is HUGE!  There are reveal parties, reveal pictures, the ultrasound tech hiding the gender picture in an envelope so the parents can learn it at a set time.  So you get super pumped to have your boy, and then at age [whenever he can talk and express his opinion otherwise] he gets to decide he's a girl?)

I read this article a few years ago, and it just struck me as weird:  Parents keep child's gender a secret
The effort these parents go to in order to "not have their child defined by what's between the child's legs" is amazing.  And to each their own.  This parenting thing is wicked hard!  But I can't imagine the amount of effort it would take to NOT share my child's gender in those first weeks.  To be honest, their little butt cheeks are out more than in with all the pooping they do in those first hours, days and weeks.

And while I disagree with much of their parenting philosophies, I'm sort of with these parents in that toys and colors do not a gender make.  If my boy wants to play with dolls, he will be able to.  If my daughter is inclined to wear blue and push cars around, that would be ok with me.

To help those around me (and because I think they're cute and because someone has to make a decision about what they wear - I'm the Mom, so I guess that decision rests on me) I dress my boy in the mostly "boy" colors of blue and green.  And my girl has a mind of her own, and it is definitively set on pink, and sparkle, and pretty, and twirly.  She ranks skirts and dresses based on their "twirl-ability factor."  I didn't do that to her - I try to dress her in things that don't twirl (and consequently don't require tights on a 15 degree day).  She wants tights and sparkle and twirl. (Unless she wants to tromp through the snow.  Then she wants boots rather than sparkle shoes, but only because my requirement is that if she's stomping through snow, she must be wearing boots.)

But not acknowledging that what is "between my child's legs" in some way defines who they are?  That seems... well... naive?  foolish?  a lie.

My babies do not have to fit any mold but their own.  They are unique individuals, created as one-of-a-kind.  One of my all-time favorite kids books is On the Night You Were Born.  It has a line in it that I just love, "...there had never been anyone like you ever in the world..." The book's simple verse speaks to the uniqueness of every child. That Heaven rejoiced with each birth, with your birth.  And while each of us and each of my babies is unique, we all must figure out who we are.

We each have to look somewhere for the answer to that very difficult question: "Who am I?"  We look to our families, to our jobs, to our schools, to our teachers, to our peers, to our pets, to our clothes, to our doctors, to our toys, to our preferences, to our television, to our computer/iPhone/Kindle/electronics, a million places to answer that question.  And everywhere we look, we find answers.

Our families tell us we are wanted, or maybe we aren't.  Our jobs tell us we are successful, or maybe we're not.  Our schools and teachers tell us we're smart, or maybe we're stupid.  Everyone, everywhere had ideas about who I am, who you are, who my babies are.

But I am responsible for figuring out who I am, and figuring out who I'm going to believe when I am told something about myself.  How do I do that?  Where is the plumb line of truth?  How do I know that I'm building my beliefs about myself on the firm foundation of truth?  And the answers to these last three questions help determine how I will set an example for my babies to follow - they will learn how to figure out who they are based on how I figure out who I am.

Sometimes, when life gets confusing, going back to the basics is the only thing to do.  I check my body structure.  According to the classification systems we have in this life, I can confirm that I am human.  I check my medical records of blood tests, urine samples, physical exams.  Indeed, I am female.

If I didn't want to look female, I could cut my hair, change my clothes, take hormone therapy, even have a gender change operation.  But changing my DNA.  That can't be done.  The fact would remain that I am still, always, female.

I know that there are cases, RARE cases in which gender is complicated.  And you know what, I've wondered what I would do if my child was born "intersex" (or ambiguous genetalia).  The answer is that I don't know what I would do.  That is hard.  I don't have an answer for that at all.  And if that ever were to happen, I would figure that out at that time.

But what I do know is that in most, MOST cases, there is a clear gender that can be determined by a quick "diaper check" or a blood test.  And even when it can't be determined that simply, even in those rare cases, there is STILL a classification that those individuals fall into, and at the very least, I would help my child find part of their identity in that.

Why do we question gender?  To me it seems like the most basic, most simple truth.  So when my 3 year old asks me, "Mommy, am I a boy or a girl?"  I respond instantly, "You are a girl."

I want this unchanging truth firmly embedded in her adorable head right along side the, "I love you" truth.

So much in this life is questioned.  There is uncertainty all around us.  Let's not try to add gray shades to things that are so obviously and simply black and white.  Please?  For me.  For my babies.  For my family.  For the future.  And, you know what?  For you.  Because you deserve to know who you are on a most basic level.

Welcome to the family Whitaker.  We're so glad you're a boy.