Poor Mojo's Newswire

Once a month I get together with half a dozen moms from Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. We call ourselves Hookers, Sluts and Drug Addicts. They dubbed me a Hooker because I wear tight clothes and smile a lot. Sally, a stay-at-home mom of boys, is a Slut, because she’s always touching her body. The Drug Addict is a therapist who can drink a bottle of Cabernet in one sitting. (All names and some details have been changed so I don’t lose more friends than I already have.) Some work and some don’t. The working ones complain about their jobs and the non-working ones complain about their husbands. We go to different restaurants, drink too much and make fun of the Catholic at the table because she is pregnant with her fifth child. (She is a Slut.) We argue over which of each other’s husbands we would have sex with if we had to. On my first Hookers, Sluts and Drug Addicts outing, to a new restaurant by the Gowanus Canal, I was excited to meet Sally. “She’s very sexy,” said my friend Cassie, a mother of three who recently had a tummy tuck. “Especially since her breast reduction. She flirts with everyone, male or female.” Sally and I hit it off right away. She had short hair and heavy lids. It turned out we had met ten years ago at the pool room in the back of the Brooklyn Inn, bantering and competing for boys. Sally went to the bathroom and I waited in front of the door for her to finish. When she came out, I said, “Lemme see your tits.” . . . The combination of irresponsible contraception and illegal drugs among Regressives is the reason New York is in a baby boom right now. Those couples you see, grimacing, with the two babies fifteen months apart? They were drunk. What other drugs do Regressives choose? Nineties drugs like pot and cocaine. Plus benzos—Xanax and Ativan—which our doctors prescribe for the sleep disorders we all suffer from post-parenthood. Two dad friends I know go out once a month to a nightclub, sit at a table, swallow Xanax recreationally with beer, and make each other laugh.

The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, “has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).” They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents’ ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time. After consulting their pediatrician, a psychologist and parents of other gender-nonconforming children, they concluded that “the important thing was to teach him not to be ashamed of who he feels he is.” Thus, the purple-pink-and-yellow-striped dress he would be wearing that next morning. For good measure, their e-mail included a link to information on gender-variant children. When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself “a boy and a girl,” but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways. Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man. Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. On days he opts for only “boy” wear, he heads off with a little swagger. Of course, had Alex been a girl who sometimes dressed or played in boyish ways, no e-mail to parents would have been necessary; no one would raise an eyebrow at a girl who likes throwing a football or wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt. There have always been people who defy gender norms. Late-19th-century medical literature described female “inverts” as appallingly straightforward, with a “dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework” and “an inclination and taste for the sciences”; male inverts were “entirely averse to outdoor games.” By the mid-20th century, doctors were trying “corrective therapy” to extinguish atypical gender behaviors. The goal was preventing children from becoming gay or transgender, a term for those who feel they were born in the wrong body. . . .