Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

These balances are hard for parents to achieve: to supervise without presiding over, to caution but not demand, to impel but not insist, to protect but not throttle.

Abrupt, decisive transformation occurs regularly in fairy tales, fantasy literature, and comic books, but not in most real lives, where change tends to be gradual and incomplete.

natal girls who are trans see their mothers as disenfranchised and therefore wish to be men, while natal boys wish to draw close to detached mothers by becoming girls.

My experience is that no one becomes transgender who had treatment early. If you work on separation anxiety and aggression, the gender problem starts to fall away. Anxiety is what leads to gender dysphoria.”

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not.

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We heal our wounds with the love we wish we’d received, but are often blind to the wounds we inflict.

The debate over gender identity was once framed as a nature-nurture divide; nowadays, it’s an intractable-tractable divide, which is equally hard to call. Clearly nature is involved, but the question is whether nurture enables it, whether it can and should disable it. The answers are frustratingly vague. Psychodynamics has proposed a range of contradictory explanations for cross-gender identification; as Amy Bloom wryly pointed out in her book Normal, it’s either absent fathers and overinvolved mothers, or dominant fathers and submissive mothers; it’s parents who encourage cross-gender identification and play, or who forbid and thereby mystify cross-gender identification and play. Some little boys may want to wear dresses because they have brutal fathers who scare them and loving mothers with whom they identify; others may have a condition determined by genetics, brain development, or the uterine environment.

distinguish between an immutable imperative and a transient neurosis.

no movement seeks to legitimize stereotypically feminine traits in men. Girls can be masculine; boys are effeminate. Girls in jeans and T-shirts wear “unisex clothing,” but boys in skirts are “in drag.”

Bryan has since been given diagnoses of oppositional defiant disorder—a dysregulated relationship to those in authority—and major depression.

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they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

Infertility may be the steepest price of transition; many trans people I met spoke of the longing to have children, but transmen mostly disliked the idea of carrying a pregnancy, and transwomen mostly mourned their inability to do so. They wanted to be fertile in their affirmed gender, and our science is a long way from making that possible; this issue as much as any other defined the limitations of transition.

changing social mores and advancing science have caused us to question the basic structuring principles of human society.

At the same time, I know that choice can be burdensome and exhausting and frightening—especially unaccustomed choice.

Some people, however, conceive children as a means of validating their own lives.

Most choose to procreate even though the affluent could conceive children in vitro with donated Superman sperm and Wonder Woman eggs.

Ordinary people insist that they are unique, while extraordinary people maintain that they are really just like everyone else.

When broad-mindedness blinds us to our offspring’s needs, our love becomes denial.

parenting is no sport for perfectionists,

two things in life look incredibly daunting until you realize that almost everyone does them—driving and having children.

I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight.

Most of the parents I interviewed for this book said they would never want other children than the ones they had, which at first seemed surprising given the challenges their children embody. But why does any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined? If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children—brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished—I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.

I have said that parents do not reproduce, but create.

Parenting is an exercise in safety, and the perpetual menace of danger is what exalts parental love above affection; without the night terrors, the spiking fevers, the litany of bruises and woes, it would be a second-rate entertainment.