Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a fortnightly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.
Two years ago, my brother and his family visited us in Spain from the US, where they live. My niece, half Indian-half German by ethnicity, and fully American by birth and education, was 17 at the time. My brother had a worn-out, exhausted look when he talked about his daughter. “She can argue the hindleg off a donkey,” he’d said, dolorously. “I’ve given up. You talk to her.”
The problem seemed to be my niece’s full philosophical embrace of what goes by the shorthand, “wokeism.” This particular Americanism is a contested word, one that’s difficult to get a handle on, even with the best of intentions. The term was originally coined by progressive Black Americans and used in racial justice movements in the early to mid-1900s. To be "woke" politically in the Black community meant that someone was informed and educated about issues of social injustice and racial inequality.
Today, the word has gone global. Conservatives use it pejoratively – to describe youngsters with thin skins, who take offence more easily than a chameleon changes colour, cannot face reality without trigger warnings and begin social interactions with asking about preferred pronouns. It stands in for what has otherwise been described as the “snowflake” generation.
My own boys go to school in Spain, which is so free of US-style wokeism that it could certainly do with a dollop. (This is the country where the national basketball team did an ad before a visit to China, with the players using their fingers to stretch their eyes upwards into narrower “Chinese” eyes. And genuinely thought it was funny.) So, I was both curious, and at least at the outset, energetic enough to play the philosophical pugilist with my niece.
The first few days we circled each other around the idea that gender is not a biological fact and is rather a fully socially constructed concept, not to be confused with sex. Gender, which can be male/female/both/other, is about how you feel inside, and is apparently divorced from the sexual organs and chromosomes you are born with, my niece explained.
We talked the issue over for a couple of days, with me playing the provocateur, trying to get her to parse her thoughts on why feeling misgendered was different from, for example, the medically recognized, psychological condition of body dysmorphia. This is when someone feels there is something wrong with their body, even though others cannot see it.
My niece remained unmoved, amused at my obtuseness.
I asked her to think about how far we could stretch the idea of fluid identities. If gender was fluid, then why not race? Could I become Chinese because I felt that I was? And to what extent could the idea be stretched? Full ontological fluidity? Could someone decide they were a tree because that’s how they identified? I felt quietly triumphant at this last rhetorical flourish. Surely now, my niece would back down. Not so.
Of course, someone could choose to be a tree, my niece replied. Her criterion was that in making that identification/choice, said person had to live authentically with the consequences of that choice. A man, who chooses to become a woman, must also accept all the disadvantages that come with womanhood. Similarly, a tree-person would have to live like a tree – without speaking, or moving, standing about outside, until the end.
I was taken aback by the radical nature of my niece’s assertions. But then I reminded myself that she was 17, and we had all had our versions of radical at that age. It’s a time when arguments and possibility and rhetoric and pushing boundaries trump quotidian realities, and constraints and common sense, which are all very middle-aged and quite dull.
In the end, going head-to-head with my niece left me as exhausted as my brother had claimed to be at the outset. And even more so imagining what I have in store with my boys, who were only 10 and 13 at the time of these conversations.
They haven’t expressed any desire to be girls or Chinese or trees, yet. But they are definitely cut of argumentative Indian cloth. I have been trying to steer clear of politics and religion. There is something about youth that wants certainties. And these two subjects, in particular, call for nuance.
I just want to talk about non-controversial things - but what are these things? Even when we look at the night sky and I point out the stars, a debate starts up about Pluto and its un-planeting, with a for and against side. It’s as if I haven’t given birth to children, but a debate team! I had an inkling of this scenario when my older son was only five years old. He had looked at me very solemnly and said, “Mama, some people believe in God, but I believe in the Internet.” We have this quote framed and up in our kitchen. It’s a maxim he still lives by. Debates aplenty in store for our family. Luckily, I happen to believe that a family that philosophizes together, stays together. What say you, dear Reader?
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