Meet The Family

The Gender Bender

Damian closed the door and walked inside the empty hall. It was a spacious, cosy, warm-looking home. The brown curtains were large enough to cover the windows, but hyaline enough to let all the sunlight needed to come through. The large sofa in the centre was clean and brightly-coloured, like most of the walls in the house. Damian gave a brief look around the living room and climbed upstairs, straight to the corridor and right into his room door, before Mrs. Tindsley could notice him past the corridor and called his name.

"Damian!" his mother voice sounded through the door. It was a sweet voice, warm enough to unchill him, not too shrill to annoy him--just soft enough to soothe him. Damian felt a lump on his throat, he didn't enjoy seeing his mother worried about him.

"Please come in, mum," he said, while she opened the door. She would never knock before entering, father would mumble where had she got her manners all the time. "Oh!" she knocked the door, feeling embarrassed by the look of her son. Damian sometimes wondered if she really had a sense of her own, or she needed to check the look on other faces to understand her own mistakes.

Mummy sat down next to Damian in the bed, "I'm all ears!"

Well, Damian didn't know where to begin, actually. He'd been called a bad name at school, but he deeply believed his actions in the past had led to his classmates thinking bad of him, and so the name he was called was just a reflex of the impression he gave to them, an act he had called upon himself. "Mum!! Are you even listening?"

Mum was gazing in his direction, Damian was sure of it, but her look had tripped over a point in the distance. Her pupils were dilated, as if she'd heard something he was not sure about having said. He laid his hand on her shoulder.

"Yes, yes! I'm listening, of course. But let's cut the tidbits in and move onto the juicy part!" She would use this old-fashioned language whenever she was caught off guard, but Damian laid a blind eye on that for the moment and condescended to cutting to the chase. "These guys, they reached up to me in the locker room and called me a poncey!"

Mrs. Tindsley gazed horrified at her son, not saying a word, while he repeatedly looked downwards fearing she may not believe him. "Honey, I believe you. But you haven't thought straight yet..." Her words drifted through the air, and Damian felt them misplaced.

"Mum!"

"Sweetie, umm..." Her cheeks rosed up, and Damian saw she couldn't hold a laughter. Mummie would always laugh at the most awkward situations.
"You should focus on the situation first. What happened before, what were you doing and what did they do afterwards?"

He had seen a boy two days before, who passed by two of them and pushed them with his shoulders. 'Watch out!' he heard them yell at him. "Sissies!" he snickered. A friend of his that was next to him whispered, "That's Dodoh. He owns this school!"

Mrs. Tindsley laughed again at Damian's report. "Own, you say?" Damian nodded. "What more?"

Damian was going back from the showers when the same two boys stood in front of him and barely forced him to pass between them. Damian squeezed untouched, but still they turned around and called him that name.

"And then?" mummy asked. Then he ignored them and picked the towel back on his seat. He asked his friend what's wrong with them. "Don't mind them, Damian. They belong to disfunctional families"

"What the sweetest little friend for my son to have!" Mrs. Tindsley frowned.

At dinner, his mother served him the recipe Damian liked the most, meat&mashed potato pie. "Dear Lord! You're spoiling the kid" complained Julian, the elderest member of the family and Mrs. Tindsley's father-in-law.

Samantha, the twenty year-old bachelorette who'd wound up at the house thanks to her aunt, tweezed through her mushed veggie salad and quietly served her plate. Damian peeked into her dish and asked her how was the food. Great, she promptly retorted. He was expecting a mild, "And how's your food?" when Mr. Tindsley snazzed into the breadwinner's corner with a flickering twist, "Ms. Dickinson has food habits that differ from ours. Let us leave her experiences and character shape her actions, as she leaves ours to our own.

"Damian, son, your mother has revealed to me about your gender--social roles issues. Your mother and I have... deliberated on this matter of so much importance to you--and, of course, even greater importance to us.

Julian quietly finished his meal and left the dining room. He was very keen on his nightly habits. Damian and Samantha glanced at each other. He felt at the same time in comfort and amazement. "Listen to your father, Damian."

"There is something I'd like to point out first. There's Sex, and there's Gender. The first is something you're born with and defines you on a strictly physiohormonal basis. The second is a completely different question that doesn't depend on the first.

"There is not gender, there are genders. It's not like you're born with one and stuck with it through the rest of your boring life. On the other hand, you are everyday on a quest of defining your identity and the place you fill in on the world.

"Take, for example, two people that have two distinct genders. One is complementary with genders 1 and 3. The other person is only attracted to genders 1, but is also capable of developing relationships with people gendered 2s. There comes a gender 1, who likes both 2s and 3s. The first, who is a 2, can freely opt between the last one and genders 3, but she will be most likely rejected by the second, even though she's a 3, since she prefers 1s to 2s. That way, the 1 will be tempted to opt between the 2, who is open to other kinds of shared relationships, and the 3, who is mad for him and has a shorter pool of pretenders to cheat with."

"I'm bi..." Samantha said, "thought that, well, it could be... comforting for you to know..."

"Well, I'm not. I'm... Sure of it!" Damian's voice sounded through the silence within the room, along with the noise of the chair rushed backwards from the table. "Baby!" Mrs. Tindsley echoed. He didn't need to make a fuzz of it. "But I'm not. I just, I... thought..."

Boris Tindsley eyes carried the weight of the world. Damian felt crushed and fell back to his chair. It was as if his father had yelled "Sit Down, Kid!" but multiplied by a number with ten digits. Damian shouldn't have stood up before he was done talking, not like that... "I know this is serious. I know... Father, this is all too hard to deal with.

"But I know! You have padded through the same lumps I'm coping with now, so you felt the same I did, tenths and tenths of years ago. But I know that. And I know I can cope with it. I... I promise, dad!"

"Damian!" Mrs. Tindsley was deeply shocked at the exasperation of her son. She cared about him, and what troubled her bruised her ten times more.

"Enough!" Boris pleaded, "It's 10pm and you kids need to go to bed on time. You too, Samantha. And you, little son, I am going to have a talk with your principle."

Mrs. Tindsley clapped her hands. Off you go, now!