XX

A future as female

As some of you know, I am slated to become a grandfather in 2025. To mark the occasion, I have begun writing letters to my prospective granddaughter, which I hope will ultimately become part of a larger project that tries to capture what it’s like to be alive in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I hope it will be of some value to you now and her later. —Jim

December 27, 2024

Dear Baby,

Your mother came out to the house after work on the evening of the 23^rd (she was laboring as a policy advisor to the 56^th governor of the great state of New Jersey), and it was the first time we were in the same room at the same time, even if you’re still unborn. We may have “met” in person sooner—the last time I remember seeing her was over the summer, when you may or may not have existed—but this is the first time I was really aware of you. You’re quite the distraction, kid. And I only expect you to become more so in the coming days.

On Christmas Eve, your parents announced that you are a girl. This was my hunch, and I told your grandmother as much. And I rather like the idea; for the last two generations of my family, the boys have come first. But the news made me feel a little uneasy, because I’m not sure I’ve really thinking of you as a girl when I began writing these letters. Actually, I’m not entirely sure what that even means, except that in general I’ve always felt more comfortable talking with males than females (though as a teacher I’ve tended to be partial to girls, in part because they are on average better students). It’s not that I’ve never imagined female readers of my work, though I’ve usually done so as particular people that I happen to know. That said, the current book I’m writing is a collection of essays about women in which I picture my reader as a fifty-year old wife and mother (maybe ex-wife and mother) who plucks it off a shelf at a museum bookstore and decides she likes the idea of feisty females of hundreds of years ago who prevailed amid adversity, man-made and otherwise. It will be impossibly obscure by the time you grow up. It will be almost impossibly obscure if, as loosely scheduled, it shows up sometime during the first half of 2026. But that’s all right. It kept your Grampa out of trouble. Which is really the point of these things for me now.

A girl: that is your sex. Your gender is another matter; we’ll have to wait and see about that. But your sex is one of those fixed variables, a die cast, that has already shaped the course of your life. There are roads not taken, roads you henceforth cannot take. Already. For precisely that reason, it is one of the characteristics of the world into which you’re arriving that there has been some determined effort to minimize, even eliminate, consideration of sex from a discourse in which one’s identity should be wholly a matter of choice. I regard this view as sadly, even dangerously, misguided. But what I think is not especially relevant. I expect in any case that the prevailing common sense by the time you’re an adult will be something neither I nor anyone else alive right now will be able to fully anticipate. Someday I hope you will sigh at the foolishness of young people. (Maybe think of me and smile.)

It does appear that history is on your side. Indeed, one could very plausibly tell the story of the past couple hundred years as one in which the status of women has generally—though not steadily or predictably—improved, notwithstanding the resistance of men and ambivalence of women for whom progress inevitably involves tradeoffs. (Actually, I don’t actually believe in progress as such—I’m a Darwinian in the sense that the human social world consists of varying and shifting environments that at any given moment will work to the advantage of some people and disadvantage of others. “Fitness” is a fickle thing.) But certainly you have reason to be hopeful: you are entering a world into which women have had more educational, athletic, and occupational opportunities, and more control over their reproduction, than ever recorded in the annals of History. Still, as stockbrokers like to say, past performance does not guarantee future results. History is twisty.

In any event, you have reason for hope. Hope can be a mixed blessing. But it’s a blessing nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m glad to have made your acquaintance over Christmas. As an unborn child you are a foreign country, and as an unborn female child you are even more so. This is a trip I will be glad to undertake, my imperfect vision notwithstanding. I eagerly await your arrival for the journey to begin.