My oldest grandson, aged 11, came home from school with some exciting news today. The annual school camp is happening next week, and he’s going to be sharing a cabin with his absolute besties, Aaron and Mary!!! He then went on to pronounce that Mary is NOT a girl, she’s actually a boy, has always been a boy even though she was ‘sorta’ born a girl.
I was very impressed with his matter-of-factness about the issue. Like, it’s actually NOT an issue at all. Mary is one of the boys and thankfully the school has acknowledged this too by allowing her to share camp digs with her mates. Kids go on camp…that’s the end of the story.
(When the kids first met at school last year, the boys came home with the story that Mary was a tomboy. All good, I was a tomboy too. Then Mary came to visit for pool parties and stuff, and it was pretty obvious to me that Mary was not just a tomboy…but not my place to say anything to the kids because I had no idea if she had come out, whether her parents acknowledged the situation, nor the school for that matter).
But today is a good day. Kid (11) is totes nonplussed now, just rapt that he is going to be sharing a cabin with his besties. Why can’t the rest of the world be like this?? If kids can get it, what the hell is wrong with adults who can’t wrap their minds around the situation?
*Using the pronoun ‘she’ still as that’s still Mary’s preference apparently. Phone calls will be made to the parental units tonight to find out if this is definitely the case.
My wife and I were born in 1958. We married in 2010 or so after our lives carried us apart. So anyway, we talk about our high-school friends.
One of the girls in our class disappeared, her family moved shortly before graduation. My wife reports that she had been born with ambiguous genitalia. All the girls knew, and none of the boys did. Imagine that.
My wife supposes she decided to identify as a boy, and moving to another town was how that was done in the Bad Old Days.
What a heavy cross they had to carry! Their family too. The story sort of brought home to me the situation some children find themselves in. I shows how we have to do all we can to help.
Sorry, nitpick, this means he is totally confused, perplexed or puzzled. I think you mean the opposite of that. There aren’t a lot of good words for the opposite of nonplussed, maybe “clear-headed” would work.
Anyway, good for your son and his friends, and the school. And good for Mary too.
FWIW it’s become one of those annoying contronyms. Usage to mean unruffled or unconcerned is common now. Honestly I hear it more in that intent that as meaning confused.
Meanwhile good for the matter of factness of the kids!
I think your link is telling you that the dictionaries are not there yet. It might be more accurate to say “it is becoming” annoying. In the battle of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, in which we all linger somewhere in the middle, this usage has not yet met critical mass apparently.
Perhaps because the word is fairly uncommon in daily usage. Then someone reads it someplace, misunderstands its context and intended meaning, and proceeds to use it to mean the opposite in an effort to seem well-read by using an uncommon word. In my opinion, that’s how these things usually happen.
The great thing about being a kid is that everything is “normal” and nothing is a big deal until someone teaches them that it is. Granted, there are dangers in that too, but for this discussion we’ll stick with the positive.
Great for your son. Wish the whole world was as welcoming. Mary is about the right age to start on puberty blockers, and hopefully avoid most or all body disphoria.
My middle kidlet came out about 18 months ago as trans after being more or less done with puberty.
Seeing that this thread has seemingly devolved into a nitpick of my use of the word ‘nonplussed’, which I used in good faith and still stand by its value here, I’m going to ask for this thread to be closed.
Yeah, nice things are all good, but if the main takeaway is a semantic dump on my use of the word nonplussed, then I’d rather the thread goes away. Roderick Femme does this sort of thread shit regularly. I’m not playing.
