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something,” Kelly would say. “He’s showing us who he is, and we’ve got to help him figure it out.”
    All Wayne wanted was to have a “normal” family, just like everyone else. Everyone else doesn’t have a normal family, Kelly told him. She hadn’t had one, and maybe that’s why she wasn’t crushed, like Wayne, when Wyatt turned out to be different. Kelly didn’t know what a perfect family looked like, so she had no expectations. She had no threshold for disappointment, no picture in her mind or her heart that Wyatt wasn’t living up to. But Wayne did have a picture from his own happy childhood, and as far as he was concerned, every time Wyatt dressed up in girls’ clothes he made a mockery of it.
    “Wyatt, you don’t want to wear those shoes,” Wayne would say when Wyatt appeared in a pair of Kelly’s heels.
    “Yes, I do.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “You don’t really want to be a girl.”
    “Yes, I do.”
    That’s how the conversations—if you could call them that—went. Wyatt wearing a dress; Wayne wanting Wyatt to act more like a boy. Around and around they went, with Wyatt just as stubborn and determined and convinced he was correct as Wayne was. And each time her husband and child had one of these back-and-forth exchanges, Kelly knew Wayne was fighting reality.
    One evening, when the twins were about three years old and had been tucked in for the night, Kelly sat down at the computer in the living room and typed five words into the search engine:
    “Boys who like girls’ toys.”
    It was both a question and a statement of fact. For Kelly, it was also a beginning. She scrolled through science articles, online forums, and medical sites. She read about homosexuality, transsexualism—wasn’t that what drag queens were?—and something called transgender. She read for hours. Her first thought was, well, maybe the girls’ toys and clothes and behavior meant Wyatt was gay. But sexual orientation was the same thing as attraction, and that seemed almost crazy to imagine, at least in a three-year-old. Transsexualism certainly wasn’t right, either, since that seemed mostly about adults who undergo surgery to change from being male to female or vice versa. As for being transgender, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defined it as “of or relating to people who have a sexual identity that is not clearly male or clearly female.”
    Well, that was sort of like Wyatt. One of his best friends in pre-K was Cassandra, and she taught him all the girly things he wanted to know. For instance, a girl doesn’t dry her hands at the sink in the back of the classroom with brown paper towels. Oh no, Cassandra told him, a girl gracefully shakes her hands, fast, like they’re on fire. Cassandra was the girliest girl Wyatt knew. She had long hair that fell all the way down her lower back. She even had long nails and wore nail polish. It was true Wyatt loved to play with dolls, but he was also very physical. He could throw a ball even better than Jonas, and he often wrestled around on the ground with his brother.
    Gender, Kelly read, was the belief that you’re male or female. It was something innate, not something you had to think about or tell other people about, unless those other people treated you like one gender when you felt you were the other. Kelly didn’t remember ever having such self-conscious thoughts when she was a child.
    The articles flew by, she took notes, and she kept searching, that night and the next and the next night after that, until the words she was using in her searches got downright ridiculous: “Boys who like pink,” “Boys who have bowl haircuts and wear shirts on their heads, but have male toys and like wrestling.”
    She kept coming back to that one word, “transgender.” Gender is about having the physical characteristics of a male or female. Gender identity, she read, is something else—and it has nothing to do with having a penis or a vagina, and everything