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What if Cinderella attends the wrong ball? What if she's asked to catch a ball, instead of dance, and is ridiculed for refusing? What if Cinderella is a four-year-old boy named Jake whose parents desperately want him to get into an elite private school?
These are among the questions raised by A Kid Like Jake, a new play by Daniel Pearle that had its world premiere at Lincoln Center Theater in 2013. The play presented a topical but largely unsung dilemma: how to raise such a boy in the face of norms more wicked than a fairy-tale stepmother.
Much like the parents in the play, psychotherapists are awakening to gender nonconformity and the pressing needs it places on us as practitioners: to challenge tradition, welcome new voices, and expand our capacity to hold and reflect forms of expression, identity, and self-narratives that have no precedent. Daily, we are challenged by the ever increasing number of “gender-creative” children and adults as they arrive at our offices and transcend our culture's normative definitions of male/female (Ehrensaft 2011). Even more important, and too often overlooked, is our personal experience of gender meanings as they seismically shift and