A friend's secret

Maybe she thought she could trust me, or maybe she just really needed to tell someone right then. We were both about 10, and our conversation then sheds light for me on a minor item in today’s report from the Elmer City Council meeting last week.

She’d come over to our house with her parents, who were friends with my parents. Sally and I didn’t know each other well, but got along OK. She was with me when I fell off the cliff, but that will come a little later on in this story.

This is about her, and all of us.

We lived at the foot of Marshal Grade, where the long gravel road met the highway that wound along the Clark Fork River and ended its journey from the southern edge of the Bob Marshal Wilderness, just east of Missoula, Montana. It was beautiful country.

Just uphill from our home overlooking the river was a gravel pit, a place where my dog and I often trekked through to get to a neighbor’s house further up the road, or just to experiment with sand and gravel to experience what I now recognize as their fluidity, how they flow and under what conditions. A kid can learn a lot of physics this way.

Sally and I were sitting atop a small cliff in the middle of the pit, watching this phenomenon and talking about whatever typical 10-year-olds might. But then …

“I’m not really a girl,” she said, as if commenting on the shape of a cloud or the coolness of the evening.

Huh, I thought, I wonder what she means by that.

She’d always known she was really a boy, she said. She couldn’t explain it, she just knew it, and it was beginning to bother her more and more.

I don’t remember my reaction, exactly, but I think it was mainly one of curiosity. I’d never heard of such a problem. Girls are girls, and boys are boys, or so I’d thought.

We didn’t talk too much more about it, but I never forgot Sally’s heartfelt revelation.

Times were different then. I suspect 10-year-olds now may know considerably more about sexuality than we did then, which was basically nothing, other than it was very interesting that girls and boys looked very different. American society wasn’t quite so preoccupied by it either; that was just around the corner of time.

Sally wasn’t telling me something she felt was trendy, or even an idea she’d been exposed to at school or out in the world away from her parents’ home. That didn’t happen in middle America in 1965 when overt sexuality hadn’t quite yet been deemed a necessity by the drivers of fame and advertising.

She was up on a flatter piece of the top of the gravel cliff, which I think was perhaps 25 feet high at most. I sat out on a thinner blade of the cliff, watching the fluid sand fall down below me as I absently moved my legs back and forth sideways a little as we spoke. I didn’t feel the movement beneath my jeans until it was too late to react. Down I went.

I remember screaming, and it took at least five minutes to fall. Sally heard nothing and only noticed me lying on the fine sand far below after realizing I wasn’t talking anymore.

The wind had been knocked out of me, and I was shaken but fine. I’d landed on my stomach on a steeply angled pile of soft sand that absorbed the energy of the fall. I came to, and we headed back to the house.

Nearly six decades later, I’ve long ago conquered my fear of heights that began that day. I rarely recall that conversation with Sally, or whatever she might be called now.

But the memory was jostled lately by the insistence of some that we must change our common language to accommodate new understandings of gender that are not so binary as I understood when I was 10. Sally helped me understand what they mean, which brings me to Elmer City.

It seems the town is busy changing pronouns in job descriptions, which had referred to “his” or “her” job is stereotypical ways — the city superintendent does his job; a city clerk, hers, and so on. The solution preferred by many these days is not to insert “his or her,” but to add a now gender-neutral and ambiguous “they.”

This is a mistake, not just in Elmer City, but in all of society.

It will not serve to advance the cause of encouraging, or forcing, respect for all people. It will make it more difficult.

The language we speak is not unchanging, of course. It changes all the time. But a forced change of this sort that makes meaning ambiguous — did that “they” mean “him,” “her,” or an actual plural “they?” — will weaken our ability to communicate, even if only by a small degree.

As I learned, as one tiny grain of sand after another fell from under me while I spoke with Sally on a lovely evening in our childhood, eroding foundations just a little at a time can be very counterproductive. Our language is the foundation of communication.

Let’s learn to respect each other for who we each are with love and compassion, not by artificial changes that weaken our ability to tell each other our stories.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher

he/him