Parenting and Gay Children

"In the end, the joy of the castrated boy is that which he initially dreaded: to be mistaken for someone that you are" (Lee 53). As a young boy, Lee was afraid of castration. He was afraid that people would think that he is a girl. As an adult, however, Lee has accepted his femininity, and his greatest joy is when someone "mistakes" him for a woman (referring to his mother's comment about being confused about whether her child is a son or a daughter). Although Lee's mother seems more accepting of of Lee now, things were different when he was a little boy. His mother used to threaten him: " 'If you don’t stop acting like a girl and start being a boy, then we’ll have to take you to the hospital and get your pee-pee cut off so that you can become a girl.' I was appropriately terrorized by this threat: what six-year-old isn’t scared of hospitals, knife blades, operations—especially on the tender private flesh between the legs?" (35).

Lee points out that his mother was merely trying to protect him as he lived in a strictly hetero-normative Korean society. On the other hand, Sedgwick argues that while Green is "obscenely eager to convince parents that their hatred and rage at their effeminate sons is really only a desire to protect them from peer-group cruelty," Green's arguments is obviously fallacious as these same parents kick their gay sons out onto the street (Sedgwick 25).

In essence, both authors touch on the role of parents. Sedgwick argues that parents' inability to accept their homosexual or transgender children stems from the imbalance of assumptions between nature and culture (which advocates the treatment and therapy of gays). Meanwhile, through his narrative, Lee implies his mother's preoccupation with society and how it would react to her son. Ultimately, both agree that parenting of homosexual or transgender children can be improved if the cultural view that homosexuality needs to be eradicated is abandoned.