Catherine Newman

My 12-year-old son has hair halfway down his back, and the fact that the bottom half of it is currently pink does not seem to be clarifying anything for anybody: everyone, everywhere assumes he’s a girl.

This is fine with him when people are nice about it, or when someone tells me how beautiful my daughters are (“a compliment is a compliment” seems to be his sensible motto). It’s less fine with him when people are dolts, like the security guy in the airport who said, “What’s your name, sweetheart?” then recoiled from Ben as though he’d suddenly found himself hitting on RuPaul. Or the guy at school who pinned him to the ground and cut off all his hair.

Oh, wait. That didn’t happen to Ben. But it did happen to somebody, and I’m thinking of it in the wake of President Obama’s fully evolved support of gay marriage alongside Mitt Romney’s apology for his bullying of a schoolmate: “There’s no question that I did some stupid things in high school, and obviously, if I hurt anyone by virtue of that, I would be very sorry for it and apologize for it,” although Mr. Romney also says, “the thought that that fellow was homosexual was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s.”

Even looking back 50 years, Mr. Romney’s claim that the boy’s sexuality was not part of the equation feels implausible to me. Because that’s always the point with children who don’t look right, right? It’s that the refusal by some men and women to dress the part means that the great human drama (a k a heterosexuality) can’t be cast correctly. If we don’t know which is which, how we can pair up everyone in properly reproductive two-by-twos, Noah’s Ark-style?

My own blog shows common search terms that people type in about it, and one of them is always some variation on “Catherine Newman son gay?” Of course, I’ll be happy whether Ben turns out to be gay or straight. But his stylishness notwithstanding, he is currently as gay or straight as your average kitchen table; Ben is more likely to marry our cat, or the board game Settlers of Catan, than he is a man or woman.

But people get nervous about gender because so much seems to be riding on it. It’s fear that makes some of us treat marriage like an injured baby bird that needs to be coddled, and equate people who incorrectly prefer sequins or flannel with the end of the family as we know it, instead of seeing that loving families and happy children come in both traditional and varied forms.

So I’m thrilled about Mr. Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage not just because it means more gay weddings to attend, but also because the more room there is for gay people, the fewer constraints there are on everybody. In my utopian vision — and you can’t raise children without a utopian vision — the world takes a deep breath and expands: everybody gets to wear what they like and look how they want, and nobody is afraid anymore because the stakes are so low.

My pink-loving son or yours never has to put on the chinos-and-navy-polo-shirt accounting department costume mandated by his gender, because nothing important is hanging in the balance. Our bald newborn daughters won’t need to wear those weird headband-y bow things. And no one will be forced to cut off whatever doesn’t fit into a narrow idea of who, exactly, people are supposed to be.