From the Introduction One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child''s name and how old he or she is. --Erma Bombeck Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. --Fran Lebowitz Excuse me, sir, but you''re sitting on my body, which is also my face. --SpongeBob SquarePants I have a couple of kids in my life, my partner''s children, and they were quite young when I met them--three and five years old. Both were at an age when gender is not so fixed, and so, upon meeting them for the first time, I got what was for me a very predictable question from them both: "Are you a boy or a girl?" When I did not give a definitive answer, they came up with a category that worked for them--boy/girl. They said it just like that, "boygirl," as if it were one word, and, moreover, as if it were al- ready a well-known term and obvious at that. Since naming has been an issue my whole life (as a young person I was constantly mistaken for a boy; as an adult, my gender regularly confuses strangers), this simple resolution of my gender ambiguity within a term that stitches boy and girl together was liberating to say the least. Boygirl I am and boygirl I will remain.

Of course, as time has passed, both kids, a boy and a girl, have recognized that the world sees me a little differently than they do. When people ask if I am their "mum," they look baffled; when people call me "sir," they seem comfortab≤ when a teacher refers to me as "she," they roll with it but they persist in calling me "he" and their "stepdad." The little girl happily told one of her friends that she had a dad and a stepdad, at which point she gestured proudly toward me. The little friend seemed slightly confused, but then she also rolled with it: "cool," she said and turned to her mom: "That''s her stepdad," she explained. The mom looked at me; I looked at her and shrugged. Life is complicated, genders are complicated, families are complicated, and yet we have so few words for these new and often quite welcome complications that accompany massive social shifts. And so we make do. We let kids who have not yet learned the appropriate languages for indeterminate identities name what escapes adult comprehension.

Children nowadays actually have a fantastically rich archive of wacky representations from which to draw as they make sense of their worlds. If SpongeBob SquarePants is anything to go by, and I believe he is, then children can find all kinds of examples of ambiguous embodiment in the materials that TV and cinema market to them. SpongeBob SquarePants and his crew of spongy life forms all experience a soft relation to reality, and while life in Bikini Bottom bears some resemblance to life above the water, it also operates according to its own set of rules, code violations, morality, and propriety. The villain of the piece is the money-grabbing Mr. Krabs, but SpongeBob and his best friend Patrick also often square off against a mean-spirited octopus named Squidward. The significance of SpongeBob SquarePants to contemporary gender norms, I believe, cannot be overstated; while earlier generations of boys and girls were raised on cartoon worlds populated by cats and mice, dogs and rabbit chasing each other across various domestic landscapes, this generation has come of age to an animated mythological universe populated by characters with eccentric and often simply weird relations to gender. And so we take SpongeBob SquarePants as our guide, following the hedonistic and cheerful sponge whose body, as he reminds one chap who sits on him, is also his face, in looking for fun, in mistrusting people who only want to make money, and in tracking down treats made with peanut butter. SpongeBob aside, this book tries to grapple with the shifts and changes that have transformed the way we live our genders and sexualities over the last twenty years.

While in universities, philosophers and queer theorists, including myself, have for years pondered the meaning of gender norms and studied the development of sexuality within matrices of normativity and perversity. We scholars don''t always explicate clearly or accessibly. And that is unfortunate, because the fact is, this world within which we live, work, and love has changed dramatically since our parents raised us, and we all need a guide to the new social and emotional structures that support these changes. Just to name a few of the most obvious changes that have impacted our daily experiences of sex and gender, in the late twentieth century and early twenty- first century, we have seen a massive decline in the prevalence and dominance of monogamous marriage and a huge rise in divorce and diverse households. In the United States, we have also witnessed a new and startling visibility of transgender communities and individuals as well as new levels of acceptance for normative gays and lesbians. Gay marriage is on the horizon and the homo- hetero binary seems less definitive of sexual orientation than it did at the turn of the last century. What has brought so many changes on and so quickly? The answer is: everything! In other words, change has occurred on account of the boom/bust economy; advances in computer technology; new medical research; increased mobility; new forms of social contact and social networking; new modes of media including Twitter feeds; new levels of media surveillance and intrusion and new forms of social control; etc., etc.

Obviously, there is no need to pinpoint one singular narrative to account for the massive changes that we have experienced in our life× and in many ways, it would be weirder if our ideas of family, desire, the normal, the ordinary, the extraordinary did not change as everything else around us shifted, evolved, developed, and col- lapsed. That things change should neither surprise nor alarm us; it should interest us, however, and should engage us enough to spur a reconsideration of the terms, the names, the categories we use to understand our bodies, our relationships, our bonds with others, our connections to strangers, our intimacies within and beyond biological relation, and our imagination about the future. Change, indeed, is the air that children breathe, which may be why they are more flexible than adults. But before I launch into a child-centric account of new genders, let me acknowledge that the child has all too often served as a justification for the most wretched forms of social and political conservatism in the United States since at least the mid- nineteenth century. A lesbian couple I know who live in San Francisco, just to give one example, became alarmed, after the birth of their daughter, about the amount of sexually explicit material in the shop windows in their very gay neighborhood, the Castro. Suddenly, the same environment that had made them feel excited about living in the city became the source of discomfort and concern. They quickly pulled up stakes and moved out to a suburb where the child would, according to them, be safe from the impact of openly displayed sexual materials. This is a couple that for years had engaged in a polyamorous relationship and had incorporated all kinds of sex toys into their sexlife.

Suddenly, however, on behalf of their infant daughter, they rushed to avoid the very materials that had nurtured their own very queer desires. We all know of the "protect the children" ruses that religious Americans have used to censor all kinds of materials that feature any kind of open discussion of sexuality-- remember that in the 1970s Anita Bryant created a "Save Our Children" campaign that was designed to counteract a pro-gay rights initiative in Florida, and this was followed in 1978 by the Briggs Initiative in California, which sought to ban gays and lesbians from the classroom. Now that California has passed a resolution requiring that gay and lesbian history be taught in the schools, we can tell ourselves that we have traveled far from these paternalistic measures; and of course we have, but the problem is that the exact sex-negative attitudes that fueled antigay sentiment three decades ago now sneak new forms of sex negativity back into dynamic social systems--but this time via gays and lesbians themselves! While we currently train teenagers to think of sex in terms of all the bad things (pregnancy, sexual diseases) that could happen to them if they actually "get lucky," many children are more wily and more canny than their parents think, and it is this generation of kids--kids growing up in the age of divorce, queer parenting, and economic collapse--who will probably recognize, name.