Letter to a Child Never Born (4)

      But I’ll be just as glad if you’re born a man.  Maybe more so, since you’ll be spared many humiliations, much servitude and abuses.  If you’re born a man, or won’t have to worry about being raped on a dark street.  You won’t have to make use of a pretty face to be accepted at first glance, of a shapely body to hide your intelligence.  You won’t have to listen to nasty remarks when you sleep with someone you like; people won’t tell you that sin was born on the day you picked an apple.  You’ll have to struggle much less.  And you’ll be able to struggle more comfortably to maintain that if God exists he could even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl.  You’ll be able to disobey without being derided, to love without fear of pregnancy, to take pride in yourself without being laughed at.  But you’ll run into other forms of slavery and injustice: life isn’t easy even for a man, you know.  You’ll have firmer muscles, and so they’ll ask you to carry heavier loads, they’ll impose arbitrary responsibilities on you.  You’ll have a beard, and so they’ll laugh at you if you cry and even if you need tenderness.  You’ll have a tail in front, and so they’ll order you to kill or be killed in war and demand your complicity in perpetuating the tyranny that was set up in the caves.  And yet, or just for this reason, to be a man will be an equally wonderful adventure, a task that will never disappoint you.  If you’re born a man, I hope you’ll be the sort of man I’ve always dreamed of: kind to the weak, fierce to the arrogant, generous to those who love you, ruthless to those who would order you around.  Finally, the enemy of anyone who tells you that the Jesuses are sons of the Father and of the Holy Spirit, not of the women who gave birth to them.

Child, I’m trying to tell you that to be a man doesn’t mean to have a tail in front: it means to be a person.  And to me, it’s important above all that you be a person.  Person is a marvelous word, because it sets no limits to a man or a woman, it draws no frontier between those who have that tail and those who don’t.  Besides, the thread dividing those who don’t have it from those who do is such a thin one: in practice it’s reduced to being able to grow another creature inside one’s body or not.  The heart and the brain have no sex.  Nor does behavior.  Remember that.  And if you should be a person with heart and brains, I certainly won’t be among those who will insist that you behave one way or another—as a male or female.  I’ll only ask you to take full advantage of the miracle of being born and never to give in to cowardice.  Cowardice is a beast that is forever lurking.  It attacks us all, every day, and there are very few people who don’t let themselves be torn to pieces by it.  In the name of prudence, in the name of expedience, sometimes in the name of wisdom.  Cowardly as long as some risk is threatening them, humans become bold once the risk has passed.  You must never avoid risk: even when fear is holding you back.  To come into the world is already a risk.  The risk of regretting later that your were born.

Maybe it’s too soon to talk to you like this.  Maybe I should keep silent for the moment about sad and ugly things and tell you about a world of innocence and gaiety.  But that would be like drawing you into a trap, Child.  It would be like encouraging you to believe that life is a soft carpet on which you can walk barefoot and not a road full of stones, stones on which you stumble, fall, injure yourself.  Stones against which we must protect ourselves with iron shoes.  And even that’s not enough because, while you’re protecting your feet, someone’s always picking up a stone to throw at your head.  I wonder what other people would say if they could hear me.  Would they accuse me of being crazy of just cruel?  I’ve looked at your last picture and, at five weeks, you’re not quite half an inch long.  You’re changing a lot.  Instead of a mysterious flower you now look like a very pretty larva, or rather a little fish that’s rapidly putting out fins.  Four fins that will turn into arms and legs.  Your eyes are already two tiny black specks enclosed in a circle, and at the end of your body you have a little tail!  The captions say that at this period it’s almost impossible to distinguish you from the embryo of any other mammal: if you ere a cat, you’d look more or less the way you do now.  In fact you have no face.  Not even a brain.  I’m talking to you, Child, and you don’t know it.  In the darkness that enfolds you, you don’t even know you exist: I could throw you away and you wouldn’t even know I’d done so.  You’d have no way of knowing whether I’d done you a wrong or a favor.