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Identity

The Film About the Messy Reality of Learning to Accept Your Nonbinary Child

"A Kid Like Jake" follows a couple learning to accept their gender non-conforming child. Trans director Silas Howard tells Broadly about portraying that journey honestly, missteps and all.
Still, Courtesy of IFC

Director Silas Howard got his start working in independent films that deal with transgender themes. In 2015, he was brought on to season two of the Emmy award-winning transgender dramedy Transparent, where he directed episodes like “Bulnerable and "Just the Facts” through 2016. For the past year, he’s been focusing his directorial vision on a new feature film, A Kid Like Jake (available today on Video on Demand). The film follows two parents, Alex (Claire Danes) and Greg Wheeler (Jim Parsons), as they attempt to place their gender nonconforming son Jake in an appropriate New York City kindergarten by consulting friends and teachers, two of whom are played by Priyanka Chopra and Octavia Spencer.

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Along the way, they are faced with seemingly unending questions: Private or public school? What should they say about Jake on applications? How can they do their very best to help their child succeed? Answering these questions is something that most first-time parents have to do for their children—but Jake is different. Jake is a four-year-old boy who likes to wear dresses and play with his Cinderella doll. Is it a phase, or could their child be transgender? While Alex and Greg have been accepting of Jake’s gender expression at home, once they have to address his behavior in public with teachers, school administrators, and friends, many more complicated feelings come to the surface.

In an interview with Broadly, Howard explains that he was “intrigued by the messiness” of the story. Alex and Greg are relatable characters who love their child—but they also argue about whether Jake is “normal” and at times refuse him to express himself the way he wants. For a transgender viewer, these moments can be painful to watch—but A Kid Like Jake isn’t made for a transgender audience. The movie isn’t even really about Jake—he’s hardly in the film at all.

Rather, the film explores parenthood in the context of our expanding understanding of gender. For that reason, it might not register as groundbreaking to audiences tired of narratives focusing cis people’s reactions to a trans subject. But it is powerful as a story that examines the pain we feel when our fears impact the love we have for someone—and the ways our identities as parents, spouses, and friends become frustratingly entangled with social morés we thought we were above.

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“It’s really hard to do the right thing."

A Kid Like Jake also shows the absurdity of the private school system (the Wheelers try to “sell” their child’s unique gender-expansive play for a spot in class) and follows Jake as he struggles to deal with adults who want him to dress or act differently than what comes naturally to him. Though these school politics are probed, Howard says he “was more interested in the messiness of the blame game and the way societal pressure plays out between us as people.”

And although open-minded people might feel frustrated watching parents who aren’t 100 percent supportive of their crossdressing child every minute, Howard says it’s important to understand the humanity of the Wheelers’ story. “A lot of my friends who are trans who read it, they really understand the parent’s struggle,” he explains. “And for parents today who like to think of themselves as open, they don’t want to see that struggle. I was interested in showing that.”

“Ultimately, what I like about it, is that Jake will go to whatever school they can deal with,” Howard tells me, boiling down the story down to its most significant point: “The support has to come from where they can control.”

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To Howard, it is of the utmost importance to tell these kinds of stories with empathy, so that they can become a map for people in the world who are going through the same thing. The film implores us to have compassion for the Wheelers because they’re reflective of real people: Just because they’re struggling, doesn’t mean they can’t get there. “I work with LGBTQ youth and they always were like, don’t show me the parents doing it wrong, show me them doing it right,” Howard says, explaining why he needed the Wheelers to learn on-screen that it was destructive to try and restrict Jake’s self-expression. “We need to model.”

Jake is a child worried about child things: He’s focused on playing with toys—regardless of whether they’re marketed to boys or girls—and running around in his favorite tutu. His parents are the ones left to deal with society’s projections and navigate identity politics on Jake’s behalf.

There are thousands of parenting handbooks for couples raising cisgender children, but far fewer roadmaps for those with kids who are exploring their gender identities. Howard explains that he believes parents, no matter how well intentioned, don’t always know what to do. “It’s really hard to do the right thing,” Howard explains. Alex and Greg’s hesitation when it comes to parenting their gender nonconforming child isn’t malicious, but rather, an uninformed reaction that can and should be worked through. “I think it comes out of fear. And if we look at that fear, then maybe we start to map a way to go passed it.”