I need people to know my son.

Because I need people to care about my son.

Not in the casual way they care about their favorite sports figure being out for the season with an injury or the celebrity crush going through their latest divorce or conscious uncoupling.

No, I need people to care about my son in the same ways they care about their own children, or their niblings, or their aging parents, or even themselves.

And I need elected officials to love my son not only for a season, like when they need his vote or my vote or the vote of anyone who truly cares about trans people and the LGBTQ+ community, but for lifetimes.

Because lifetimes are what’s at stake.

My trans son is who helped me truly understand the full complexity of being human.

Being his parent and navigating his experience with gender alongside him blew open my understanding of everything in this world, requiring I cultivate the courage to take a critical look at all I’d subconsciously absorbed, untangle the mess, and rebuild with an unflinching honesty.

What that meant for me is doing some of the most deep, personal, and vulnerable work I’ve ever done.

I questioned everything, my son, most often—at least at first. My need to know if my child was trans bordered on compulsive. I felt definitively knowing was the only way I would be able to parent him, to advocate for his needs.

Back then, some 15 years ago, the most common answer you got if you Googled whether your child was transgender or not was, somewhat ironically, fairly binary: If your kid was “consistent, insistent and persistent” in their desire to not be their assigned sex at birth, chances are your child was trans. If not, then your kid was … probably not trans, but … maybe?

That answer did not bring me any closer to understanding what my child needed from me.

Turns out, as with so many things in life, I was just asking the wrong question.

Instead, appropriately, necessarily, I turned my gaze inward, where my focus should have been all along.

Then, the questions I started asking weren’t about whether or not my kid was trans but, rather, why I was so afraid the answer might be “Yes.”

After the 2024 election, pundits, analysts and legislators were eager to dissect Harris’ loss and, to the surprise of no-one, they found an answer quick: trans people.

From Tom Suozzi to Seth Moulton to Chris Murphy, Dems almost immediately pointed fingers at the demographic that not only needs and deserves the most protection but is also one of the most reliably Democratic voting blocs.

Instead, they told us, in a chorus as loud as it was redundant, we need to once again focus our embrace on the working class, slough off our insistence that trans people deserve humanity, and quit quibbling over inclusive language and equity because, as they noted in quieter and more veiled language, all of those things make the average person uncomfortable.

“We need a bigger tent,” Murphy said over and over and over again.

No, I thought to myself, over and over and over again.

What we need, what all legislators who can’t fathom why protection of LGBTQ+ people is not something you negotiate away after an election loss need, is bigger imaginations and a bigger commitment to community.

I recognize the language of discomfort. I recognize the posture of not understanding and then, instead of committing to understanding, letting defenses rise. I recognize the defensive stance meant to protect my peace and stabilize my worldview.

Because I came to my trans child via questions. I came to my trans child in discomfort, in knowing that I was going to have to take my understanding of reality down to the studs and remodel my relationship with and in this world in very fundamental ways.

Yes, that work is hard. Yes, that work can be uncomfortable and intimidating. Yes, that work is delicate and vulnerable.

But, it’s work every person who is elected to represent people—whether locally or nationally—should be willing, even eager, to do.

I carved out new understanding by putting everything I knew under the microscope so I could think honestly about how I knew what I knew and the ways in which the world worked to uphold consensus around normal and good and worthwhile.

Doing this work made one thing clear: There is a certain confidence in the patriarchy and social norms around gender that tricks us into believing they’re immutable.

But, once stripped of their illusion—eyes, heart and mind wiped clear—you begin to really see that nothing and no one is ever easily categorized.

The more I dug, the deeper I sunk, the clearer I was able to see I didn’t really know anything at all, and I could choose to let people—everybody, not just my kid—tell me who they are for themselves. I could meet people where they are and, from there, let them unfold at their own pace.

I learned that agreeing, uncritically, to the social contracts I’d been eased into since childhood was only serving a majority experience that too many people I love don’t share. People in power (and, yes, if you’re having the majority cis, hetero experience, you have power) are careful about what and who might disrupt or topple their own understanding of the world and, more importantly, their place in this world.

They can’t or don’t often engage with this truth because it’s not charming or kind to admit that you want to keep your stake in this world stable and that, most often without thinking, you’ll sacrifice people in really vulnerable positions to so.

But when you start to understand that posture is everyone’s default—we all, no matter who we are or how evolved or inclusive, unconsciously protect our own high ground—you also start to realize that one of the tent poles of being engaged in the world, of building community that really matters and sustains, is to be forever vigilant and conscious about leveling that same high ground.

We need our elected officials to get back to doing the work that matters: Committing to making sure the legislative power voters trust them with is used to protect the most vulnerable among us.

I need the people I vote for to do the work themselves—and help those around them do the work—of adjusting their own worldview to enfold within their majority the humanity of people, like my trans son, who have a different but no less valuable lived experience.

For every legislator who thinks that closing ranks and acting as if the LGBTQ+ community is dispensable is good strategy, please understand there will be a cost: My vote, and the vote of everyone who loves me and my child and every trans child and person out there who in their own beauty make this world better.

There will be no us without them, and I will not cast a vote for anyone who thinks, acts, legislates, strategizes, speaks as though that’s possible, period.

And what I’m inviting everyone reading this to do is commit to the LGBTQ+ community with this same force: Let your legislator know, now, today, tomorrow, for all the day going forward, that action, words, strategy that betray the LGBTQ+ community will cost them your vote.

Take action today:

1. Go to the Congress.gov Find Your Members website and enter your zip code. You will be provided the names and phone numbers for your congressperson and senators. If you additionally wish to contact your state legislators, you can find them via 5calls.org by entering your zip code.

2. Julia Serano provided this sample copy, and I love it’s directness and passion. But, please feel free to customize:
   
   Hello _____, my name is _____ and I’m a constituent from _____. As an LGBTQ person [or ally, or family member of, etc.], I am calling to express my dismay at the number of Democratic politicians who have proposed retreating from trans rights since the election, and the lack of Democratic pushback to speaker Johnson’s and representative Mace’s congressional and proposed federal anti-trans bathroom bans. It’s clear from states where Republicans hold a trifecta that they will not stop with restrooms, or sports, or with trans people—their goal is to roll back all LGBTQ+ rights, censor all LGBTQ+ content, and force all LGBTQ+ people out of the public sphere.
   

   We need our Democratic representatives (like you) to vocally speak out and push back against [and filibuster, if speaking to a senator] any and all anti-LGBTQ+ policies and legislation. Democrats also need us: LGBTQ+ people comprised 8% of voters in November’s election, 86% of whom voted for Vice President Harris. So I urge you to work together with our community to fight back against this GOP anti-LGBTQ+ onslaught starting now!
   
   I promise, I will remember what you did in this moment—whether it be strongly standing up for us, or capitulating to Republicans’ anti-LGBTQ+ moral panic—when time comes for the next election cycle. Thank you for your consideration.

Start Your Own Learning Journey

Here are a few resources for you to start your own dismantling of internal biases that keep us all captive:

1. A digital resource my trans son and I created that talks through in plain language how gender-affirming care happens.

2. Other writing I do around parenting my trans kid to give you a personal perspective on this care.

3. Julia Serano’s work is invaluable and who I turned to often when doing the work of understanding my trans child so I could show up for him the way I wanted and need to show up for him.

4. Erin Reed, an award-winning trans journalist who I depend on for the latest news that affects the LGBTQ+ community.

In last night's, Ben was graduating. In parts, I was helping him get ready. In parts, I was giving away clothes from his very early years, many feminine presenting, all well past fitting.

There was an emotional tension I could feel acutely, even in waking.

The honest nostalgia for his youth, of being able to carry him, literally, his weight in my arms and against my body. The tension of letting go, over and over, not just of what was, whatever was, but in age, too. The letting go that independence has always and will always demand.

But also, ...

The tension of knowing that in advocacy, most specifically parental advocacy for trans kids, there is shame attached to grieving. More precisely: The shame around the idea that you'd ever grieve an embodied and very much alive child. And with that specific sentiment, that shame, I can wholeheartedly agree.

But shame also subsumes and swallows the tension I experience here, in this dream and in this life. There is no room to miss what was, again, whatever was, without labeling that longing shameful. Even "longing" is not precise enough.

So, I come to realize time and time again that there is no word for my experience. And all the words I have are fraught and charged with the potential to batter those humans, my own included, I most want to protect and lift up.

My mind makes up the difference, I suppose. Giving me imagined opportunities to say goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello, to every old and new part of my kid as their own growth continues to outpace my heart.

Most often, trans kids are expected to *feel* certain ways about gender-affirming care, and those feelings are almost always at opposing ends of the spectrum: misery or euphoria.

Some of that is the fault of the medical system and how the medical system categorizes gender-affirming care. For trans kids to access care, even gender clinics are still functioning under the model where they must prove pathology.

Many gender clinics use a kind of a wink and a nod, where they acknowledge trans kids have more complicated feelings but still need pathology recorded for insurance purposes.

Now, however, this same idea around pathology has trickled down to how most people frame gender-affirming care: Life-saving. A way for a kid who is depressed and anxious to find relief and stay alive. 

I talk about this care in this way all the time.

And I do so because it's true. Gender-affirming care is life-saving and essential and oftentimes pursued because a child is in distress.

But, ... that is not the whole story.

Not even close.

I find that kids like Ben are often not given access to the whole range of emotions, especially around care they receive. Instead, they're boxed in, told how to feel (directly and indirectly), left no room for much beyond distress/relief, dysphoria/euphoria.

Ben's first look at his chest unbound came after his first post-op appointment, before he stepped into the shower after 10 days of recovery. When he came out, he looked ... unsettled, a little sad, maybe. 

I didn't push. Slowly, he distilled his feelings to a succinct sentence he spoke with his back to me, sitting on the edge of the couch: "If I like the results, why don't I feel happy?"

I didn't have an answer for him.

A few crossed my mind: You've been in recovery for 10 days. You had surgery and haven't fully healed yet. You're returning to school and may be feeling a little anxious.

The truth is probably all those things and then some.  He was looking at a body he wanted. He was seeing real and welcome changes. But, changes nonetheless, and not all as he immediately might have expected.

Because what outcome in anything ever wholly matches expectation?

Most people can voice neutrality or moments of disappointment or sadness or any number of feelings when that crack appears and is acknowledged—and they can do that openly and  honestly.

Trans kids are too often caught in an impossible place: Any hesitation threatens future care, for themselves and other trans kids. Any sadness too often misinterpreted as regret, feeding the harmful mischaracterizations of gender-affirming care as forced upon trans kids or the dangerous misconceptions that trans kids are too young to participate in care decisions.

The truth is obvious but often forgotten: Trans kids are full human beings and should be allowed—and encouraged—to access the full range of emotions without their feelings being constantly dissected in order to either question surety or use as evidence of regret.

The capital T truth is:

1. My trans son having moments of sadness around gender-affirming care does not mean that care is not essential. Those feelings mean he's human.

2. My son not feeling instant euphoria around gender-affirming care does not mean he regrets that care. It means he's human.

3. Even moments of regret, which he hasn't voiced, do not mean gender-affirming care is not essential health care. It only means trans kids are human.

It's easy, even for me, to pigeonhole trans kids.

So many conversations around gender-affirming care center other people's expectations and what other people need to feel comfortable providing trans kids autonomy over their bodies: certainty, desperation, relief.

But we do a real disservice to trans kids when we let our own feelings disrupt how they process what's happening to them and to their own bodies.

When our own comfort demands instant and everlasting happiness to continue accessing care, we are, in maybe small but still harmful ways, dehumanizing trans kids.

When we can't allow trans kids access to the full range of human emotions but instead demand expression of only predetermined, socially acceptable feelings around gender-affirming care, we are dehumanizing trans kids.

My trans kids is a whole human.

Every trans kid is a whole human.

Let's make sure we all give them the space to live full lives.

Unless you speak and act in a way that suggests you are transphobic, I always assume your intentions are genuine. The question itself doesn’t necessarily bother me—I understand the concern on a very basic level.

When Ben and I were first starting to talk puberty blockers with his care team, I chatted with his principal to update her on what was going on. As someone at the head of an environment my kid was spending a good part of his day in, I wanted her to understand.

During that conversation, she looked at me and asked: "How can kids know this young?" The context here, to be clear, wasn't hostility or disbelief, more wonder and honest curiosity.

I skipped answering her directly and instead moved to my more general fears, fears that are probably rooted in grieving a potential, not because I don't believe my kid or question what they need. "The big one for me is fertility," I said. "That's a lot for a kid their age to process." When considering next steps, steps that aren't decided yet, Ben didn't hesitate in their acceptance that one road meant biological children would not be possible. "I can always adopt," he said.

"I have one adopted and one biological child," his principal offered. "I never felt like having a biological child was important, even as a little kid."

I nodded.

"I think kids can know that pretty early," she added.

What struck me as interesting is that she was openly curious about my kid's ability to truly understand his own experience of gender but definitively positive about his feelings toward biological children.

What this conversation drove home to me is that we're always more willing to accept what mirrors our own experience.

Still, my kid's understanding of their own gender is as innate and natural as any cisgender person's. Just as you don't wake up every morning questioning who you are, neither does he, even when his understanding may be more fluid than your own. Age has absolutely nothing to do with this certainty.

He is who he is, through and through and through.

Learn more about how puberty blockers are prescribed to trans kids.

The lesson (or at least one of the lessons) is that it's very easy to look at trans kids and think they can't possibly know what they know about themselves, that their feelings will almost certainly change or they're confused or ... on and on and on.

I can tell you, though, that of every single person I've ever met in my life, my kid, these kids, know themselves best, are truer and more honest about who they are than anybody on this planet. 

So, believe them.

Challenge yourself to step outside your own experience, your own doubt, your questions, your own sense of how things should work or be and ... just ... believe them.

You were happiness, tucked away inside me, my solitary secret for half a day after taking a pregnancy test at work, hoping, hoping, hoping, then, your presence announced in a single digital word.

But around me most everything else was falling apart. My relationship with your dad. My job. In the frankest terms possible: I wanted you, and remaining in a life that didn’t suit me until you showed up seemed like the fastest way to you, especially when time seemed so short.

Of course, that’s not even close to the whole truth. Hindsight has a way of sharpening our focus, helping us deliver our memories and motivations in neat, sensible packages, untangling them from the messy present they come from to arrive with pristine clarity and reason.

But life is nearly always a jumble of experience; there is very little you’ll be able to boil down to its simplest and most certain source. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with thinking there is always a definitively right choice to be made, one that will lead to an outcome untarnished by shame or anger or guilt or envy or selfishness or regret … or goodness and nobility, even.

And if that sounds foolish and naive, it’s because it is. We are released from perfection the moment we engage with this world, our only hope being to become perfectly us.

Still, that script running in the background, unconscious and hidden, paralyzes you. You think you’re pursuing your best self, but what you don’t understand is that being is a continuous act of creation that depends on you listening to your own voice. I confined myself to a kind of indecisive neutrality, where what was right became only ever about what was good for everybody except me.

My becoming was fashioned from expectation and patched with a compulsion to blend in. I watered my roots with an understanding of my place as supportive and secondary, and, later, the need to punish myself for loss. I was grounded in denial of my worth for so long I saw no way to unearth my self; I had no path to my own truth.

Until you.

Of course now, the idea of being knotted in such a stringent binary—a version of exactly right versus wrong—makes me snicker. Watching you continue to grow into yourself has forced a personal reckoning, one that’s sometimes racked with sobs, fighting with every inch of myself to just let go.

Let go of everything I’d internalized my entire life, from what desirable bodies look like to how love manifests to where boundaries are and the rules of engagement that govern our internal dialogue and how we navigate this world. Let go of thinking that because I’d internalized these ideals they were somehow right and worthy of consideration and care.

I’ve written quite a bit about our journey, your journey. What I’ve never really stripped to its bones was my own. Perhaps because my own is filled with contrasts that appear despite my best efforts to only ever feel goodness, optimism, confidence.

But part of this love story, this deep, true, love story—parent and child—only exists because I can no longer turn away from my own truth. And truth, like everything, is muddled and messy. The hardest thing to reconcile with myself as a parent and a person is how asleep I’ve been my entire life, and how on some of the challenging days I wish without wishing for that rest again.

(But not really.)

Because knowing you and loving you forced me off autopilot. But supporting you, being your parent, required I re-examine my entire worldview, grapple with my own version of … everything. Here is how I think of it: I was thrown into an ice cold pool of water and when I came up for air I found myself in an entirely new universe where all my internal messaging was erased and reset.

I needed to look at myself closely and critically—Why am I feeling this way or that way? What don’t I know? Where is my anxiety coming from? What does my reaction tell me about myself?

I was brand new.

The lesson in all of this, I found, is that loving you unconditionally is and always has been easy, but really understanding you and being able to walk beside you and advocate for you required a faithfulness to myself I’d never really developed. I had to find a way to my truth, even the uncomfortable parts, perhaps most especially the uncomfortable parts, and commit to rebuilding with candor.

It might seem like such a simple thing, really, especially for someone who’s lived much of their life so honest and true. But it’s hard to find the words that can encompass what a gift you are, to me, to this world. The infinite ways you’ve helped me soak in vulnerability until vulnerability became strength. The infinite ways you’ve broadened my perspective, leading me to the edge of my own understanding and then pushing me, pushing me, pushing me, to stretch into something new or recognize a part of me I’d forgotten or ignored.

Looking back now, I see all of this for what it truly is: the labor of renewal.

The focus of parenting for so many is the child, and that seems elementary. But you, you made me see that parenting is also about self, of really seeing yourself not as you want to be but as you really are. Parenting you showed me exactly who I am, and then demanded I continually adjust the balance sheets.

You keep me true—to you, to this world (mostly) and maybe most importantly to myself.

Today and everyday, I want you to think of all the ways you believe I love you, then multiply that by forever. Even then, you’ll still never come close to really knowing how much I value you, how lucky I feel to be your parent. How I’ll always see you as the only one who could really help me see myself.

xoxo,

Mama

I sometimes imagine people reading anything I write and getting just past the first line or two before taking a deep breath and exhaling an irritated sigh.

Maybe they roll their eyes.

“Oh, this again,” I can almost hear in my ear. “Man, why can’t you just let it go.”

Truth be told, I wonder that myself sometimes. Not because I feel as a nation we’re at a place where anyone who is interested in social justice, in equality, can relax and say, “Ahh, it’ll all work out.” More because I’ve always been quiet, stunted my voice with a need to be perceived as likable or good.

I am not naturally subversive.

At least on the surface, which is sometimes where it counts.

When I write about Sabine, I often find myself pausing, pushing delete, backspacing … pausing, writing, … backspacing. Which, interestingly, is exactly how many (though many more who don’t) want to deal with her. Recognition. Backspace. Confusion. Delete.

She’s not transgender. Yet. She is gender non-conforming. Although I am never sure the individual experiences are different. In other words: I am never sure she doesn’t—even if loosely—simply experience the world as a transgender child.

I try to parse the difference out. In maybe some of the same harmful ways others do.

“You do not compute.” That’s what I sometimes see scrawled across the face of folks who have this desperate need to want things and people to be what they expect, what they’ve been carefully groomed to anticipate.

My feelings are magnified to infinity. We each carry our own histories. Backbreaking and impossibly oppressive at times. At 44, I’ve been under the magnifying glass long enough to know when it’s time to adapt in order to avoid the harsh, unforgiving, focused light that burns.

Scorched Earth.

Jacqueline Rose, in a long, beautiful essay about trans narratives, punched me in the gut with this idea about ambiguity in reference to gender identity: “At a conference in Philadelphia attended by Margaret Talbot, the journalist who wrote about Skylar, one woman admitted that she was the one who needed to know: ‘We want to know—are you trans or not?’”

That’s me, as a parent.

Ashamedly, yes. But with at the very least an edge of the very same need to protect my child that all parents feel. I want to know because I want to understand the world I need to prepare Sabine for, as one is going to be (right now) distinctly more cruel (potentially) than the other, or others.

So, for me, everything she says and does becomes a clue, and in ways my need for investigative, internally interrogatory thought makes me a decidedly less effective parent, if (sometimes) more effective advocate.

I both gain and lose ground.

Coming up our back stairs, she tells me to call her “John.” She’s playing, continuing a game she started in our alley with a a fairly simple request: “Pretend you don’t know me, mom.”

There’s not a kid in the universe that hasn’t played this game. Distancing yourself from your parents, gaining independence, even if the world where you are alone and someone new is completely imaginary. There’s a danger and excitement to thinking about yourself as someone other than yourself.

“Hi, John,” I say.

I close our back door. Wait. Wait. Wait.

“You coming?” I ask, opening the door and calling out to her. Is that panic in my voice? I hear her feet on the back steps. I think I probably should have let her go a minute or two more. Let her figure out the next move.

“Yeah,” she tells me. Retreating. Back up the steps, into our condo.

Here’s my mistake: “Do you want to be called John,” I ask. There’s a serious edge to my voice that for all my own chiding and self-scolding, I can’t seem to tame.

She’s noncommittal. In this moment, she wants to be both: Sabine and John.

And there’s the word I want to set my sights on, focus my attention and let myself, for once, breath in a space that isn’t constrained by anything beyond: Here is my child, in this moment, right now.

Instead of reading her being both Sabine and John as playful, her working out her own ambiguity, her truly not knowing—or her truly not caring, to be more precise—I think to myself: “She wants to be a boy.”

When really, she (as Jacquline Rose and many others will attest to) may just be returning the focus to where, if we’re all honest with ourselves, we belong: People who can experience a wide range of emotions and identities that, left unlabeled and untethered to ideologies and expectations that are almost always socially instead of biologically constructed, can span great distances without moral implications. Male, female, gay, straight, all, none, one, two.

In my effort to always honor her truth, I begin to find one of my own: My love, my extraordinary respect for my daughter, sometimes acts as a stranglehold on her ability to develop her own sense of self.

In this way, unconditional love can be a burden, as limiting as it is limitless.

Ironically, I find myself banished to the very ambiguity I work against. An ambiguity that, because of our sometimes strict adherence to a binary world that doesn’t really serve anyone, or at the least doesn’t serve everyone, feels urgent and anxious, unnatural.

When really, we all have our own paradoxes, right? Some of which, with time, come to be more definitive, solid. Others that remain gray, fuzzier, less distinct. Neither of which deserve any less respect. None of which make us any less human.

Human.

Not less than.

Ever.

I will go to my grave not knowing every part of myself completely and wholly. There are parts of myself I will continually deny or distort (that’s just the truth), just as there are parts of myself I’ll continue to discover and recognize. This much I know, and this much I’m OK with knowing.

And this: You can’t ever assume you truly understand someone else’s identity or experience. Ever.

Ever.

But you can try to dismantle some of your well-tended presumptions.

Because the people who take you to the edge of what you recognize, dangle you over and dare you to stare wide-eyed without judgment, are, almost always, the most vulnerable, the people most in need—and most deserving—of protection.

I used to think I had a story to tell. And I do, no doubt. But it’s not all mine, perhaps not even half mine or a quarter mine.

Or, maybe my 100 percent just lays somewhere not distant but not close. A shadow that never touches the subject, the active, the I. Trailing but somehow present and visible.

I’m not sure my memory extends back to the first time she ever had trouble. Could it, I wonder? Trouble, in this context, feels so subjective. Will I ever remember her existence as she remembers her existence—skin, bone, cheeks flushed, not flushed, something rising from her belly—not always, not never— hot and and distinct, though unnameable. Even in those moments where we’re both standing there, side by side, present, not in some existential fog but truly, physically, present, do I know?

No. Probably not. I can guess, and often do.

Even people who love my daughter, or who have a passing understanding or sympathy for her, often don’t. It’s that simple.

There’s something, and she won’t say what that something is. The stares, the questions, the mouths dropped open, the possibilities are limited, not endless.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

I assess. Mentally calculating what that “nothing” could encompass.

I know only one topic that could throw her into some abstract abyss and I know, too, I’m to blame.

“Does this have anything to do with the bathroom?”

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The signs meant nothing to me until they meant something to me. My worldview is simplistic in its need to be just: Yeah, whatever, live and let live.

I’m not a simple person. I understand how the world works.

And yet, …

“I don’t want to have to deal with all the questions!”

I don’t know that I’ve ever used an exclamation point to describe my daughter’s feelings but it’s appropriate here. Tired, exhausted even. “I don’t want to and won’t do this” seem to be the refrain. She no longer cares where she is allowed, but takes for granted where she isn’t.

I can talk to myself all day long about how I live in a liberal enclave. Chicago. Where would she ever be in trouble in Chicago? Plenty of places, to be honest. School, for one, three years back, unknown, new kid, stranger.

Now known, not misunderstood, exactly, but the sting of those first weeks still holds, still buzz and catch. If not for all of those places within liberal America where she could find shelter and catch her breath, me whispering, “Fuck ‘em” (not literally), you will have, you will absolutely have the last say,” where would she be, as a person, as a force of nature?

I don’t know.

Because every parent thinks they gave the world a force of nature, right? But, that’s probably not true. You can build them, later, when they truly understand what’s at stake and say to themselves, “Yeah. No.” That might be me. A force come to this force secondhand. Forced by force, so the speak.

True forces, though, they exist disregarding natural order. A whirlwind that are born in spite of the best defenses.

Force of nature seems like an awful lot to put on a person, I’ll admit that. I do admit that. I take what I can, but some things simply belong to her. Or those who have come before her.

I used to think that I was the only true spokesperson for my daughter, but that’s not even close, not even within a mile of the truth. And maybe that’s my undoing, my own Achilles’ heel that I’m so apt at pointing out in others.

Weakness.

My ear is trained to the ground for the marginalized voices that speak, believing I was one of them. A daughter, gender nonconforming. Often mistaken; often aggrieved.

Then, my voice means shit. And it should, right? How have I put at the fore my own voice while knowing that I don’t really know.

I am not my daughter. I am my daughter’s mother.

She’s … tight lipped.

I think it’s OK to think I know. I can be, what?, a sieve through which she unburdens herself, leaving the heaviest of the challenges with me. I’ll speak them when I know I need to and let them rest when I know I can.

But is that what is best? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

After the election I wondered for a long time (though it’s not been too long), what to to do with those tears of hers, of mine. Do I collect them as evidence of what we felt, of how wronged we were? No.

Because again, I can’t remember the first time she was troubled. I don’t remember (and maybe I do) the last. Her voice is hers. So, do I substitute mine for when she chooses to go silent. Quiet. Fly under the potential for attack?

It’s easy for me to say what I want to say. I don’t live the experience. I don’t pay the price for careless words or misguided niceties. Personally, my deliberate resistance has no consequence beyond what I can shrug off as ignorance.

But for Sabine, …

She lives the hate. Those words, that misunderstanding, that prayer, that “love the sinner but hate the sin” attitude that informs so much of some folks’ goodwill shapes her worldview, makes her feel the squareness of that round hole.

I once thought that I could round those edges and flatten that horizon. But I know the only folks who can truly do that for her are those who truly know her because they are her, or have been her, or kind of sort of might be her.

That doesn’t come from a secondhand understanding. No matter how close, no matter how well meaning, the only way to truly understand the marginalized voice is to indeed listen to the marginalized voice. Her voice, even in its innocence and insecurity (or, silence, frankly), is a much better gauge by which to measure the gender nonconforming experience than mine, with its maturity and nuance.

She is the real deal. I am but her echo.

I’ve seen people, privileged people, shout down marginalized voices they disagreed with if only by virtue of thinking they’d done too much to be silenced. I am this because I did that … doesn’t alway ring genuine to the folks who know the cost of that without the reward of this.

So, I listen. Now more than ever. And I beg you do, too.

I can speak as my daughter’s mother. Period. That’s where my expertise ends. I can give voice to how I feel about how she feels. How she feels? That’s hers. That’s for every gender nonconforming ally she has to speak to. My responsibility begins and ends with acting as her microphone, amplifying the authentic voice, not the white cis heterosexual female voice that loves her to pieces but actually knows not one thing about how she feels about being in this world, knows not one thing about how she experience this world.

I know it’s tempting in our desire to help, in our desire to be known as helpers, to forsake these voices because we think our own will reach farther. And that might be true. Our privilege might afford us a wider audience.

But that’s not the point.

The point now, especially now, is to let the the people who have the most to lose speak the most words, have the most attention, seek the most spotlight.

Seek the voices you wish to protect and instead of speaking for them let them speak for themselves and offer them, as example, understanding, love, acceptance, … defense.

To anyone who knows me, the idea that I almost obssesively think about pureness might not come as a suprise. Not in the way you might think of “purity” today, muddled and greasy with moral judgement and traditional standards. No, my idea of purity is more definitively tethered to freedom.

In an interview with Pete Holmes, the host of It’s Been a Minute mentioned how beautiful he found Holmes’ description of being with his newborn baby. “Unecumbered awareness” were his words.

Holmes briefly explains the idea as being that point where you’re so new you haven’t yet inherited a story.

In other words, or in my words, freedom.

Freedom from the family history you don’t yet have the ability to digest. Freedom from the weight of expectation. Freedom from the mutual agreements that bind social interaction. Freedom from disappointment or exultation.

An endless loop of here, now.

Those first weeks, months, are all total presence.

In a meeting about my kid’s readiness for hormone therapy, his past comes up. “He doesn’t have much to say about growing up,” she tells me. The question is specific to gender; I’m there to fill in some of the blanks.

You sometimes hear about parents consciously raising their kids gender neutral, and though that wasn’t my intention, my child’s experience mirrors those efforts, mostly because by happy accident he was in a school early that valued independence.

His therapist talks to me about how she has photos of herself in a dress where she’s frowning and unhappy, but when she asked my kid about his own experience, she got what I usually get when I talk to him about gender: nothing. “He doesn’t seem to have any of those memories,” she tells me. He can pinpoint one, I know, but even that singular moment isn’t unhappiness but more indifferent obligation.

Also: The dress wasn’t about him (though it was about social expectation). The dress was about occasion. (His cousin’s quinceanera).

Now, she wasn’t suggesting that if you don’t look happy in clothes that are gendered you’re trans. Or, that to be trans, you need photographic evidence of unhappiness. I have plenty of photos and memories of clothing I didn’t choose, a scowl pulling at the corners of my mouth, eyes turned upward and arms tightly knotted across my chest.

The unhappiness, as with so many kids, I imagine, was usually complicated, a collection of misgiving. Sometimes situation was what I was really rebelling against, other times the clothing just didn’t fit well or maybe my shoes were tight or my friends had been unkind that day or I really wanted to be somewhere else but was instead right there stuck in front of the camera being asked to smile.

Still, I understood what she meant. There are those moments after social transition or the start of hormones where you can see the weight lift, the person crack open and emerge new and light. I don’t want to say reborn because they’re always the same the person, maybe just more clear and more crisp.

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As I’m talking, she’s writing. “Do you mind that I’m taking notes?” she asks. Of course I don’t. My truth is out. But even as I’m telling her, I think about how cumbered what I’m saying is—by my experience, my understanding of my kid’s experience, my lens.

When I started to think about my kid possibly being trans, I did what some parents do: I googled “trans kids.” Most of the narratives surrounding trans experiences are immediate and definitive.”From three to four year old ..” or “From the moment they could talk” or “… Mommy, I’m a boy/girl.”

“You know I’m a girl, Joseph,” rushes to my memory bank with a gang of similar recollections.The two hours we spent on the playground looking for a monkey clip he’d lost, which he found after tracing our steps back, walking the playground over and over, kicking up wood chips. Hand in hand with my mom in a pink onesie, a pacifier hanging from his mouth. Scooping sand in a cherry-covered swimsuit, lazy curls blowing in the wind. “Do you want to take these photos down?” I ask every now and again. “No,” is always his answer.

When I casually removed a sign that hung on the wall above his door bearing his birth name, tucking it away in my closet where I keep some other cherished items, he noticed the same day. “Where’s my sign,” he called from bed. I was drying my hands on a towel, ready to say goodnight. “I took it down,” I told him from his doorway, watching his eyes fill.

When I asked if he was surprised by his reaction, he told me yes. Not more surprised than me, I thought.

I hung the sign—and the name—back up.

His therapist would have you believe that growing up with this much personal agency is a good thing. “It has come to bite me in the ass, though,” I laugh. Because here we are talking about medical decisions and my kid is unable to … all the words I’m thinking of here feel too definitive: pinpoint, recall.

Everyone looks for that moment when trans kids knew. The knowing is so tightly bound to access to health care that as a parent you’re groomed by almost all the information you read to click back through your memories, carefully dissecting your child so you can say with utmost certainty there was a time when they absolutely understood both who they are and who they are not.

But that’s not every kid’s journey. I’d wager that’s not most kids’ journeys.

Or maybe a better way of saying the same thing would be: My kid always knows who they are, but our insistence that who they are be resolute is the genesis of some internal struggle.

The problem, especially when you’re talking about health care or public space, is that there is no room for exploration or organic growth anywhere. My kid was very young when they started to understand that being who they are was going to come at a cost: in privacy, in freedom, in respect, in the available room they had to move, unencumbered. He was constantly invaded, his autonomy plundered.

“I don’t think he has much use for gender,” his therapist once told me. I agree. Left alone, I think they simply would have grown into themselves. But now, she continues, I think he wants to be able to move seamlessly (or somewhat seamlessly) through social expectation. Those are not her exact words, but I agree again.

When she finally arrives at her true destination, wondering out loud if some part of him feels like he was bullied out of his assigned sex, I hold my breath.

Because breathing sound into that specific sentiment feels dangerous. All over the world, there are people who dedicate their time and energy to spreading harmful myths about trans people: their parents are child abusers, trans kids are too young to know they’re trans, they’re ruining sports, they don’t deserve federal civil rights protections.

As a parent, when you talk honestly about your kid’s experience and grapple with the very real complexity involved, you do so in hushed tones because you know what’s at stake and you understand there are people who will joyfully call trans kids frauds instead of openly appreciating your frankness.

What’s unfortunate is that when stripped of the unchecked and uninformed curiosity and opinions of nearly everyone, there is nothing so different about my kid’s journey to themselves. Every person explores, carries on internal dialogue that reinforces their sense of self. We all experience growth, at least in part, as a refinement of our own understanding of who we are, the capital “s” version of self. We test and retest, embrace and refuse, stumble, gain purchase, a mostly never-ending dance with our own awareness.

Now imagine doing that work under the constant gaze of disbelief and battering debates about your humanity and right to exist. Imagine how noisy that internal exchange becomes, how clogged with chatter designed to sow self-doubt and self-hatred.

But at the same time you realize your participation in public space, your access to care, the fight for civil rights—many times your safety—are dependent on surety. Not only your own certainty, but also your ability to assure the world that you’re not a mistake, that you’re not making a mistake.

I liken what my kid’s own voice must sometimes sound like to them to talking under water where the messages are muddled and distant. And in this loss lies another: their openness—to the world, to other people, to me, to themselves.

This isn’t a call for finger pointing, for those who hate my kid to come charging to the scene to declare they were right all along, trans kids must just be confused.

No, this is a call for quiet.

My kid isn’t confused about who they are, and I am not confused about how much I love him. What I continually lament, though, is how suffocating and small his space to explore himself freely has become. He is guarded and cautious, mostly, I think, because his ability to sink into unencumbered awareness is continually interrupted.

That is what the work of knowing yourself requires, and that is what so few LGBTQ kids like mine are offered.

When I exhale his therapist’s suggestion about being bullied away from a different truth, I have to admit it’s crossed my mind. But I also know in my bones that he is figuring himself out, is working within the space I and those who love him can provide to come up from under and really listen, silence the commotion caused by something as simple as his existence and recenter.

That is why visible allies and inclusive education practice are so important. Because when you rise up and get loud, when you give my kid a mirror they can see themselves in when they’re in your classroom, you’re clearing space, muting the background noise and restoring to them some of the unburdened freedom to just …

be.

My child’s body hasn’t been their own for a very long time. I wonder if they can consciously recall the feeling of true body autonomy. I doubt it.

The sideways glances of strangers, the intrusive questions and sometimes openly hostile confrontations always send a clear and consistent, if at times subtle, message: I know you don’t belong here. Or, I know you aren’t who you say you are. Always the negative to their positive, circling their truth and shoving it away like a shameful secret. Their version of gender the motherland; Bean’s sense of self the invader.

Then, there’s their own sense of dissonance, a corpus at odds with their internal true north. I purposely avoid using the word conflict because that seems to again shade their truth with antagonism when what I want to do is highlight the beauty in their authenticity.

Now on the cusp of medical intervention, doubt again taps lightly at the door and asks for evidence. Even among the believers, I think to myself, the burden of proof falls at my child’s feet.

I’ve said the same thing in a thousand different ways: Bean lives in their body and knows themselves in a way more pure, for lack of a better word, than anyone I’ve ever known. There is no magic to their insight; they know themselves because they have the courage to grapple honestly—whether by choice or necessity—with their personhood, in all its confusion and contradiction, joy and hope, sorrow and cruelty. Sitting in your self (not yourself) is hard and messy work, but required if we truly want to stake our claim on our own hearts.

And yet …

Bearing witness to the relentless refusal of your child’s own experience of their own existence is as mystifying as it is maddening.

They were sunk into a bean bag chair when he pulled a copy of the DSM from a book shelf. He was slightly bent, Bean face-to-face with the cover as he described a single entry: gender dysphoria. The contrast of childhood and weighty decisions felt stark and immediate. “We can’t give you medicine unless you have something that needs to be treated,” he explained.

I crawled to the edge of my seat, uncomfortable. In the years I’ve been reading about gender, Julia Serano describing exceptional gender expressions as “naturally occurring examples of human variation” was a light bulb moment for me. This simple sentence changed everything, brought a clarity and understanding that seemed to sit on my skin and then sink, deep and nourishing, straight to my bones.

I do not want my child pathologized.

I tell them as much, making clear for Bean that their feelings aren’t symptoms. Their being isn’t a diagnosis. These same sorts of variations occur across several species, and would likely be more pronounced in humans if we didn’t so tightly script gender. “Yep, yep,” her therapist agrees in his now familiar shorthand.

I want to be clear that I like Bean’s therapist; I know him to be a strong advocate for the medical needs of trans*/non-binary/gender nonconforming kids. He is doing his job, and his job is a somewhat complicated combination of ensuring kids get the care they need while also appeasing a larger medical environment—and most specifically an insurance industry—that hasn’t caught up to them yet.

I understand and believe in the need for informed consent and readiness assessments. But I also know much of Bean’s life has been a readiness assessment, and they’ve been denied at every turn. A moral outrage for many, a simple shake of the head for some.

The gatekeeping of medical care just seems like the latest.

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

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A few months ago, I rewatched the movie Defending Your Life. I can’t say why I like the movie so much, but something about reviewing pivotal life moments, some that may even seem ordinary, appeals to me. I like accountability; I like the idea of not letting yourself off the hook so easily, of forcing a reckoning of sorts.

Raising Bean has been my personal Defending Your Life. I’ve turned so much of myself over and over, like tilling old soil hoping for more fertile ground. The most surprising discovery is the amount of unconscious bias I find on my own shadowy edges, obscured, ignored even, but established and hardy nonetheless. Holding them in silence, I see the roots for what they plainly are: fear.

Now when we get denials from insurance companies or someone comments on how Bean is an abomination or how there are only two genders, I imagine sitting them down and playing scenes not from their own life, but from Bean’s.

We can start with the day one of their preschool teachers wouldn’t step in and help Bean navigate the constant questions they were getting about gender. There I’d be at the end, sitting across from the teacher at a child-sized table wondering why they weren’t asking some of Bean’s peers to take more responsibility for better understanding them. “They’re always answering questions about whether they’re a boy or a girl from the same kids,” I’d ask from on-screen. Then, a pivot back to Bean from the teacher: “Well, if she gets enough peer pressure, she’ll change.”

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

Next, let’s move to Fenway, opening on Bean sitting at a table with her family waiting to meet a player from her favorite ball club. A quick trip to the bathroom after lunch; an adult swooping into the frame. “You belong over there!” the stranger yells, pointing to the boy’s restroom. Cut to a short time later where this same stranger is behind us as we finish the tour of the stadium, pointing at Bean and whispering behind her hand to her husband.

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

Staying on theme, we’ll move to the park district to watch Bean going into the bathroom before baseball practice. “That’s the girls! That’s the girls! That’s the girls!” a stranger will shout, chasing us in through the doorway. When I assure her we know, she squeaks out a confused “Oh” and starts laughing hysterically.

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

Same park district, same bathroom—a custodian shoos Bean down the hall with a “The boy’s room is down there,” his mouth dropping open and an elongated “Reeaallyyy” escaping as Bean continues in and I let him know we’re fine, they know where they belong.

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

Finally, we’ll close in a hallway in Bean’s school outside the makeshift gym. In line, Bean asks another student why they always seem to have a bad attitude. The instruction was mine; I’d told them to reach out to a peer they said always seemed upset, though I might have chosen different words. We’ll pull in close to the student’s face as she responds: “Why do you act like a boy when you’re really a girl?”

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

Their therapist draws a crude version of the brain on his whiteboard. “Puberty starts in the pituitary gland,” he explains. “This gland sends out hormones to the gonads — ovaries if you’re born female and testicles if you’re born male — that tell them to start producing estrogen or testosterone.” He tells Bean the names of the hormones (FSH and LH) and talks briefly about germ cells.

“Puberty blockers work right at the pituitary gland,” he continues, drawing an arrow to the imagined gland. “They stop these hormones from being sent out.”

He pauses to test Bean on what he knows they should have learned from their endocrinologist. “What are the ways you can take puberty blockers?” he asks. Shot or implant, Bean answers. “And where do they place the implant?” Bean points to just above the inside of their elbow. “How long do they last?” This one, Bean can’t remember.

The whiteboard gets erased and he asks them to teach us what they learned. Bean freezes, though finally scrawls a circle for the brain and stem for the pituitary gland, stuttering “Uh, uh, um, um” to remember the hormones, though the names never do come in that moment.

The therapist tells Bean it’s OK, we’ll go over the information again, and moves on to some of the larger consequences of using puberty blockers.

The main one for Bean is that should they decide to never go through an estrogen puberty, they won’t be able to have biological kids. “I need you to think about four questions for me,” he tells them. “1. What does family mean to me? 2. What family would I like? 3. Do I want kids? 4. Do I want kids that are biologically related to me?”

There’s no way to get around the fact that these are difficult conversations, substantial and far-reaching considerations. How can an 11-year-old even begin to answer these things for themselves? I’ve heard that, I’ve thought that, more times than I can count.

But then I remember what’s been demanded of Bean throughout most of their life, and how often those demands are far heavier and more treacherous than thinking about if they want kids that are biologically related to them at an age when most of their peers are picking out training bras or searching their faces for that first pimple.

I know you aren’t who you say you are.

My parenting Achilles’ heel has always been my compulsion to start from a strong defense. I torch the woodlands instead of wondering how I might use the timber to build bridges instead. Love is at the center, I tell myself, but there’s a good amount of fear, too, when I’m honest.

I think back to my imagined Defending Your Life-style attempt at underscoring Bean’s assuredness by emphasizing their ability to withstand, to protect and live their truth against a world that so often gets them wrong.

But endurance is not their essence.

So, I imagine sitting them down again, not to offer a defense or show of strength, but to showcase the undeniable beauty of steadfast self-awareness.

We’ll open in the shoe aisle at Target. Bean’s corkscrew curls hang to their shoulders, bouncing as they skip past all the glitter and pull a box of Spiderman shoes from the shelf. Off come their own shoes and I hear the scratch of the Velcro, and then they’re up, running to a mirror to admire their feet. “Are those the ones you want?” I ask. “Yes,” they answer without missing a beat.

I know who I am.

Same Target, different day. We’re in the boy’s department getting some shorts and T-shirts when Bean spies a suit coat. Their love is immediate. One arm in, then the other. I watch a smile crack their face in half. I’m not even sure they’re aware of how wide open their face is with joy. That’s the hallmark of genuine happiness, I think, when elation is a reflex, not something you have to summon.

I know who I am.

Next, we’re in their room. It’s picture day at school and they’re carefully laying out a button down and tie, trying to decide between red and gray. The gray matches the plaid pattern of their shirt better, so they flip the collar, circle the tie over their head and pull the knot to their neck. “You don’t have to wear it so tight,” I tell them. “That’s the way I like it,” they answer.

I know who I am.

For a long time, our morning routine included brushing their hair back in a ponytail they’d tuck up into their baseball cap. But now, we’re standing in front of the bathroom mirror. “I want a hair cut,” they say. Bean’s on a booster seat in a chair in a salon, long curls scattered across the floor. They look up at me, beaming, and I snap a quick photo.

I know who I am.

Finally, we’ll close in the hallway of Bean’s school outside the makeshift gym. At the urging of their mother, they’ll ask a classmate why they always seem upset, though those aren’t the words they’ll choose. This time, we’ll pull in close to Bean’s face as “Why do you act like a boy when you’re really a girl?” snakes its way into their ear, up, up, up, to finally register. “Because I can,” they respond.

I know who I am.

I know you do.

I know who I am.

I know you do.

I know who I am.