The Start of Something
When my kid started to realize the world saw them as different, and the need for people to listen.
NOTE: This post was originally written in 2016 and uses my child’s birth name and she/her pronouns, both of which are no longer acceptable. I am sharing here for parents who may be at the start of their own work with their kid, not as an invitation to use this name or these pronouns for my kid.
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?”
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.