I want to specify that the following commentary is reflective of my personal experience being the parent of a transgendered child. I do not assume to be speaking for my child. I will not be sharing specific details, for that is not my story to tell. For this reason I will be protecting their privacy and identity as much as possible. I will be using the pronoun “they” instead of identifying gender specific pronouns for the purposes of this post.

The news came as a surprise to me. The fact it had been such a surprise caused me a measure of grief, in the after. The fact that I hadn’t seen it, hadn’t sensed it. It caused me to question if I’d been entirely unaware as a mother, in general.

I’d always felt close to my children.  As soon as they were born, I felt I really understood them.  That I knew who they were.  That I saw them.  Perhaps this is a common in all mothers.  I felt an immediate understanding with both of my children – I see you – I love you for who you are.  Having seemingly missed this part of my child, it grieved me, later. 

I had been raised the way most of us had in the 70’s and 80’s. That being gay, being other could be corrected, was a misunderstanding, just needed some extra help. I had parted ways with this belief fairly early in life. I had studied psychology in college. I had a class that required us weekly to meet in smaller groups. We had discussion topics that we all participated in. Although I never knew the last names of these people, I ended up knowing quite a bit about them, as they did with me. Many of our discussion topics gave the option of responding anonymously on cards, which were then read out-loud by the group leader. People did usually fess up to the cards they contributed when they felt comfortable that they were being met with empathy and compassion. There was a young man who had shared he was gay. This was the late 80’s. He was struggling with it. Wanted to change it, even in terrible ways. Aversion therapy. I walked with him once after class. A person would have had to have been both blind and non-feeling to not see the amount of pain he was in. All because of this part of his identity he felt unable to remove from himself. This experience was completely contradictory to my prior assumptions on the topic. I felt nothing but compassion for him. It changed my beliefs, feeling this . Seeing him. Despite the things I assumed prior to this, I had no issue accepting the fact that this was just him. Many times, in the years since, I have thought of him and hoped he found his way to peace. That he had not ended up a sad statistic of those who are driven to suicide in the constant background noise of “if you try hard enough, you can change this. Because you are wrong.”

That was the late 80’s. By the 2000’s I had shed any form of prejudice against anyone “other.” I remember thinking that I would make a great go-to person when one of my friends children came out. As anything. Although I’d never met a trans-gendered person (to my knowledge) I didn’t have any pre-conceived issues with it. I just didn’t foresee that my beliefs would be tested in a personal way.

I was fortunate, because of this. That I was already fine with it, in the abstract. The shock I felt, at that time, centered mostly around the other people in my life. What THEY would think. What was being said about me, about my child, in conversations that did not include me. What kind of situations would I find myself navigating with family members and friends, at a time when I was struggling with the shock of it myself. I did not think of my child first and foremost. This also brought me a measure of grief, later. I thought of the others in my life. I thought about how it would affect me.

There are things in life we cannot know, because we have not experienced them ourselves. For instance, I cannot know what it feels like to be truly discriminated against. Being born with white skin, straight and cis-gendered (body and identity match) prevents me from having to truly experience this. I can navigate my life in America under the assumption that I will be treated with respect in the places I go to shop, that I will be surrounded mostly by other people who look like I do, that I will never be asked to speak for all the people of my race. I have not earned these things because people can see I am a good person or that I am a law abiding citizen. Rather, it is often assumed because of my race that I am a good, law abiding person. Have I had rare experiences in which I was not treated with respect? I have. But these have been exceptions to the ease in which I navigate my life in America. I cannot say I know what it feels like, but this does not prevent me from believing that others do know it, and are telling the truth when they speak of it.

If sexual attraction is on a scale from 1-10, one being completely heterosexual and 10 being completely gay, I would fall pretty close to 1. I haven’t experienced being a 5 nor have I experienced being a 10. I can’t know what it feels like either, but this doesn’t mean I don’t believe 5’s and 10’s exist. It doesn’t mean I don’t believe others when they say they are a 5 or 10.

Then there are things I can know, because I have experienced them myself.

I know what it feels like to try and live a lie.  I know the effort it takes to accomplish such a thing.  I know the energy it takes away from other areas of your life because you need so much to focus on the force field you portray for others.  I know the painful spiral of hating yourself for not being the way other people expect you to be.  All around you there are people who are effortlessly doing this.  Why can’t you do it?  Why can’t you just do it?  Why can’t you just get over it?  You’re not trying hard enough.  There must be something wrong with you.  I mean deep down, there must be something really wrong with you.  I know how it feels to be included in conversations about people like yourself.  Except, the only person who knows you are sitting there being an impostor is you.  Nobody else knows.  I know how it feels to agree with them, about people like you.  Knowing all along that you are talking about yourself.  I know how that feels.    

I know what it feels like to hate your body.  I know how helpless it feels to have your body stubbornly lock-stepping down a path that horrifies you.  While I never took issue with being female, I had a horrible time when by body hit puberty. It happened long before my mind did.  My body felt completely foreign to me.  I hated it.  I wore almost comically over-sized clothing because it made me feel smaller.  I went on my first diet at 10.  I became obsessed with the thought that I could return to the safety of my childhood through weight loss.  This feeling, hatred of self, only grew more intense all the way up till it broke at age 22.  During these years I developed an eating disorder.  During these years I bound my breasts with ace bandages. I wore several bras at the same time.  I had such a hatred for my breasts that I fear, to this day, I absorbed it on a cellular level and eventually it will manifest itself in the form of breast cancer.  I would have done anything to stop my body. I know what it feels like to not be ok, at all. To be helpless inside a body that does not represent who you are.

Another thing I do know.  The feeling of being accepted for who you truly are, inside.  At this point of my life, I can see that I’m a generally likable person. I can see that I’ve always had a pretty easy time making friends. I didn’t always see this in myself, though. I didn’t always have a positive opinion of myself. I’ve put a lot of effort in my life into being liked. I’ve put a lot of effort into meeting other’s expectations of me.  Too much effort, as it turns out. Often to my detriment. I’ve known what it feels like to keep the most “me” part of me hidden.

There were people, along the way, who saw me, despite my efforts to hide.  There is one woman I remember particularly; she was the mother of one of my close friends.  She saw me.  I mean, she really saw me.  I felt in her gaze, she knew all about me and she was good with it.  I was able to put it aside, my constant instinct to hide myself. I always knew that when I reached her house, the pressure I normally felt would lift from my shoulders.  It was a gift she didn’t even know she was giving me. I never said as much to her, though. When she died, she had wanted her service to be personal memories.  I told the story of her, there.  How I felt wholly accepted.  Seen.  Loved, without expectations.  How good it had felt to have these things in that very turbulent period of my life. 

What a gift it is to be seen.  What a gift it is to be accepted for who you really are. 

I made mistakes in this situation with my child. Not huge mistakes, but things I would do differently, if I could.  I do not feel bad that I went through the grief process that I did. I think my grief was normal. It was full of seeing my child growing up as the gender they were, then. It was full of fearing that child was gone. I think I grieved the name the most. I had chosen that name with so much care. I had always felt that name matched my child perfectly. It was difficult for me to see this being rejected, wholly. I do not feel bad for the time it took before my brain was fully re-routed, because I think that was normal too. I do not feel bad that, at first, I defaulted to this is just temporary. Again, I believe this was a normal part of acceptance.

I do feel bad for any time I unintentionally invalidated what my child was going through. I do feel bad for the times we encouraged our child to just wait. Just wait. A phrase spoken with no regard for how long our child had waited, already. I do feel bad that it was so long before I was ready to ask my child what they had gone through to come to this realization about themselves. After that conversation was had, I felt as close to my child as ever. After that conversation, I knew that my child was making the right decisions for themselves. After that conversation I knew I had not lost anything.

There is nobody in this world I would choose over my child.  I can’t tell you how much I do not care how the pronouns and named changed along the way.  When it comes to any living person, I will never choose genders, pronouns and names over your validity as a human being. I will see you and you will know you are accepted by me. And when it comes my turn to die, I sincerely hope people will make their way to the front to talk about how they didn’t have to pretend around me, to be something they weren’t. The way I did at my friends mothers funeral. There is nothing more I can wish for more of my life than this.