The parents you deserve as a trans person
I don’t write a lot about the other people in my life. Mostly, it’s out of respect for their privacy, and the fact that I do not ever want to speak for anyone else, or make the remotest claim that I can.
That said, I have great parents. Like, really, really great parents. And I feel compelled to share a little about that, in part because I want people to know that it’s possible, and in part because I might be a little irked and melancholy that other trans people have to set their bars so low. Maybe I also want to brag a little, but I really do think that I just want to give others hope — and to set the bar where it belongs.
Because unconditional love is real, and some people really need to know that.
So yeah. A little background. My parents are from separate regions of the American South. Dad is Appalachian, specifically East Tennessean, raised Baptist and the third child of a Navy recruiter and a rural mail carrier. Mom is a Texas Czech, the third child of a self-taught electrician and devoted mother (who also worked for the local electric company herself), raised devoutly Catholic and poor on a farm with seven other siblings. When he finished high school, Dad took a pipeline drafting job over the phone and made the drive west. I’m told that a third party introduced him to Mom at a dance.
If you’re familiar with the United States, you’ll know that these are the kinds of regional backgrounds typically associated with social conservatism. They are the kinds of backgrounds that other trans people bring up to explain their tense relationships with family, like, “Oh, they’re good people; they just won’t call me by my name,” or “Oh, they mean well; they just don’t believe in trans stuff.” (To be fair, all three of us eventually had the privilege of a university education, albeit at one of the most conservative schools in the nation. I still didn’t even know that trans people existed when I graduated in 2014.)
Growing up in Greater Houston, the LGBTQ+ community wasn’t on my radar. I can’t say what my parents believed in 1992, 2002, or 2012, because that sort of thing just didn’t come up in conversation at home. I think I knew, at some level, that my parents were reasonable and loving people, because I later (much embarrassingly later) connected the dots about close relatives whose same-sex ‘friends’ or ‘roommates’ showed up repeatedly at family events. Maybe we weren’t taught a word for what was going on, but there was never any sort of palpable hatred or physical distancing from such relatives.
(Not that the whole topic avoidance thing was ideal or even okay, nor should I attempt to speak for those relatives, but my point is that we were never fed bigotry, as far as my little mind could tell. I don’t even remember the LGBT community being talked about much during the sermons at Catholic Mass, probably because Facebook and Fox News had not yet begun to pointlessly infect the general zeitgeist with their callous and inflammatory nonsense.)
Anyhow, my assumption is that my parents saw the idea of having a queer child as a “take it as it comes, if it comes” situation. When I was about 20, they even sat me down and hinted that it would be okay if I was attracted to women, presumably because I had never seriously dated and was totally disinterested in it. But the real situation did come, nearly a decade later. And they handled it like champs.
On February 27, 2021, I came out as transgender to my parents via email, with a long letter attached (you can read that here if you’re particularly interested).
Dad replied a couple of hours later:
I hope my new son will allow me to share his new life. I look forward to spending time with you when I retire. As always, I know you can only take limited doses of parent visits so will still respect that.
I look forward to learning more about what this means for you and support and love you.
Love,
Dad
Roughly the morning after, a phone conversation with Mom (whose email reply I sadly can’t find anymore, but was likewise positive and included something like “your dad and I are not surprised”) had a gist like this:
I don’t fully understand this yet, but I want you to know that I will always stand behind you.
And she has. From braving all the awkward questions of friends and family we haven’t seen in a while to writing letters to local politicians (far more important in Texas right now than it is in the safe haven states that I’ve run off to), my mom has been steadfast in putting her child first, plain and simple.
She’s also a deeply honest person. Over the past three years, she has told me things like:
Well, if I had a problem with it, it wouldn’t matter, because you are clearly doing so much better and are visibly happier.
And when I nervously insist that she doesn’t have to call me a ‘son’ if it feels weird:
Honestly, I just see you as my “child” in my head now, not really with a gender.
I think a lot of eggshell-walkers could learn from stuff like that.
These days, it feels like parents have to commit to one extreme reaction or another, applying the same blanket (and, dare I say, blind) intensity of full acceptance or full rejection to every self-described trans child of every age and life circumstance they’ve ever heard of or actually met, let alone parented themselves.
(Before this turns into an unfair and unpalatbly hot take admittedly driven by my abject terror of losing hormone access as an adult, I’ll just say this: You’re allowed to have nuanced thoughts about your trans child. If you’re also a reasonable human being who loves your child, the foundation of trust will hold strong, no black-and-white internet posturing required.)
I didn’t want to believe that things could turn out so well, but I’ll admit I wasn’t entirely surprised.
Before I came out, the scenario I feared and replayed over and over to my therapist was one where my parents were not at all hateful (I knew from that start that they just didn’t have that in them), but incredibly concerned. I worried that they would be concerned enough to fly right up to Colorado the next day and encourage me to get psychiatric help. Or at very least, concerned enough for things to become supremely awkward instead of just the regular kind of awkward.
But, perhaps as a millennial myself infected with ageist anxiety by social media (that scourge is becoming a theme here, isn’t it?), I was not giving my parents enough credit.
Like any intelligent, reasonable, and/or empathetic people, they did their reading — of my personal experience, other people’s personal experiences, online resources for families, and the medical consensus.
Like any intelligent, reasonable, and/or empathetic people (they’re both all three, but what I’m getting at is that it shouldn’t be that hard), they came to their own conclusions about their own child, whom they love unconditionally.
So, yeah. Good people exist.
And, no. There’s no excuse anymore.
