Trans-Versation: Our Story

Apologies for the big lead-up to this post, but it comes with years of thought behind it. While the trans-versation has been a topic within our household for nearly a decade, we have learned to be careful with it outside of our home (further explained below). With recent modifications to “how” transgender youth are being cared for, I felt like it may finally be time to brave feedback and share our story. Please note: this is not our child’s story, that is theirs to tell but that doesn’t mean that we do not have our own. Our story is important, too, though some would disagree. For some context on why I am sharing our story now, read this week’s article from The Free Press: The End of Youth Gender Transition and an article written a few years ago that nearly mimics our experience: The Planned Parenthood Problem. The story below was originally written for Huffington Post and was also submitted to The Free Press (hence the very generic names).

Should I offer a politically correct response? Should I tell them how I really feel? Are they asking conversationally or because they know the topic hits close to home?

These are all thoughts that zip through my head when someone asks for my thoughts on transgender care or rights, or policies.

Before I answer, can I ask about your personal experience? Do any of you have a child who identifies differently?

I have learned, over the last decade, that those who are most vocal about transgender rights rarely have experienced the emotional woodchipper that arrives when your child declares themselves as living in the wrong body. For many, their only real experience in the transgender community is proudly using someone’s preferred name and pronouns–as if that is all it takes to be a true supporter of this complicated path.

If only it were that easy.

It’s not.

I don’t often tell my story. I learned long ago that unless I share my story while waving a Pride flag, it is not welcome. I’m going to tell my story anyway. I know that it will be met with accusations of transphobia from some. I also know that many others will feel seen and relieved and a little less alone.

Ten years ago, our twelve-year-old, biological female child announced that she’d “realized she was actually a boy while having lunch” at school.

Before you ask–no, “she/her” are not my child’s preferred pronouns. Please, focus on my story rather than the pronouns. I will also refer to my child as Jane, though this is not her birth name.  

Jane continued on, giddy with excitement, as she explained that it wasn’t just her–that almost everyone at her lunch table realized they were trans. “Six (out of eight) of us!” My husband and I were sitting across the living room from Jane trying to make sense of her words. Six students came to this realization on the same day, in the same school, at the same lunch table, at the exact same time? “Some realized they were actually boys, while some realized they were actually girls while…” What was happening?

To say we were skeptical would be an understatement.

It was as if Jane had gotten off the school bus speaking a foreign language.

Having no playbook for this, we went to the canned parental response of, “Oh, interesting. Keep those grades up.” Jane asked us to call her by a new name (John) and new pronouns (he/him). We politely declined, having no idea that we had just entered a rabbit hole in which we are still trying to navigate, ten years later.

We had watched Jane struggle with mental health issues for years. Her biological parents (I am a stepmom on paper) divorced when she was ten years old. The divorce was sandwiched between several tumultuous years as her first family fell apart and a new one was formed. When I married Jane’s father, it was with no intention of taking on a full-time parenting role but when that role was thrust onto my plate, I naively accepted enthusiastically before learning how unprepared I was.

We quickly became a family of four with three members grieving the loss of their “original family” and one (me) struggling to find her place as a mother and wife. While my husband, my youngest stepchild, and I seemed to emerge from the fog that comes with the creation of a blended family fairly quickly, Jane continued to struggle with a range of emotions.

Jane was unhappy. Jane hated her biological mother. Jane was angry. Jane loved me. Jane didn’t trust anyone. Jane loved her biological mother. Jane was depressed. Jane hated me.

When Jane declared herself a male, we saw a light in her eyes that we forgot existed. There was comfort, perhaps, in feeling that she’d finally found her tribe. Sounds good. Keep those grades up.

While Jane was asking friends, teachers, and coaches to call her “John,” we continued to love her just as we always saw her–as our smart, kind, and beautiful daughter. We felt confident that this phase, this bizarre phase, would fade out in the coming years.

It’s not that we ignored it altogether or that we didn’t believe that “transgender” was a real identity. We had simply landed at the starting line of the coming influx of teenage girls declaring themselves to be male. The conversation surrounding transgender didn’t exist in its current form. Resources were scarce. There were no tools with which to navigate the path.

We asked Jane where and when these feelings came from, but the answers didn’t make any sense to us. Don’t you remember that time I tried to pee standing up? I never liked princesses. You’ve always wanted sons. I was never happy.

I looked back through piles of pictures from Jane’s childhood trying to find signs. No, she was not a girly-girl clad in pinks or purples, but she sparkled just the same. I wanted to tell her that I, too, had tried to pee standing up (many times) as a child. I wanted to tell her that I, too, preferred digging in the dirt and that I, too, had collected more worms from the backyard than dolls from the toy store.

I wanted to tell her that I thought maybe, just maybe, she was simply a tomboy.

I wanted to tell her that what she was feeling now wasn’t forever.

I wanted to tell her that, yes, the changes in her body, both physically and hormonally, were awful and awkward and uncomfortable, and that I understood and would be right by her side through it all.

Within the days of that first conversation, we got a call from Jane’s school asking how we felt about the name and pronoun changes. Sounds great, just teach her math. The school took our answer as a roaring stamp of approval, stopping just short of hosting a coming-out party, latching onto Jane as its poster child for inclusivity.

Weeks later, a teacher reached out to me after learning that we weren’t using Jane’s preferred name or pronouns at home. The email was laced with disgust. I’ve never been so disappointed in a parent. I was still new to my role as a step-mother. I had no idea just how inappropriate this communication was. I felt ashamed and small and mortified and I tucked away the email with hopes of hiding my latest failure from the world.

Just after starting high school, Jane asked for puberty blockers and a double mastectomy. We again declined. We did not feel it appropriate to allow a teenager to make permanent changes to a body that they’d hardly gotten to know. We still feel this way. We encouraged Jane to be patient while paying for breast binders. We stopped suggesting to Jane that she shop in the female section of the stores though she had regular meltdowns related to how poorly the men’s clothes fit her.

I wanted to tell her that her body was beautiful and to stop trying so hard to hide it. 

As a researcher, I got to work. I wanted to understand why there were suddenly so many young females declaring themselves male. There seemed to be so many commonalities: divorce, abuse, neglect…did no one else see this? I wondered why Jane’s therapist was so locked into the word “affirmation.” Why wasn’t Jane being challenged to explore her feelings of anger or anxiety or low self-confidence? Why was her therapist simply with agreeing with whatever she said?

I discovered that, nationwide, healthcare professionals were being guided to “Affirm at All Costs.”  I was shocked. Didn’t that border on allowing patients to self-diagnose? Surely a surgeon wouldn’t agree to remove a leg simply because a patient declared it the cause of distress, right? Right? This was different, yet nobody could explain why.

I started using the phrase “gender alteration” instead of “gender affirmation.” I understood gender affirmation when it related to a breast lift to increase femininity, or hair plugs to aid with a receding hairline. Pumping my child, my sweet child, full of testosterone was not affirming her gender, it was altering it.

We continued to be ostracized for not embracing every piece of this growing puzzle. We were chastised for not signing off on those puberty blockers. We were villainized for not engaging with a surgeon to remove Jane’s breasts. She’s not even old enough to drive–how could she possibly understand the permanency of these demands? She’s also our child, not yours. You are not experiencing our story.

We lost friends. We lost friends because we were trying to do the right thing for this child that we loved so much. No, we are not transphobic. Yes, we love Jane so very much. We are doing what feels right to us, her parents, who have known her longer than anyone. This is not so black and white when it is happening within your home.

We made new friends–allies–in other parents walking the same path as we were. We felt like renegades, forced to share “a-ha!” moments in secret. We found more commonalities. The internet was a hotbed preying on our children. There were emails from strangers, transfluencers, encouraging our children to turn away from us. “If your family doesn’t accept you,” the emails read, “Then they are not your family anymore–we are.“

Together, we discovered that an unhealthy relationship with social media seemed to pair perfectly with gender confusion. We all agreed that when we limited our child’s time online, their mental health almost always improved.

We tried to keep the transversation open within our home. We failed often.

We’d see Jane cringe if we used her given name in public, and we heard her refer to it as her dead name. What does that mean? It means that Jane is dead and never existed. But we love Jane. We have a history with Jane. We had stories and adventures, and laughter with Jane.

Forget them all, we were told. Jane is dead. Jane never existed.

Who is it, then, that lives in our memories? Who is it, then, that smiles back at us from family photos? Who is it?

We knew that, with each birthday, we would have to encourage Jane to take more and more ownership of her life’s path. For many parents, this is exciting as they look forward to watching their children spread their wings. For us? It was terrifying. Each birthday brought Jane closer to adulthood and the ability to pick up all of those things we’d kicked down the road like hormones and surgeries.

When the word “transgender” first entered our home, we knew it as relating (incorrectly) to those who preferred to dress to their opposite gender. We learned that cross-dressing was not the same as being transgender. With new definitions, light bulbs went on in both my husband and my head as we recalled acquaintances who seemed to disappear only to reappear years later as a whole new person (and gender). This was not common but, in each case, it did make sense.

In each case, it was easy to see the path that led to that shift in identity.

For our child, it did not make sense at all. Had we missed all the signs? How had we missed all the signs? Were there signs? Or were we unwilling participants in a dangerous trend?

It took no time at all for transgender-friendly healthcare options to pop up on every corner, offering drastic care at no charge for adolescents feeling stuck in bodies that they didn’t like. We were quickly nearing the age when Jane would be able to walk into a clinic and acquire testosterone at no cost, no questions asked, and no follow-up.

Jane took her first dose of testosterone less than a month after turning 18. We were not surprised. Our hearts plummeted into our stomachs. We learned later that she’d gotten it at Planned Parenthood after answering a few short questions with no requirements for counseling.

Within six months of that first self-injection, Jane had dropped out of college, too anxious and depressed to continue her classes. Within a year, we walked Jane into our local emergency room and watched as she self-admitted, suicidal. When she’d taken that first shot, she was filled with elation, finally becoming John, her true, authentic self.

The elation was now forgotten as that wondrous, true, authentic self turned out to be a traitor.

It took nearly a year to rebuild our child’s mental health. It was grueling. We wondered if this child would ever be capable of living on their own. We fought. We cried. We did the work, as a family. It took nearly a year but, in the fall of 2021, Jane moved into a new dorm on a new campus, instantly found a new tribe and was quickly thriving.

We finally exhaled.  

Jane continued presenting as male, filling in those “preferred name” boxes with “John,” but this John was confident and inquisitive and earning accolades on campus and beyond. This John was happy, comfortable, and funny. This John’s eyes were sparkling again, and a smile returned that we’d all but forgotten. This John had a growing list of exciting plans for the future.

Today? Today, this John is disappearing again. From the bird’s eye view of parents, it seems so obvious. John started taking testosterone again, and there was an instant shift in his personality. The anger returned. The lies returned. The hatred of his family returned. That list of exciting plans for the future faded from view.

I have no doubt we are hunting for a scapegoat, but it does seem that, once again, adding a foreign substance to John’s body kicked off a mental implosion.

John’s story is not over, of course. If we’ve learned anything it is that our child can rise again.

Why am I choosing now to tell our story?

I’m telling my story because it is easy to raise voices against the changes in transgender care when one can do so from the sidelines, with a barely visible view of the harm that unchecked management can cause.

I’m telling my story because, often, we forget that blanket decisions can cause irreversible damage to the population they are aimed at protecting.

Allowing adolescents no-questions-asked access to hormone replacement or gender-altering surgery without a deep dive into their mental health is reckless. Failing to share the negative implications of these treatments is careless. We may feel that “affirm at all costs” is generous and shows unconditional support or love, but in reality, it is dangerous.

These opinions do not make me transphobic. These thoughts do not change my views on body dysphoria. Yes, our lives would be so much easier if our biologically female child embraced her femininity but that was not our story. Our story included chaos from that first declaration of, “I’m actually a boy” and very little support for our decision move slowly and make thoughtful decisions as a family. Instead, we were chastised.

Had we been encouraged to move slowly and make thoughtful decisions, we may also have had the ability to walk this path with our child, rather than at battle.

When last week’s vote pointed to a shifting pendulum in transgender care for youth, we were relieved. We do not know what will happen tomorrow or next month or next year. We do hope that those changes to transgender care will, at minimum, offer the chance for families entering this muddy water the time to make educated decisions, together. We also hope that it encourages the medical community to move more slowly, creating treatment plans that are more thoughtful, less hasty, and designed for each individual.

We hope that we never, ever hear the words “Affirm at all Costs” again.

Should I offer a politically correct response? Should I tell them how I really feel? Are they asking conversationally or because they know the topic hits close to home?

These are all thoughts that zip through my head when someone asks for my thoughts on transgender care or rights, or policies.

Before I answer, can I ask about your personal experience?

Do any of you have a child who identifies differently? Because we do and we love that child without question. We would give our own lives for that child without a second thought. Until your beautiful, inside-and-out, child sits before you and demands drastic procedures, it may be hard to understand the emotional chaos.

Please, let me tell you our story.