A mother in Canada tells her story.
Transcript
Hi. I’m a mom in Canada.
I want to share the story of my daughter who as a little girl, toddler, always was into purple and sparkles and girl things, dolls. She could run around and climb trees too, but she certainly was not gender non-conforming in any way.
When she was about 12, she told me she thought she was bisexual after talking to the girls in her class at recess. It seemed like most of them are identifying as at least bisexual. This was in grade six and then grade seven. By the time she was about 13, she’s decided no, she was actually a lesbian, she only liked girls.
And in both cases we were, as her parents, fully supportive.
Then, when she was around 14, she was in high school and involved with a group of all LGBTQ kids, it seemed pretty much exclusively and there was one new trans-identifying boy in the group. And at that point, she started to say she was gender fluid, or non-binary. I sort of found this out accidentally, she didn’t want to tell us and when she did tell us, she said the reason she hadn’t told us was because she thought we were going to kick her out of the house. And we said, when, have you ever gotten that impression from us? It was really mind-blowing.
Anyway, she couldn’t explain why she didn’t feel like a girl and she rewrote her childhood history. I’m realising now, talking to these other kids and immersing herself online. It’s pretty clear. She has not expressed interest in hormones, at least to me. But to us, though, she has talked about top surgery.
But now she’s a couple years later, hasn’t actually done anything beyond, you know, hair and clothing. Guess the other big thing was, of course, she wanted the names and pronouns at school. As usual with these stories, the school was hiding this from us. And it was pretty surprising given our involvement with the school. So we’re now sort of at an equilibrium, I guess.
We don’t any longer really talk about this; we tried to at least, head-on. We tried to talk about other things and focus on other aspects of our relationship to keep the bond with her, knowing that she’ll be leaving the house for university in less than two years. I have no idea what she’ll do at that point, if anything. I live in constant fear of that, and I cannot believe that we live, I live, in a society where the family unit is so denigrated by society.
It’s mind-blowing, and I say this as a life-long liberal, left-leaning person.
Thanks for listening.