A Mom in Maryland describes how her son’s trans declaration came out of the blue after an uncontentious childhood and how she found a community of like-minded parents, questioning the wisdom of life-changing interventions to treat an ideological state.
Originally written for PITT, this story is read by a fellow parent.
Transcript
I’m a mom in Maryland.
One night this summer, my young teen son revealed he was trans. My husband and I sat down with him right away to learn more. And he gave the following evidence. He did not feel comfortable in his body, and about a month prior had realised that this was because he was not a boy. He knew he was trans because when he put girl clothes on his video game avatar, he felt euphoria. He had had crushes on girls, but he recently wasn’t so sure since he may have had a crush on a boy. He didn’t like his shoulders or his voice, he felt different.
My husband and I held his hands and told him how all his feelings sounded like regular old puberty, where nothing about your body feels right. And you were starting to develop your sexual identity. We told him that people like to pretend in games, that feeling of thrill or arousal like using a female avatar in a game is not what being a girl feels like. We love you no matter what, we said.
Because it seemed like the thing to do, we brought our child to a psychologist. She spoke with our son for 30 minutes. And despite what we shared about our son’s gender-conforming history, she agreed with our son’s self-diagnosis. She told him he could start blockers and hormones and later he could complete his transition through surgery. She asked him when he planned to tell his grandparents. Just like that, my son was a girl, because he said so. And a therapist agreed after half an hour.
This was strange to me in so many ways. My kid had never expressed an interest in girl things. He was happy, not in distress. As a feminist, I had wanted to raise my son to respect women and to be a sensitive good man, who believed in gender role equality. I had given him cooking playsets, presented dolls, dressed him in gender-neutral clothing. He was not interested. He wanted trucks, he revelled in dirt and frogs. He climbed trees, ran around naked, had superhero sword fights with his brother. He ate with his hands and put spiders in my bed.
Contrary to my understanding of how this all works, my son had no signs of distress or dysphoria, neither in childhood nor now. I have since found that there’s a parent community made up of many caring moms and dads. The parents’ stories are all like mine. Their teenage boys and girls announced they were trans out of the blue.
And don’t tell us we missed the signs. We are parents, we pay attention to our kids.
The parents come from across the religious, social, political and economic spectrum. Universally, we were told that if we don’t accept our kids new self-identifications wholesale, we’re horrible people, horrible parents, and transphobic bigots. We are good parents, not bad ones, asking for questions and trying to understand the facts before jumping on the bandwagon that encourages our children to receive medical treatment for something invisible and theoretical.
We are good parents to question dogma before we tell our kids and young adults that their natural bodies are wrong. It is not evil to think that maybe our children’s human potential and happiness is not solely defined by their gender identity, but by their appetite for self-improvement, personal evolution and internal growth and that gender obsession will hold them back from reaching their potential.
Why did so many loud voices lose sight of the fact that true happiness comes from within?