Coming Out, Like a Flower

The first person I shared my uneasy news with was my friend Brandy. I shut the door behind me as I entered her office to relay that my eleven-year-old had, just the day before, informed me that they would be using they/them pronouns and that their name was now JJ.

It wasn't, I argued at the time, that I was against transgender people. Not at all. In fact, I’d had many transgender students, several of whom I mentored and worked with on independent studies and advanced projects.

It was that didn’t take kindly to my kid changing their name on me, I told Brandy. The name I'd given them was, in my opinion, pretty great. I continued to misgender JJ throughout this conversation with Brandy. She corrected me each time. This rankled me. Who did she think she was? Brandy’s overt (woke?) patience was so annoying. After all, this was my kid we were talking about!

But then, over the next several days, I noticed my kid grew despondent if I didn’t use their new name. I got worried: my typically fresh-faced and mildly belligerent kid was flat-out bleak. Like, depressed. So I tried harder.

I risked telling a few more people about my kid, expecting them to regard me with incredulity or sympathy. Congratulations, an editor responded warmly. It's great they've found their true self. I nodded, thinking: Can you be serious? If I dropped the news casually into a conversation about something else, whoever I was talking to would pause, offer effusive support, and wear an expression of what appeared to be genuine delight.

How could they all be so sunny when my child had just slid themself beneath a lens through which so much of our society scrutinizes them, making them a target?

Finally, I told my mother. She said it was a phase. I told her it did not strike me as a phase. I went to my exercise class, jumping up and down with other (apparently) cis women before a mirrored wall, the reflection of our femininity uniform, my face on the verge of cracking into tears.

There was a time when transness made me uncomfortable because I did not understand it.

When JJ first came out, I thought I didn’t need to understand being trans to support it. But the truth is, understanding what being transgender means, learning everything I can about it, helps me see why it is so necessary to support trans youth— and adults—who move forward to actualize their true identity. What often comes as a surprise to the parent was long in the works for their trans child.

I am deeply fortunate to have friends who recognized right away that JJ’s coming out was a powerful moment and nothing to be ashamed of, but rather a source of pride for them and—when I could get there—for me.

I came to understand that it takes years for a trans person to come out, to finally transition, because it is a heavy lift. The process is all-consuming. It requires that one completely reconfigure their life in order to establish, inside and outside, that they identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. This an an intense process for the trans person given the pressure of entrenched gender norms. Trans people never simply come out; they come out in opposition to. Resistance comes on any number of fronts: Neighbors, workplaces, school, faith communities, law enforcement. It is extra painful when trans people suffer judgment or exclusion within their own families.

Why would we add to our children’s burden? Growing up is hard enough. Growing up trans is harder. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

Don’t we have better things to do than tell our friends, or co-workers, or our own children, that they have to be someone or something they aren’t?

Couldn’t we better spend our time learning how to cook, taking walks, catching up on work, reaching out to a friend we’ve been missing? In addition to, I mean, being open to our kids, trusting them, getting to know them as their true selves.

You have to wonder why one person’s happiness is an affront to others.

You have to wonder why this matter is politicized at all.