My Trans Child And I: Two and the Same
While I was pregnant, folks failed to understand that my and my baby’s well-being are intertwined. The same holds true now that they are a teen
Getting to be two people is maybe the strangest and most wonderful thing about being pregnant. Sort of. Okay, let’s just say it’s like sharing a body. Or maybe the baby’s taking your body over? By month seven, JJ was very much in charge, letting me know they needed more room every time they jabbed a tiny little elbow, knee, or foot into my bladder.
Yet, the Christian Right and so-called pro-life folks appear to have the desire to make the relationship between a mother and their child altogether stranger than it is by treating their respective bodies as warring parties. I was introduced to this odd notion—that what affects a baby is somehow separate from what affects its mother—when I was 30 months pregnant with JJ and came down with a super bad cold.
I’d refused to take any medications during my pregnancy. It took me a long time to get pregnant in the first place, and for the early weeks, I was at risk for miscarrying. As a result, I got extra anxious about doing anything that might “harm” the baby, such as drinking caffeine or taking cold meds.
But my cold was severe, and I was about to board a plane for a job interview. On hearing the nasally intonations of my voice over the phone, my mother begged me to consider taking cold medicine. I tend to do what my mother says, so I looked up a few medicines purporting to be safe for both myself and the kid I was carrying. Back then, we shared a body.
And so I drove our Xtra Large self to Walgreens, perused the cold aisle, made a few selections, and brought them up to the pharmacist to avail myself of his expertise. He angled in, looking at each box warily, scrutinizing the ingredients. I liked that. I was wary too. My body was a temple soon to be turned into a Pack ’n Play. He shook his head.
Dark cloud
“I worry about blood pressure with this one,” he said, pointing at one of the meds I’d passed across the counter.
“Actually,” I said, “my blood pressure has been great!”
A dark cloud landed on his brow. He looked up, annoyed. “I wasn’t talking about you,” he sneered. “I’m worried about the baby.”
It would not be the last time folks would fail to understand that my well-being and my baby’s well-being were interdependent. But at the time, the pharmacist’s response struck me as so strange I took a step back from the counter.
JJ is now in 10th grade. Fifteen years after I was scolded by this pharmacist, JJ is faced with a binary that is similarly accusatory and exclusionary: the ridiculous lack of gender-neutral bathrooms.
I don’t know about you, but I have to pee a lot, because I love my water. JJ, however, refuses to hydrate while at school because it will result in the inevitable need for a “bio-break,” which means they’ll then need to head to the sole gender-neutral restroom, which happens to be in the school basement.
When JJ started high school, I thought it was great that they had a gender-neutral bathroom. Little did I know.
One day after a Starbuck’s run, JJ and I were walking through the school on the way to a parent-teacher conference, and we both needed a bio-break. I headed over to the so-called women’s room. JJ disappeared into an elevator that took them down to the bowels of the building—no pun intended.
You gotta wonder why the gender neutral bathroom is in the basement in the first place, no? Most of JJ's classes are on the second floor. The five minutes they are given between classes is not enough time to journey to the depths of the building to access this particular restroom.
Ask yourself: Have you ever really needed to pee? Really badly? Have you ever worried about finding a bathroom in time? Now imagine only being able to use a bathroom in a basement while you are stationed on the second floor. Two flights of stairs and one slow elevator ride away. Have you started sweating yet?
The literal difficulty my child faces in attempting to access a safe and appropriate bathroom speaks volumes. It’s certainly not respectful of their needs. The high school basement is, according to JJ, kind of scary.
I’ll bet it is. High school is scary enough on the main floor.
As a parent, you know you have to let your kid go if you want them to grow up. We want our kids to grow up because it is good for them and, one hopes, will put them in a position to carry on our values, contribute to the world, and enjoy the beautiful thing that living on this planet is.
The trans hatred in our country makes it awfully hard for me to let JJ go.
I think back to that divide that the pharmacist assumed when chastising me for (selfishly?) misunderstanding that he was talking about “the baby’s” health and not my own. Even the fact that he referred to JJ as the baby and not your baby. He took my baby away from me in a sentence, before they were even born, treating me as though I would do them harm.
What that pharmacist did not know is that I succeeded in getting pregnant after three rounds of IVF (involving a total of nine embryos) to have JJ. It was a process that required daily vigilance and a hell of a lot of injections, which I administered to myself. It was, to say the least, not an accident.
I have encountered folks who voted for Trump and tell me, earnestly, that things are going to get better. Better than what? As far as I’m concerned, every single person who voted for Trump advocated for outright violence on my child.
People like that pharmacist act like they're protecting my baby from me, and then they create a world in which I am afraid to let my kid out of the house. Fifteen years after giving birth, I installed a security system in our home. I often forget to activate it when the house is empty. The fact is, I got it to protect my kid when they are alone inside the house.
—T.C.
