“Nobody Knew About This Back Then”

Go get Bigger, the new book of essays by Ren Cedar Fuller. It’s a complex and personal exploration of growing up in a gender diverse family. But it’s also about girlhood, friendships, the Gospels, Dr. Who, what it’s like to whip out a vial of eyedrops and squeeze it into your eyes without a mirror while continuing to speak as you’re giving a talk when you have Sjögren’s Syndrome, and so much more.

Every family with trans people in it is more than a trans family. Every family is full of stories. Fuller weaves her Ecuadorian mother’s history, her child’s coming out, her father’s undiagnosed autism, and her own coming of age boogie boarding on an oil-blobbed beach in California into a clear-eyed, steady whole.

A paper flower

If it seems unusual to have a mother who prayed to be a boy, always felt male, didn’t walk the way other mothers walked, and scrubbed her lipstick off the minute church ended, the great thing about Bigger is how, in Fuller’s voice, it isn’t unusual. The truth unfolds like a paper flower in water: there have always been such mothers, such people. There just wasn’t language for it the way there is now.

Transgender. Trans nonbinary. Gender expansive, gender creative, gender questing.

“I’ve never really been female,” her mother reflects one day, sitting on the lawn in the sun. “Isn’t that interesting.”

Interesting, wondrous, and at all not unusual—like dragonflies, or geologic formations. Fuller balances ordinary with extraordinary in sharing her story, which is an aspect of the book that Gender Defiant readers will especially appreciate, I think.

Interrupting this review to say I just thought of Juniper Blessing again. It happens a lot. I’ll be talking to someone at work, editing Gender Defiant, or throwing towels in the washer, and Juniper Blessing is in my head. GD doesn’t cover breaking news, but I wanted to show, with this interruption, what it’s like in my mind and the minds of people I know.

Hallelujah

Coming from the background she does, it turns out Fuller was unknowingly and ideally prepared to raise her trans child, Indigo, when they came out at 14.

“Parents whose children come out as transgender often feel overwhelmed with grief. They might say something unkind, raise their voices, refuse to leap beyond the way they’ve always understood gender,” she writes. (Fuller now works as a facilitator for a national support group called TransFamilies.) “But Jason [Fuller's husband] and I were different.

“I was scared about the world outside our home,” Fuller allows, “but when Indigo said, ‘Mom, Dad, I'm transgender,’ I wanted to shout hallelujah.” Fuller’s husband adds: “It's like finding the pieces of a puzzle.”

It’s like finding the pieces of a puzzle.

When our daughter Izzy came out, also at 14, my husband and I celebrated too. Inside, I worried about the outside world, as Fuller did. As we both still do.

Just thought of Juniper Blessing again.

Fantasy

I have been in parent support Zoom rooms with people whose kids have just come out. I have held space and held my tongue when parents said shocking and cruel things about their children (who are sometimes adult children).

Reading Fuller’s account of how her smugness at the fantasy that she was an exemplary parent—as parents of children who are not trans told her—fell away, I was humbled. Fuller enjoyed believing that fantasy for a while, but, she says, “my love for my child was not bigger” than the love of the parents who misgendered their kids and cried. Despite the horrible things those parents said, “their desperate love for their babies was palpable.”

For celebrating my own child’s coming out, for thanking her for trusting us, and for keeping any fears to myself till I educated myself, I am not an exemplary parent. The fact is, my parents rejected my older brother when he came out to them as gay, and that shattered our family. I could see clearly how it was the loss of my brother that broke my mother’s heart. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was gay. Because of what my parents did, I lost my brother, too, for decades.

I just knew I wanted to stay a family, if I had a kid, no matter what.

Friendship

I just had a long phone gab with a friend who has a trans daughter the same age as mine. We’ve been friends since our kids were born. During the (relatively few) years we both thought we had cishet boys, we used to laugh in wonder that the universe had missed the chance to assign us a gay kid, since we would have been welcoming parents to one.

As it turns out, our lives are bigger. These days we talk about internalized transphobia, applying to college, dating, and being stealth, in addition to the more ubiquitous stuff about having teenage kids. It was a great catch-up conversation for a Sunday afternoon. She also shared that her daughter auditioned for and got a role in a short independent film. Her daughter is out as trans. But she is not playing a trans character.

I’m just reflecting that’s part of my dream for my child, too. Not acting in a movie—mine prefers to be behind the camera, not in front it. I mean to be out and not have it be the story of her whole life, just one part of it.

Right now, because of what’s going on in this country, our concerns about getting healthcare and staying safe, being trans feels like too much of her story. Too much of our family's story. Bigger helps me keep in mind that our family is bigger, all of our lives are bigger, than gender, and gender conflict.

Every family with trans people in it is more than a trans family. Every family is full of stories.

— N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a health care worker, an editor at Gender Defiant, and the mom of a trans teen.