Trans Parent, Anti-Hero
I can’t persuade my trans teen to leave the country.
I had a nightmare this week that a group of activist parents of trans kids I belong to turned into gigantic stone monoliths when I was talking to them. These are people I attend protests with, people I lean on and who lean on me for support and intel as we raise our kids in a time of unprecedented anti-trans hate.
These parents became cold, looming stones because my true self showed: I was a shitty friend and a coward for not fighting our biggest fight alongside them. I tried to explain, but they had no ears.
It is true that I have not been able to join with parent groups fighting providers for cutting off care and fighting federal subpoenas of our personal information from our health care providers. I am willing, but my child has chosen not to participate in the suits as her anonymity is not guaranteed. I have to respect her wish. I actually do respect her wish.
It is also true that these parents courageously fighting the subpoenas, which would open the door to criminalizing parents of trans kids and their care providers, are right now winning that battle. They are heroes. Of course they don’t blame me or the several other parents whose children chose not to go on record. But that nightmare persists.
Never doing enough
It’s common for people in wartime and times of crisis to feel they are never doing enough. Even though I push back against the hate, and our authoritarian state, in less public ways, I often feel like I am falling short supporting my community and family.
Here’s another example. Last week, Gender Defiant published a wonderful guest essay about parents upending their lives to leave the country for the sake of their trans kids. The writer, a relocation specialist who helps LGBTQ families live abroad, calls those parents quietly seeking freedom her heroes.
Allow me to flip that idea on its head. Because what do you call a parent who can’t persuade her child to leave the country? Whatever you call it, that’s me.
Soon my daughter will go to college. College would be an obvious time for her to get outside the U.S. to a safer place. Yet despite the research we have done on universities she can apply to in Spain, Scotland, Canada, and elsewhere, despite that teens we know are going to school abroad and that things are getting ever worse in this country for trans people, immigrants, and all of us, I can’t get her to consider leaving, even for a few years.
She just won’t.
Magical thinking
We have arrived at the time when I can't control my daughter. We can’t pick her up and put her on a plane. Soon (as she often reminds us) we won’t have any legal authority over her.
As for her reasons, Izzy has said she thinks anti-trans hate will fade fairly soon. She has high hopes for the midterm elections. In the meantime, I know she feels she can stay under the radar because she is stealth.
The fact that my daughter passes as a cis girl has given her social confidence, but it has also created a case of (this is my feeling) magical thinking that goes something like this: If no one knows I’m trans, I’m pretty much not trans.
Such reasoning is tinged with self-erasure and internalized transphobia. It is not at all rational. Or healthy. But it is powerful, and she is using it to dwell, in certain moments, in an alternate reality where she can “forget” to turn in a college application and then “forget” to tell us.
Gender Defiant
Check out this related essay by lawyer and contributor Benjamin Erwin.
Left behind?
Having failed in every attempt to persuade her, I am left to live with daughter’s mindset. Which has created an odd thought experiment that keeps me up at night. The fact that my kid won’t leave turns my family into a photo negative of my family of origin.
I am the granddaughter of people who fled Europe to escape persecution as Jews. By the time the Nazis were shipping Jewish people (also queer people, disabled people, and others) to extermination camps, my grands were in America. Now cut to the present day: here my husband, daughter, and I are in America three generations later. Could I imagine a scenario where my husband and I leave the U.S. and our grown child stays behind—by choice?
There are no heroes in this thought experiment.
At the same time, this terrible situation—brought to you by my daughter’s unswerving faith in the future, which I mostly don’t share—helps me understand my distant Jewish family who stayed in Europe and didn’t survive the Holocaust. I have always wondered: why didn’t more of them try to leave if they could? What were they thinking?
Probably something like what Izzy is thinking. That the hate would fade, the violence would a, and reason would return. And if they could pass as Gentiles or Christians in the meantime, that would help.
No records, no closure
Of course, my family were wrong. No one who stayed behind survived except my grandmother’s sister, who somehow escaped a death camp and got to Canada. There are no records of the lost wing of my family, I don’t know their names. No one talked about them. My grands were immigrants starting over as Americans. My parents were busy raising children while also being the children of immigrants. They got on with it.
*
I don’t have a way to close my thoughts here.
Every parent is doing the work they can.
Every trans child in America is trying to become their full self, however they can, at a terrible time.
Every coming of age involves pushing back, not allowing yourself to be told what to do or how to think. It involves trying to visualize your place in the world and get there somehow. On your own.
I am a writer, so I am writing, telling you this story. This is my work.
Every story of a real family, real parents, real kids, at Gender Defiant is a crack in the wall of lies our government has built.
—N.R.
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Noa Rabinow is a health care worker, an editor at Gender Defiant, and the mom of a trans teen.
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