Some Difficult Things to Know How to Do

It has been seven years since my child informed me they expected me to use “they/he” pronouns when speaking of them and that they’d changed their name to JJ. At the time, I was fairly aghast. It had taken me months to devise the name I gave them at birth.

I made their name everything mine wasn’t. I gave it the attention a poet gives to language. And I could not utter it again.

If I were to share here what their name was, I would be deadnaming them. I could whisper the name to you, but only if you are a close friend or a fellow parent of a trans kid who gets it. My child made clear that my duty is to make sure their deadname is buried forever, never to appear again—not even in retrospect.

In utero

An early fixation when JJ told me their new name was, ridiculously, a Christmas stocking I had started needlepointing for them when they were in utero. If you know anything about needlepoint, you know it’s excruciatingly slow work. A square inch can take an hour.

I ordered the kit online without noting the dimensions and was then horrified to discover the stocking was large enough to encase a small child. Nonetheless, I undertook to needlepoint the whole goddamned thing. It took four years.

Perhaps to distract myself from the fundamental shift occurring in my child’s psyche, I obsessed about what to do with this stocking decorated with their deadname. And so I joined a Facebook group called The Needlepointers Society, looking for help on how to change it.

Cherishing

Clever advice poured in. Most stitchers suggested needlepointing a separate cuff of sorts with JJ’s new name and attaching it to the top of the stocking, covering their deadname. Then one member told me: put it away. He was, he explained, a gay man long and happily married. Elderly now, he was looking back at his coming out through the lens of cherishing a life well lived. He suggested buying a stocking with my child’s new name instead of needlepointing a solution.

“Keep the old one,” he said. “You never know, they may treasure it in years to come.”

I did exactly as this gentleman suggested, ordering a stocking in the colors of the trans flag with JJ’s name in swooping cursive.

Merged

Recently, in an Uber in Mexico City, where JJ and I now live, I had a memory of JJ as a toddler and realized I did not deadname them in my head. The name JJ had merged with their child self in my memory.

Since JJ came out just as they hit adolescence, their child self felt, for so long, like a little girl I lost.

Now it feels like JJ has always been here.

* * *

A difficult thing for me to accommodate when JJ came out was their request that I take down all pictures of them as an AFAB (assigned female at birth) individual. No more photos in the house of them as a baby, a toddler, a young child.

I had tons of framed photos of JJ’s big infant head: huge grin, first teeth, teensy earrings glinting. I took them down. Then I took all the pictures off Facebook.

Details

The other day in the Uber, when I recalled JJ’s child self as their nonbinary self instead of as a lost little girl, I put it together with the fact that JJ has begun to talk a lot about their childhood lately.

JJ has quite a memory. They recall getting their ears pierced at six months old. They aren’t making up what happened—I was there! They’ve got the details down.

Talking about the past signals to me that their childhood is intact. To my great relief, the pain of growing up AFAB did not occlude JJ’s past. There are memories there.

Secret altar

My office walls were once covered with pictures of JJ as an AFAB child. The photos hung there through Covid, collecting dust. For years, no one entered my office. I worked from home.

When I finally returned to campus, my office felt like a secret altar to the someone JJ once was and was now not.

I had accepted that JJ was no longer the little girl in these pictures.

But I needed to accept the fact that they never were.

This was hard for me.

“I need to take these pictures down, don’t I?” I asked a colleague who was also a close friend.

“Yeah,” she said, looking at me kind of sharply, in a way that surprised me.

Faces

And so I gathered the photos from the filing cabinet, the desk, the walls, nearly missing one stuck to the side of a bookcase, and put them in a drawer. Then, because it was the first Monday of the month, I opened my laptop and joined a PFLAG support meeting on Zoom.

The screen filled with faces, some familiar, some new. We took turns introducing ourselves and giving updates on our lives. I told them I had just taken down all of the pictures of JJ as a girl-child wearing dresses and pink cowboy boots.

I told them I needed new pictures of JJ.

In this month's meeting, years later, I told them I am experiencing memories of JJ without misgendering or deadnaming them, in a most surprisingly fluid and natural manner, and that I never thought I would arrive at this moment.

Full self

That’s where I decided to end this essay last night. But when I woke, I realized something I need to do.

I have a dearth of pictures of JJ in our Mexico City home because they, like all teens, hate to have their picture taken by their parent. But when I looked on my phone, I discovered many pictures of us from the past few years: on a trip to LA, driving through Hollywood Hills, laughing our asses off; reflected in the silvery Bean of downtown Chicago; and my favorite picture of them, sitting in a café, staring off into the distance, looking contemplative and scholarly and grown up. I sent for prints.

* * *

I changed my office, and am changing my house, because I want people who come into my space to know me as a person. I didn’t want my students to see a cis woman who talks about her trans kid but only has pictures of a three-year-old in pink on her walls. I don’t want new friends to enter my home and see a blank where a family could be.

I am continually figuring out how to be a better parent to my trans kid, which extends to being, and showing, my full self to the people in my life.

My ongoing relationship with JJ teaches me that love is action.

— T.C.

Tina Carson is a writer, teacher, and founder of Gender Defiant. She lives in Mexico City.

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GENDER DEFIANTTina Carson