Wednesday Essay: Why I Made (Up) Tina Carson // A Mother's Confession (A Rerun)

This week,I am rerunning my first Substack essay from a couple of months ago, in case you might have missed it.

WHO IS TINA CARSON ANYWAY?

When you come right down to it, Tina Carson and her column Gender Defiant really started back in 2009, the year my baby was born. As you’ll know if you’ve been reading me for a bit, “Tina” is a pseudonym, and “JJ” is her trans nonbinary child’s moniker. But we are, as you may have guessed, real people.

Gender Defiant: Raising a Trans Teen is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you had told me back in 2009 that I would be desperately trying to find a way to reach people about trans issues because I feared for my trans child’s security and happiness, I would have no doubt stared back at you blankly.

The fact is I never even entertained the idea that I might have a trans child.

For years, I dressed my AFAB (assigned female at birth) child to nines. JJ wore, daily, many very fabulous and deeply feminine outfits. This, despite the fact I was a staunch feminist and questioned, as an academic, any and all gender constructs. I did not consider, ever, that gendering my child as so fiercely feminine was potentially oppressive.

I invented Tina out of necessity.

When it’s your kid’s identity in the cross-hairs, you start to take it personally.

*. *. *. *. *. *

Tina Carson writes Gender Defiant on behalf of her kid, JJ (they/he), who is now fifteen and identifies as trans-masc and nonbinary.

I would have never have thought to make Tina up, much less write this column, were it not for an imperative from on up high that I produce essays to promote the publication of my fourth book of poems.

I am a “professional”poet; Tina is not.

A literary agent who had, rather strangely, figured out how to make the writing of poetry profitable, suggested I boost my career by writing  a few opinion pieces to promote my upcoming (fourth) book of poems.

(Let it be known: books of poetry do not have what one would consider a wide readership.)

He recommended I should try to place said pieces in major venues, such as the New York Times.

I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.

*. *. *. *. *. *

I had been growing increasingly irritated with NYT’s op-ed editor Pamela Paul’s lengthy (and dull) pieces of barely disguised trans-hate.

I wanted to write about what I had learned about my own biases from my (then) 11 year old’s transition.

When it’s your kid’s identity in the cross-hairs, you take it personally.

So I wrote an essay and submitted it to the NYT. And then I wrote another essay and submitted it to the NYT.

I heard back nothing from the NYT. Each time.

I sent these essays out to lots of other places too. And it was through this process that I began to ascertain how nightmarish the practice of journalism is.

The writing of poetry, and the development of a body of one’s poetic work – the task of growing into the poet one is meant to be --  is all a wonderfully tedious process that takes years, if not decades.

From the poet’s perspective, journalism kind of sucks.

*. *. *. *. *. *

Some folks encouraged me. But no one published me. I wrote another piece. And another.

In the meantime, NYT Op-Ed editor (etc) Pamela Paul was churning out tedious and lengthy essays that disregarded, simply put, trans folks’ right to be who they are. When you’ve read a bajillion words by Pamela Paul on the attributes of J.K. Rowling with no mention of how trans folks are attacked, unaccommodated, etc., you start to wonder why Pamela thinks it’s okay to decide how other people should live.

Here I was, writing all these essays about being the mom of a trans kid, and how transphobia affects our day to day lives, and no one seemed to give a hoot.

When I posted about trans issues on my Facebook page, I maybe got 3 “likes.”

But if I posted about my cat, folks came clamoring with something like 256 “likes.”

Did no one in my widely white, cis-het Facebook realm feel a need, at all, to engage with the experience of trans folks?

I could feel the silence and incomprehension that had loomed over my own intellectual and emotional life over the previous decades hammer back at me.

I know what it means to think you care but to not in fact care. To think an issue does not implicitly affect you, and to tell yourself the lie that by simply acknowledging an injustice, you have done your best.

*. *. *. *. *. *

Before long, I forgot that the impetus for writing about having a trans kid was to publicize my fourth book of poems.

I continued to send out my essays, imploring folks to understand the many obstacles trans folks face in our culture. This now seemed a matter of survival.

How so?

Every weekday afternoon that I maneuver my car through the high school’s parking lot to recover my straight-A student child, and I see them perched and waiting adjacent to the line of school buses, my heart crawls up my throat.

As a poet, I am accustomed to rejection. Really, poetry is the hardest business for a writer to be in.  There’s no money to be made, and it’s competitive.  As one of my very best poetry mentors once commented, “Being a famous poet is like being a famous mushroom.”

I’m used to not being mainstream.

And it turns out that that writing about having a trans kids is not mainstream.

Only a radical paper will have you.

On the advice of a friend, I approached a local free paper in Portland, Maine. And Chris Busby, editor of The Bollard, took Tina on.

Chris Busby went further and published all of Tina’s essays combined as a front-page FEATURE. And then he invited  her to create this column under the umbrella of his totally free-to-the-public newspaper.

For months I knew the sheer joy of walking out of the grocery store and seeing a fresh new stack of Bollards with Tina Carson’s column in it.

Tina writes about her number one person: her kid, JJ.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Last week, Tina’s editor, Chris Busby, wrote to tell me that much of the advertising revenue for The Bollard has been cut. As a result, Tina’s column has been dropped.

Am I sad? Hell, yeah. But I take no offense. I’m really grateful to Chris Busby for publishing Tina’s column in the first place.  

And it has, in  fact, been a relief to be Tina, because through her I’ve learn to tell my story without flinching. There’s been a lot of freedom in that. And, as you may have noticed, freedom is in short supply nowadays.

I started this essay to share why I started writing Gender Defiant in the first place.

I would have preferred to have published Gender Defiant under my own name. It is an absolute fact that I’d get a hell of a lot more traction if I published this column under my real name.

So who reads Tina? As compared to who reads me?

I chose to employ a pseudonym for Gender Defiant because I was afraid someone might connect my kid to my writing, and potentially mock them, or even hate crime them.

Call it paranoid; call it proactive: You know what it’s like to love. My job in this world is to protect my kid.

RIP: Nex Benedict

Gender Defiant: Raising a Trans Teen is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.