'I'm trans-parenting. My 21-year-old son is now my daughter'
"In retrospect, I was in denial. Not only was I confused, but I was sure my kid was confused."
Trans-parenting
What to do when your 21-year-old son becomes your daughter
In the late spring of 2022, my son came home for his first summer break from college. He’d just completed his freshman year. It wasn’t a good one. We just didn’t know it until five days after driving from Washington, D.C., up to Michigan and back on Mother’s Day to pack up a few of the things in his dorm room. The week after we returned home, we received his report card. It wasn’t even close to a 2.0! This, from our kid who was an AP student in high school. By week’s end, we got a letter from his college basically saying it’d be best to part ways until he got his act together.
That’s when our questions began: “What happened?” “How did this happen?” “What went wrong?” “What were you doing?” “Why didn’t you tell us?” … were just a few of the questions hammered their way by their dad, stepdad, and myself. We got minimal, unsatisfactory and blank responses. But later, when I was alone with my child, they confided the reasons for this chaotic year and grades. For a few days, I kept this information to myself, mostly because I didn’t think it related to his flop of a first year at college.
In the meantime, my mother, from 3,000 miles away, decided she’d take the reins. She aimed to be her grandchild’s champion by hosting weekly Zoom calls to offer support and chart a new academic path for her “Golden Boy.” The entire family was summoned, including myself, my husband (stepdad), my ex-husband (the kids’ biological father), and my child’s then-16-year-old sister. After glossing over academics and next steps, my “son” spilled to everyone what he told me in confidence just a few weeks prior: “I want to be a woman.”
“The entire family was summoned, including myself, my husband (stepdad), my ex-husband (the kids’ biological father), and my child’s then-16-year-old sister.
After glossing over academics and next steps, my ‘son’ spilled to everyone what he told me in confidence just a few weeks prior: ‘I want to be a woman.’”
Focusing on the wrong thing
Moments after my child rolls out the news, my mother finds her sunglasses on her desk and slides them onto her face. She clears her throat in nervous disbelief. Though she’d been the self-appointed Zoom facilitator, she went quiet. As for myself, when it came to my child, I felt as though my championing, advocacy and protection had begun 22 years ago when they were just a fetus, in my belly. I’d spent the last two decades ensuring my kids stayed out of harm’s way — for me, that specifically meant jail and prison, because for nearly 20 years, I’d worked in the criminal legal reform space, fighting for the human rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Since my kids were ages three and five, they knew I visited jails and prisons, and met with policymakers, the families of impacted people, and those directly impacted by our justice system. I would regurgitate statistics to them to let them know getting in trouble in the U.S. while Black is no joke.
In my work, one piece of data that stood out for me was, “One in three Black men will touch the criminal justice system at some point in their life.” Another piece of data — published by the very think tank I managed communications for — was that the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for Black women born in 2001 is one in eighteen. My kids were born in 2003 and 2005, not too far off from that timeframe. For perspective, the stat for white men and white women born in 2001 is one in 17, and one in 111, respectively.
Meaning, while was raising my children, I spent my days and nights working on criminal justice reform and trying to ensure that both my son and daughter spent their out-of-school time in community with others: Girl Scouts, swimming and violin for my daughter, and Big Brothers of America, karate, saxophone, and wrestling for my son. I even published a blog, Not These Two, chronicling my efforts to ensure my kids would not be included in those statistics. After rushing to be first to register them for camp, filling out scholarship applications for special programs and schools, and putting thousands of miles on my car — and my body — I can say I succeeded, but now I wonder if perhaps I was too laser-focused on saving them both from having a prison or jail ID, and didn’t consider other identity issues, like gender and sexual orientation. It never occurred to me that the son I was worried about getting caught up in our school-to-prison pipeline would at some point decide he wanted to be identified as my daughter.
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Bravo!
love to them and to you ♥️