Alone with My Child's Childhood

When my trans daughter said "don’t send me photos anymore," it felt like she ripped herself out of our shared past.

Today on Instagram a friend posts two photos: one as a young bridesmaid in a strapless cranberry-colored dress, hair up, ultrafemme, looking flirtingly into the lens; the other in short-haired, masc-nonbinary middle age, after top surgery, wearing bandages and looking happy as hell. Two views, same friend. Past and present.

The images take my breath away at the distance between them, like jump cuts do. Swiping from the friend’s teen self to their older, masc self, I can see resemblance. Also joy. Two joys you can’t trace a line between: they just are.

Anyone scrolling by couldn’t know whether the young person in the bridesmaid dress felt dysphoria. Which is maybe the point of the friend’s post. Gender transition can simply be part of a life. There are more trans stories than “agony healed” and “disaster forestalled.”

Last week I sent a photo from a couple of years ago to my daughter Izzy. In it she wears a navy blue dress, her hair is shoulder-length. She has on big sunglasses and looks French and chic. I am next to her in a ridiculous sun hat. I added a funny caption and tossed it into our ongoing wade through the memory bank, not without thinking, because I’m aware Izzy doesn’t like a lot of photos from her past. I thought she had approved this one, though. She had already transitioned to her female self in it. I remember us looking at the picture together and laughing.

No she texted. It’s a terrible photo of me just don’t send me photos. Ok bye I’m busy.

I thought I sent a sweet memory. Instead I opened a sinkhole. Something changed. I know my job as mom of a teen is not to probe her about it. These chasms can happen at any time. Certainly the ground gave way enough between me and my own mother when I was 17, and I was in cis puberty, no gender transition. Still, when Izzy said just don’t send me photos, it felt like she ripped herself out of the picture.

She didn’t mean to leave me alone there in the past. But it hurt.

Since then, I have been looking at more pictures of my daughter, from when we thought Boy, and said Him. She WAS really handsome in the pleather aviator jacket when she was 4. I am alone with my child’s childhood right now, but I am keeping my tenderness toward that photo. And the one with chaps and cowboy boots and the long blond tips tied up on her head so she looked like a pineapple, age 9. And with braces on her teeth as she held a snowball as big as a laundry basket.

I do love a family photo gallery that says: here we all are. We lived here, in this place. In our house, the routine is taking down photos. You will know we lived here by the many nail-holes and plaster crumbs from rearranging art to fill the blank spots. Our love isn’t so much in the pictures as it is in the walls.

The last time we visited my in-laws, out of town, I took off my coat and spotted a picture of Izzy in the living room that I know she wouldn’t want to be confronted with. I tossed it in a cabinet. It’s not that she looks unhappy in that picture from middle school, back when we said He. Or does she?

I can’t help scanning the past for shadows. In the photo of her holding her clarinet, she has a hooded look. Dysphoria? Was she miserable inside? But now I am falling into the sinkhole of before and after. It’s a ready trap, because it’s the story we often hear about trans people: before transition equals “suicidal risk” and after equals “saved.”

That story is important. It warns us of the real risks trans people face if they can’t live as their true selves. Parents should deeply listen to their kids, and protect them, including getting them the care they deserve, just as cis kids should get the care they deserve. All of this is urgent and true. But being trans doesn’t necessarily hold the extremes of suicide and life saved. If dysphoria is there, it doesn't show up in every moment.

Trans is not a tragedy. It’s possible for gender transition to unfold relatively uneventfully. It can involve self-doubt and awkwardness but also nonchalance, happiness, and more, all at the same time. It’s just life. No wonder transphobic people are losing it right now. If you can live an ordinary, pretty happy life across a gender transition, how much these parents stand to lose, and so seemingly easily! Their kid could just slip through a crack into trans!

Of course, that’s not how it works. No one slips into being trans. It is a self-realization that happens over time, often a long time. But I can almost relate to these parents’ fear. It hurt when Izzy ripped herself out of our picture, even if the ripping had nothing to do with me. All parents lose their children in puberty.

I was the mother of a child in a three-piece suit, age 5, and I am the mother of the person upstairs blasting George Michael who hates the suit picture. Maybe she hates it because she hates her masc self, or hates seeing her masc self. Maybe she hates it because it’s a picture of her being called He.

Or maybe because she is like most teenagers and thinks her mom texting her baby pictures is, like, cringe.