COMING OUT, LIKE A FLOWER

Don’t we have better things to do than tell folks they have to be someone or something they aren’t?

The first person I shared my uneasy news with was my friend Brandy. I shut the door behind me as I entered my office to relay that my eleven-year-old had, just the day before, informed me that they would be using they/them pronouns and that their name was now JJ.

It wasn't, I would have argued at the time, that I was against transgender people. Not at all. In fact, I'd have gone on to explain, I'd had many transgender students, several of whom I worked to support.

I didn't take kindly to my kid changing their name on me, I explained to Brandy. The one I'd given them was, in my opinion, pretty great. I continued to misgender JJ throughout this conversation, while Brandy corrected me each time. This rankled me. Who did she think she was? And Brandy’s overt (woke?) patience was so annoying. After all, this was my kid we were talking about!

But then over the next several days I noticed my kid grew despondent when I didn’t use their new name. I got worried: my typically fresh-faced and mildly belligerent kid was flat-out bleak. Like, depressed. So I tried using the new name more. I told a few more people, expecting them to regard me with incredulity.

Congratulations, my editor responded warmly. It's great they've found their true self. I nodded, thinking: Can you be serious? All the people I mentioned it to in sideways conversation had nothing to offer but effusive support and what appeared to be genuine delight.

How could they all be so sunny when my child had just slid themself beneath a lens through which so much of our society views a target?

Finally, I told my mother. She said it was a phase. I told her it did not strike me as a phase. I went to my exercise class, jumping up and down with other cis het women before a mirrored wall, the reflection of our femininity uniform, my face on the verge of cracking into tears.

There was a time when transness made me uncomfortable because I did not understand it.

When JJ first came out, I thought I didn’t need to understand it to support it. But the truth is, understanding helps one see why it is so necessary to support trans youth and adults who move forward to actualize their true identity. What often comes at a surprise to the parent was long in the works for their trans child.

I am deeply fortunate to have friends who recognized right away that JJ's coming out was a powerful moment and nothing to be ashamed of, but rather a source of pride.

What I finally came to understand was that it takes years for a trans person to come out, to finally transition, because it is a heavy lift. The process is painful and all-consuming because it requires that one completely reconfigure their life in order to establish they identify with a gender other than they were assigned at birth.

Don’t we have better things to do than tell folks they have to be someone or something they aren’t?

Couldn’t we better spend our time learning how to cook, taking walks, catching up on work, reaching out to a friend we’ve been missing?

You have to wonder why one person's happiness is an affront to others.

You have to wonder why this matter is politicized at all.