# Parent Interview Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC0hh-QCqCA

[00:00] Hi, my name is Rachel and I am the parent of a 10 year old transgender girl.
[00:05] My name is Kathy and I am the parent of an 18 year old transgender boy, or a man rather.
[00:10] Hi, I'm Barnaby and my daughter is Kai and she's a 10 year old trans girl.
[00:16] So hi, my name is Melissa, I am a stepmother of Ashton.
[00:23] Ashton is 17.
[00:29] So from the moment that Kai could move around, she, and as far as we knew he at the time, so you know a year old Kai would gravitate towards her older sister's clothing.
[00:44] So at the time we had Kai dressed in in the boy clothes and Kai would somehow end up in her older sister Ruby's Disney princess dresses and and high heels.
[00:55] Even I mean at a year and a half she could barely walk but she was already sporting the high heels so when.
[01:02] My son was 14 and a half.
[01:05] We were having a nice conversation and he told me that he thought he was a boy.
[01:10] I was really shocked at the time because I had thought we perhaps had a um lesbian um and kind of as he grew up felt that way and I just didn't know what to do.
[01:22] I was really um really grieving and really confused.
[01:26] And so I told my husband immediately what was going on and we said you know we would try to figure this out.
[01:31] I can't say I was completely surprised because as long as I have known Ash, nation has been extremely tomboyish.
[01:42] And when I put all the pieces together it made sense.
[01:44] For example, when I married his dad we um Ashton and I went out shopping for a bridesmaid's dress because Ashton was going to be in her wedding.
[01:56] And man oh man that was quite an experience.
[02:00] It ended up with lots and lots of tears.
[02:02] And lots of frustration.
[02:05] I kind of always thought Ashton was gay.
[02:08] Maybe I didn't think about the transgender thing at all.
[02:13] But then when I was able to kind of put two together, it was like, wow, what a dummy I was not to even realize it back then.
[02:22] That was there was so much emotion about that dress.
[02:28] Yeah, so, um, of course at the beginning we felt like it might be a phase because he started talking about going on hormones and changing pronouns.
[02:38] Um, changing his name.
[02:41] Um, doing, you know, surgeries.
[02:43] I mean, there's all these things that he started throwing at us, and this was right at the beginning.
[02:47] And we thought, well, hold on, how do we, you know, how do we know?
[02:49] You're only 14 years old.
[02:51] How do we know that you're gonna stay this way?
[02:54] What if you switch back, and, you know, how do we really know?
[02:56] Also really initially afraid of my child's safety, or for her safety, and I was afraid.
[03:03] Um, that she would be bullied by family, by peers, by parents at preschool.
[03:11] There, you know, by doctors, there was just a lot of fear of how we handle this.
[03:16] How will we get through this?
[03:20] Where can we turn for support?
[03:22] It was just a really hard, it was a really tough time because we just were so ignorant.
[03:25] We didn't understand, you know.
[03:27] We would say, "Why can't you just be a more masculine lesbian?"
[03:30] I mean, honestly, that's what we would say to him.
[03:32] And we would fight about him saying, "No, I am a boy, I'm a boy, and it's different."
[03:39] And we didn't understand why that was different.
[03:41] It just took a really long time to untangle those two things from each other and understand what it meant to be a transgender person.
[03:48] But at the first, it was really hard and there was a lot of second-guessing and doubting and wondering, "Am I doing the right thing for a dad?"
[03:57] You know, I already had a girl, Kai's older sister, who's two and a half years older, and so here was the boy.
[04:04] And in our society, I think that what I've been fed and told is there's something about the, you know, the dad and his little boy playing football together and roughhousing together.
[04:17] And so in my mind, that's where my expectations were going with me and Kai.
[04:23] And for me as a mom, I like to plan things and I like to kind of know a timeline, and this just felt like this vast unknown that we were treading into.
[04:32] You know, they always say that we've got the handbook, What to Expect When You're Expecting, about pregnancy and about, you know, birth and then raising children afterward.
[04:43] And there didn't feel like there was a handbook for raising transgender children.
[04:46] And it just felt very lonely.
[04:50] It felt, we felt very isolated as a family and like we were processing a lot of grief and a lot of just fear of the unknown.
[05:04] I was so proud of him for.
[05:07] You know, being so proud to come out and be who he was, and I agree.
[05:12] And I didn't want to damper that spirit as he was trying to rally the support of other people in his life.
[05:17] Um, I was very okay with it, but I wasn't at all sure how dad was gonna be, biological mother were going to be.
[05:27] And Ashton's biological mom, who ended up ironically being, I guess that would be more supportive, and was very unsupportive.
[05:35] And that's been very, very frustrating for us because, and wanting to support Ashton's transition, mom has pretty much fought it every single step of the way.
[05:50] It was really hard because I'm a people pleaser.
[05:52] I want everybody to be happy.
[05:55] I want everybody, especially in my family, to love and accept me.
[05:57] I, I really love the idea of the, the all-American family, the, you know, the American dream.
[06:04] I've got a wife and kids and, and, uh, you know, the white.
[06:08] Picket fence, I love that idea.
[06:13] Every day I get older, I realize more and more that that's not true happiness.
[06:19] That's um, and that's a dream that isn't going to bring fulfillment.
[06:29] And for a lot of people, that's just not their way in the way it's going to be, and that's okay.
[06:35] Um, I think you know there was a lot of family pressure that we were experiencing from my parents in particular to get this little boy out of the dresses.
[06:45] Um, and this, the sense of shame about the first question.
[06:58] I'm already crying.
[06:58] I mean, we, you know, really hard over-corrected to try to make this kid, you know, be a boy, what we thought was a boy, and you know it.
[07:09] At the low point, you know, shaving the head to look like Dad, and you know, really, um, you know, buying boy clothes and all of those things, and just nothing worked.
[07:20] You know, nothing, nothing, um, nothing that we were doing was, was changing, you know, our child's gender expression.
[07:29] It's true, though, I mean, there's just, you know, you know, there was so much pressure from our family of origin, so much pressure from society, having an assigned male, you know, to make this child look a certain way, dressed a certain way, act a certain way.
[07:46] And when, um, when our child did not do that, there was this real sense of like, oh no, you know, what, what are we doing wrong?
[07:57] Yeah, it's really hard sometimes to think about, you know, you know, the fact that, you know, I thought I had a daughter and, you know, I, I don't, um.
[08:07] And one of my friends, I, I came out and I.
[08:11] I was always worried about all the all the friends I was going to tell because I felt like what if one of them says you know what I don't support you and and we're through we're not friends anymore.
[08:19] I can't believe you're you know this way or you're doing this to your child.
[08:23] And one of my friends I told who's known Sid um you know since he was little and and she said, "Kathy, you never had a daughter."
[08:31] And I thought, "Wow, that's so harsh, what a what a heavy thing to say."
[08:38] But right after she said it, it really sunk in and it honestly is the one thing that really sticks with me is you know you know I never had a daughter.
[08:45] I really didn't, I just didn't.
[08:46] I chose not to see that I there wasn't the language, it wasn't you know it wasn't the language of the time, but I really never did have a daughter.
[08:54] I mean I gave I gave birth to a boy um but we just didn't realize it.
[09:00] And so that really helps me for some reason.
[09:02] You know grief was a big part of this in the beginning.
[09:04] I think that I had a certain plan for my child of what this child's life would look like.
[09:12] And that turned out to be different than what I imagined and what I had planned.
[09:15] And then in the beginning, you know, I went through all the different stages of acceptance and, um, anger and denial and grief and whatever the order is of the stages.
[09:25] Definitely experienced all of those.
[09:27] [Music] Um.
[09:29] But I think something that really helped me get through that was going to a support group in Los Angeles and hearing one of the clinicians, one of the speakers, say, you know, that you're not grieving, um, the death of a child, that your child is not gone, your child is actually still present and still here with you.
[09:48] What you're grieving is a story, a story that you had imagined for your child, a certain outcome, a certain ending, what their life might look like, you know.
[09:56] And then you're going to close that story and open up a new one, and that's your kid's actual story.
[09:59] And I think, you know, as parents, that rings true for all of our kids.
[10:03] We might have an expectation of what their life will look like or, um, you know, what they will choose to pursue or their interests, their academics, anything, their friends and.
[10:13] That's not necessarily who they are.
[10:15] Allowing each of our kids to choose their own story to write their own story and us, you know, cheering them on is the most important thing.
[10:23] [Music]