The Bold World

by Jodie Patterson

  We know this may be confusing for you. It remains very complex for us. There is so much information available about transgender people that may help to clarify some of your questions. Easy places to start might be the specials on Oprah and 20/20. You can find them online. (Those were the places I started with, and while not perfect, they provided an introduction, a starting point to deeper conversation.)

  We ask that you support Penelope’s request to be seen as a boy. Please refer to him only by male pronouns or by his name (which he has asked not to change). Despite any personal feelings you may have about our decision, we expect that you will be respectful of Penelope and of our decision.

  Our love and respect for Penelope are complete. We hope yours will be, too.

  This is a version of the letter I sent out to dozens of people, both family and friends, formally announcing Penelope as boy. I’d found a sample letter in a book I was reading that could be used by parents of transgender kids to publicly state their child’s preferred gender. The letter was so direct, and at the same time so loving and poignant, that I decided to use it for our loved ones. The time was right, I felt, for each of them to meet us exactly where we were, with more clarity than we’d ever been able to offer.

  We don’t hide. There’s no time to hide. Those words, something Grandmother Gloria might have said during the civil rights movement, replayed in my head as I constructed the letter—addressing it to each person, putting together an opening, listing details, crafting a conclusion. With each sentence, each thought, I clarified the importance of my decision to support Penelope, for myself and for the reader. The letter didn’t ask for approval; it didn’t waste time explaining or justifying. Its only goal was to command respect. Respect for Penelope, for me, and for Joe (that is, if I could get him to support my idea).

  After reading and rereading the letter several times, making sure each word was perfectly placed and my points were clear, I nervously shared it with Joe. With all the respect he was accorded in his family by his siblings and his parents, I knew Joe’s cosign would be like the supreme judge’s gavel slamming down once and for all.

  “Babe, I wrote this letter. Can you come over here and take a look at it? If you sign it, we could even send it out tonight.” I could see him shifting—assuming his standard argument posture.

  He read the letter, chuckling when he finished. “You want me to sign this letter, love?”

  “Yup,” I answered dryly, moving papers around on the desk without looking up.

  “Well, if I sign this letter—your letter—it’ll be obvious to my family that I didn’t write it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it just isn’t what I’d say.”

  “Okay. Well, what would you say, then?”

  He pulled my keyboard toward him and began editing what I’d written, typing in a new line: We are also aware that Penelope’s self-identity may or may not change over time; however, from what we have read, the most important thing is that we support Penelope in his wishes.

  “May or may not change”? He was giving Penelope an out, a way to be fluid in his decisions about himself. You are fundamentally missing the point of what’s going on, I thought as I read over his words. Penelope’s identity was not a decision. It was a fact. The assumption that Penelope could change his mind eventually was ridiculous to me. But Joe’s intentions were genuine, and his heart for Penelope was in the right place. We were collaborating on a big family decision, and ultimately—thankfully—this time we were fighting on the same side. Progress.

  Rather than sending it out via mass email, I wanted people to receive the letter individually, and really feel the weight of the words. I pulled Penelope into the process as my editor and assistant, “approving” language, stuffing envelopes, and hand-delivering letters to those who lived nearby. For those who weren’t as close, Penelope added a stamp and dropped them in the mailbox. He sent each one out as if it were an invitation to his wedding—he was absolutely jubilant.

  My entire family responded with a flood of supportive, loving, and wordy emails, congratulating me as an “understanding mom” and Penel as a “courageous young man.”

  My niece Naeemah wrote to me:

  Jodie, I support self-determination (and mama-determination!). And I look forward to conversing with and experiencing Penel for myself, so I can ‘officially’ get her as a him. I am curious to see where/how he continues to develop (on all levels, in all aspects), as I am with them all. We are fortunate to know that we (Pattersons) are free to stand in whatever we choose and be loved, accepted, respected regardless.

  Generally speaking, I am of the notion that none of it matters anyway…that the only reason it matters is because people make it matter.

  So, lucky us for being the stand-out, stand-up family we are—who can show people how to beautifully Be with such a seemingly complex situation. Thus being a vessel for the transformation of the world. :)

  I was proud to know my family was willing to accept Penelope in whatever form and energy he showed up in. In contrast, Joe’s family remained silent—not responding at all to what we wrote. Well, at least not to me.

  * * *

  —

  In seeing Penelope as spirit, I saw the physical world—the one that gendered everything in either pink or blue—as the enemy. Anyone or anything that couldn’t be comfortable around Boy Penelope was on the opposing side of my fight. This was a turning point for me: When I had something beyond my own fears to fight for. When I loved more than I was scared. When I felt there was only one move to make: choose Penelope or choose the world.

  I was carrying a weight on my back—Penelope’s truth. And that weight would stay there, I vowed, until the world knelt for my child. Forever if necessary. It was the least I could do.

  Boy Penelope was happening—and would continue to happen—with or without us. Our job was not to question, it was to pick a side: either be with him, or be against him.

  The letter we sent out to family and friends was my first line in the sand.

  I started to weave what I was experiencing with Penelope into every part of my existence, speaking transgender like a familiar cadence, loud and clear, rather than like something that snagged and disrupted the flow. I added this big new thing into our everyday, then worked to smooth it out, quickly sanding the corners and polishing the rough spots so that when Penelope walked into a room, he’d feel at ease. Like a street sweeper, I brushed dust off the roads before Penelope stepped onto them. I moved debris out of the way just before he arrived. I cleared the air before Penelope had a chance to breathe it in, waving away anything doubtful or alarming so that my boy could just strut. If I didn’t like the way a room felt, if the eyes of the people looked mean or suspicious, I grabbed my kid’s hands and went in the opposite direction.

  Moving through a radical change—really embracing it—makes you want to break the rules. Abiding by protocol, being polite, looking for the “appropriate time”—those were at the core of the very problem. I spoke about transgender everywhere, at dinner tables and cocktail parties, business meetings and girls’ nights. Ask what I’d been up to in casual conversation, and prepare to hear the unadulterated and unprettied truth:

  “So, how’ve you been? How are the kids?”

  “Oh, you know, Penelope told me the other day he really wanted to start peeing standing up—so I let him. The first attempt was hilarious. I mean, pee just in every direction—on the wall, on the floor, on the both of us. We fell out, it was so funny. I was like, ‘Okay, Okay, this isn’t going to work.’ So then I went to the kitchen and brought back our cooking funnel for him to use. Problem solved!”

  I started telling my friends these anecdotes as though they were something to brag about, or at least laugh about, so they would stop looking at us with such pity.

  They’d half-smile at me suspiciously across
the table, as if they thought I were exaggerating, and then reveling in the apparent absurdity of it all. Then they’d look away and start an entirely new conversation. “Anyone up for a glass of rosé?”—burying my comments about Penelope under banal topics like wine.

  Making things worse was the fact that we didn’t live in a bubble—we were with our extended family and friends all the time. Big holiday celebrations, weekend road trips—we never stopped our family rituals during this time of transition. And our family was full of opinions, traditions, and rules—specific to the South, to Ghana, to Black people in general. Because of that, we had eyes on us, always. Loving eyes from the “village,” but eyes that sometimes judged the decisions that I, Penelope’s mother, was making on behalf of my own child. Eyes that questioned my motives, as if my motive could be anything other than Penelope’s best interest. If they only knew how much I didn’t want to make these tough decisions, how much it nearly broke me to put on a smile and send my baby out to school, to karate, on playdates, fearing how people might look at him. But they did not know how hard it was for me. Behind closed doors, I quietly raged at what I saw as the judgment in their eyes. And then I got back up again the next morning, prepared to fight another day.

  Soon, I found an LGBT national events calendar on the Internet, then started attending panels and workshops, some a six-hour drive from our home. Sometimes bringing Joe, sometimes going on my own. I’d sit quietly in rooms with people much more knowledgeable than I was, weaving together complex thoughts about gender that sent my mind in a million different new directions. But I kept quiet in these forums. Adding my own voice to the conversation was an authority I felt I hadn’t yet earned.

  Every day my head spun with big ideas of what life could be like for Penelope. I looked for people who could teach me more about my son and about a world where gender didn’t define a person. Through my work I discovered Janet Mock, a well-known transgender woman of color, writer, and advocate.

  After shutting down the Georgia store, I continued writing the Georgia blog, focusing on inner beauty and the modern lifestyle of women. The blog grew in popularity, and within a year I attracted the attention of a successful beauty executive. Together we launched an even larger-scale blog and beauty retail site called Doobop. As my voice was being heard throughout the country and beyond, my views on beauty were leaning toward the radical. I could no longer just talk about it from a surface perspective—going on and on about product ingredients and makeup techniques. How could I, the mother of a kid who had been refusing to conform all his life, promote shallow vanity and follow-the-leader standards of beauty? Standards that left everyone, including myself, feeling “not good enough”? Each blog post I wrote became a deeper look into a woman—her emotions, her way of thinking, and her culture—and less about what was in her medicine cabinet.

  Ms. Mock, a luminary as far as I was concerned, and one of the most famous transgender people in America, would make an ideal interview subject for the blog. I spent an hour on the phone with her one afternoon, listening to her stories of growing up in Hawaii.

  “I grew up in a place and time where there were other spaces beyond male and female—‘in between’ spaces. Growing up in Hawaii enabled me to avoid internalizing the shame that a lot of transgender people take on. I found myself in Hawaii. I found my best friend in Hawaii. I found a community of trans women and LGBT people. That’s the kind of space I grew up in.”

  From what I was learning, in Hawaii, among other places, trans people have always been normal parts of society—and even considered special, transcendent, and two-spirited—a term I was growing to love.

  After our conversation, I wrote this about Janet:

  If you were to take a snapshot of what we would hope our beloved granddaughters and grandnieces to be like in 3014, Janet Mock would be it. She’s “free, boundless, and unapologetically fly.” Those strong words are the very ones Janet uses to describe the ideal girl she’s dreamed up: someone unconstructed by gender, class, stereotypes, and societal assumptions. Upon meeting Janet I quickly understand this: She is that futuristic hybrid of all things wonderful.

  I wrote these words to all women, and I didn’t care what it sounded like: me saying that Janet Mock, a transgender person, was the ideal. I wanted for Penelope what Janet had: a life in which he made sense.

  I became even more urgently committed to Penelope, more insistent on establishing his dignity. I did it because I had read that over 50 percent of transgender teens attempt suicide, and because violence against trans people had become an epidemic. I did it because I knew the decision to love and support Penelope would be a decision that could make the difference between his life and his death. So I continued to bring up transgender as often as possible, on beauty sites and at tech conferences. Any time I was interviewed for anything and every time I was given a microphone, I’d find a way to get around to gender, how complex it was and how we hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of it.

  And I started to walk away from anyone who showed signs of rejecting Boy Penelope. Standing still while someone is transforming can make the bystander feel uncomfortable, I know. Some people, who just a year before saw Penelope dressed in pink skirts and Mary Janes, were genuinely taken aback when they saw him now. But if they couldn’t recover from that initial moment of surprise, if they stiffened upon hearing me use these “strange” new words in association with Penelope—“transgender,” “boy,” “nephew”—that became their problem, not mine. I would drop folks like a bad habit, and think about it another day.

  But coming home at night, when I’d put to rest my boxer’s stance and my zero-F’s attitude, I’d break down, losing all my bravado. The relentless demand for “proof”—to “explain” and “justify” and “defend”—became a dead thing chained to my ankles, threatening to take me under.

  Proving and explaining ourselves, even dodging mean bullets, was something we all did on occasion, but I was doing it day in and day out. A few people close to me suggested I pull back on being so visible, so outspoken, for the safety of our family. Apparently, showing off our differences and being proud of them could put us in harm’s way. This possibility of being hurt, even attacked, made my sleep erratic, sometimes impossible. I hated for Joe to leave me alone at home with the kids—checking and double-checking the locks on doors and windows several times throughout the night. By being transgender, Penelope lost the privilege of simple and safe existence, where you just go about your day, unbothered by others, and I gave away mine when I stood by his side. I hadn’t stopped to think what that would mean for us. I hadn’t calculated the stress it would rain down.

  Every single day I came home from work, or from a relative’s house, the dead thing got heavier and heavier. Every single day, I wept.

  “You know—real women, Jodie—we cry and type at the same time.” Letting out a deep sigh, my sister-friend Johnica delivered this gem of harsh wisdom while she watched me in the throes of a particularly bad episode one afternoon, curled up in a ball on the couch.

  It’s an old Southern saying meant to tell us that those who are about the business of change will work through their sorrow without ever stopping. They aren’t immobilized by emotions, but emboldened by them. Her words lodged deep in my heart, and stayed there.

  Chin up. Eyes up. Fists up, I thought. We are revolutionaries like our grandparents.

  I would press on.

  * * *

  —

  If the letter we sent out about Penelope was my first line in the sand, the second was where I spent my time. I began to circle around Penelope—protecting him—at the expense of the other people living in my own home.

  Too many times to count, I chose Penelope—over Joe, over Georgia, over Cassius and Othello and Nain. I chose to show my love for him more, to touch his face more, tell him more than the others how beautiful he was.

  I chose to sit throu
gh each of his karate classes, never missing a single one, often skipping his brothers’ tennis and gymnastics classes so that on the car ride home, Penelope and I could talk about the new kata he just learned. I chose to sleep next to him more than the others so I could push back his nightmares. I chose to walk with him into every new space he ever entered, two steps ahead, so he would never feel alone.

  “It’s cool. Everyone knows I’m always last on your list.” Joe half-smiled at me whenever I forgot to pick up a coffee for him when I got one for myself, or greeted the kids with a hug and a kiss and forgot to show him any love. There were countless other instances that reinforced what we both knew was true but couldn’t honestly, fully admit.

  Most times he blew it off with a sarcastic comment and a pat on my butt, as he’d done for years. But other times, it really got to him, knowing without a doubt that his needs, sometimes physical, sometimes intellectual, sometimes emotional, would most likely not be met by his wife. But my hands were full and my brain was taxed. Catering to Joe felt like coddling a grown-ass man. My empathy reserves were gone by the time I turned my attention to Joe. I couldn’t see past Penelope and me.

  My choices had taken a toll beyond my marriage. Cassius began spending more time with Joe, preferring him to me, brushing me off with a scowl and a cold shoulder. Othello still clung to my leg most of the day, but he was slow to speak, the only one of my kids who wasn’t using complex sentences by age two. He’d rely mostly on his brothers to talk for him, or to him. He’d nod and smile, understanding everything but responding mostly by pointing, or using only one or two words. “His vocabulary is smaller than it should be,” relayed a mildly interested therapist we’d hired to assess the situation. “I’m sure you have your hands full, but try reeeading to him.” She was patronizing, but I couldn’t argue the point. Othello, the baby, wasn’t getting enough from me.