by Mary Collins
While putting the final touches on this book in 2016, I learned that President Barack Obama appointed Eric Fanning as the first openly gay secretary of the army, a shift I never could have imagined occurring in my lifetime. The military has also softened its stance on allowing transgender soldiers to serve openly, rather than under the shadow of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But such progress doesn’t change my overall feeling that “military” = “conservative” and “conservative” = “vehemently uncomfortable with transgender individuals.”
Before Donald went off to New York City for a paid internship at age twenty-one, I pulled up a map of voting patterns in the United States and looked at red districts versus blue districts and told him that there—pointing to large cities—his gender-bending ways probably wouldn’t matter all that much, but there—pointing to the rural South—they could be deadly.
He. She. It. They. Drunken, gun-toting men have beaten trans people and left them for dead over that shifting continuum.
Of course something resembling acceptance has broken out in the media, with trans woman Laverne Cox, from the hit TV show Orange Is the New Black, on the cover of Time magazine; another TV show, Transparent, winning an Emmy; and, of course, Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner’s transition playing out across every possible media outlet, from Twitter to the morning talk shows. In recent years, there has been a rush of TV shows, documentaries, books, and movies about trans people, but it all feels very voyeur-like, with glib black-and-white discussions about whether transgender people are sinful or the next group to press for their civil rights.
What we need is a third way to talk about gender issues, dialogue that is not so polarizing but more in line with what really happens when people slip along the gender slide rule. Instead of asking if gender nonconformity is right or wrong, we could be discussing what it is, what it means, and how much pain it can cause for the person in transition and those who love that person.
How do we all stay in motion without hurting each other?
Most parents of young girls worry about protecting them from sexual predators, sexual harassment, and risks on social media, but I never worried about my vulnerable red-haired, fair-eyed young daughter as much as I worry about my trans son. I do not agree with the decisions he has made to alter his body so completely and at such a young age, but that does not negate my love for him or my concern for his right to remain protected.
He seeks an authentic self.
He seeks to match his gender with his identity.
A short haircut and name change were not enough for him.
But gender dystopia remains listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of psychiatric disorders (they ditched homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973 after much debate), and the search for scientific clarity on whether or not transgender people are mentally ill or genetically predetermined continues internationally. The Dutch have led the way in research, studying how brain structure impacts gender identity, for example, and there’s the Gender Identity Research and Education Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which emphatically challenges listing transgender people as mentally ill and says that being trans “should not be judged as inherently pathological or negative.”
But it’s hard to see any path to understanding and acceptance, never mind WPATH, when your own child comes out as transgender and you have never heard of that word. The lack of general education around all of this hurts families.
It’s hard to see a path when the daughter you love dissolves before your eyes and every high school advisor, counselor, and medical professional who helps her do that cannot talk to you because of privacy issues for young adults sixteen and older. The law stripped me of all power as a parent seeking to protect my child. All three fields—education, counseling, and medicine—need to rethink how they handle not only their trans clients but also the people around them. Right now there are limited services for parents like myself.
It’s hard to see a path when other families embrace your trans son’s decisions and never once call or ask what you, the mother, think.
Donald had facial hair by age eighteen.
Donald’s voice went tinny, then deep, so I saved J.’s voice on my answering machine.
She, she, she became he, he, he.
Right now, after many years of reflection and hard work, I dodge all pronouns as much as possible when referring to Donald in conversation. A linguistics professor at my university noticed I have developed a verbal tic when referring to my trans son. I tend to say “my Donnie” instead of “my son.”
Donald is in New York. Donald is working hard. I am so proud of all that my Donald is doing.
Not he. Not she. Just, my Donald.
After reading the essays he wrote for this book, I am almost embarrassed by my reticence to call him my son, but some residual sense of loss about my daughter makes it difficult, even though I’ve come so much further in terms of accepting what Donald wants and deserves.
Donald, my son.
Gender Roles
What was more important to me in my role as a mother: to protect J. from being dismantled step by step, or to empower Donald to emerge with a new identity as a trans man?
In an effort to remain true to myself as a single mother of an only child, I could not willingly go along with completely erasing J. The biological father walked when I was still pregnant; the stepfather, whom I divorced when Donald was thirteen, manages to see him once or twice a year. There are no siblings.
Just me and J.
A family.
Two females.
One mother and one daughter.
All the various factors in my personal life led me to a career and financial situation more commonly associated with a man. I took charge of everything, bought my own house, excelled at work, and was continually promoted to ever more demanding jobs. When I first moved from the South to New England after my divorce, I actually wrangled with my future employer over my starting salary. Later, I learned from a top administrator that I was the only woman she had ever met who had done that. In her experience, only men had the gumption to press for more cash before they even started a job.
With no child support or life partner to help me, I had to become ever more gender neutral in how I lived my life to care for my young daughter.
But as J. transformed into Donald, everything flipped. I found myself shifting into ever more traditional feminine roles. I wanted to go to the mother-daughter tea at the high school, but Donald declined; I wanted Donald to wear a white dress to the high school graduation like all the other young women, but he arrived in a suit and tie. I used food to help heal the wounds that kept opening between us, making sure I prepared fine meals, like fresh swordfish and homemade mashed potatoes, for Donald so we’d eat together and talk about the things we both love—reading, writing, art, humor—rather than fall into our excruciating disagreements.
Donald became much more assertive about shaping his own life and secured internships he never would have aspired to as a young woman. As J., my child feared talking to cashiers when buying a bagel, but as Donald he lived on his own in New York City before even graduating college and plunged into the high-octane world of TV production. He’s bluntly admitted to me that life in the United States is easier and much more fun living as a man.
He feels nature pulled a nasty trick and put him in the wrong body, and he’s working to adjust that. I feel nature gave me a daughter and then, unexpectedly, took her away.
Both of those feelings and impressions are true and authentic.
I do not need to be a woman, and Donald does not have to be a man, to understand the agony inherent in that conundrum.
We just want to find a way to be humane to each other.
Endings and Beginnings
Mapping Modern Grief
Mary Collins
“I am transgender,” my teenaged daughter, J., says, her green eyes squinting with
anxiety.
“Trans?” I ask. “What’s that?”
I am still thinking about mundane things, like the dirty dishes on the counter. We sit at my favorite place in the house, the round kitchen table by a window with lacy curtains, where I drink tea and read my newspaper every morning.
“Trans, Mom. I am a man trapped in a woman’s body.”
The summer day’s simmering breath coming through the screen suddenly feels like a panting animal.
“What?”
My first fully modern loss.
It does not feel the same as when my father died when I was age fourteen.
It does not feel the same as when the love of my life left me when I was in my twenties.
In that moment at the kitchen table, I experienced a loss only made possible by our current culture, which allows—even empowers—a teenager to take steroids and have “top surgery” (trans speak for a double mastectomy) all before age twenty so his gender can match his person.
When J. legally changed her name to Donald and insisted we use male pronouns to refer to him, I resisted for a short time, but eventually gave up on “she,” “her,” and the entire idea that I have a daughter at all.
But when I said I thought Donald was moving too fast with his physical transition, the counselors, school advisors, and medical professionals told me I must face the inevitable.
When I said I was sad about the unique obstacles my child will have to deal with in the larger world as an adult, they told me to tamp down my homophobia and trans bias. Seek counseling to overcome your prejudices, they advised.
I am not ashamed or biased, I told them.
I am grieving the loss of my daughter, and that does not mean I do not love my trans son.
Modern loss. Modern grief.
None of them grasped any of it, so I share a story with one of the school advisors.
When the school had a mother-daughter tea for Mother’s Day, Donald and I did not go, and skipped over to a nondescript Dunkin’ Donuts in a strip mall instead. As we finished our iced coffees, both milky-white with extra cream, I noticed two guys with heavily tattooed arms sitting two tables away listening as we chatted about Cher’s trans son, Chaz, who had been in the news a lot.
The men’s shoulders seemed tight, their lips closed.
I eyed the pickup truck outside.
I stared at the ice cubes in my cheap plastic cup.
I told Donald we needed to leave.
He thought it was because I’d finished my drink.
In that moment I did not feel shame, I tell the advisor, just fear.
I take no issue with any individual’s right to affirm and assert his or her identity.
But I know that outside the super-accommodating world of my child’s liberal school, approximately 40 percent of Americans still disapprove of homosexuality. Imagine how they must perceive someone who is transgender? Even within the LGBTQ community, the T falls toward the end of the continuum.
In that moment, I explain to the advisor, I understood my daughter would never return. Her person remains, but my trans son faces a day-to-day life I never imagined for my child. As I drove Donald back to school, my fear transformed into something else, something that now follows me through my days, something I can only describe as grief.
I know from reading books and articles about parents with children who do not fall within “normal” parameters, in particular Andrew Solomon’s book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, that millions of families struggle with this unusual form of grieving. Two tall parents might have a dwarf; a scholar might have an autistic boy who does not speak. Counselors focus on “acceptance” of the situation rather than processing the grief first, which, unfortunately, falls right in line with the American Psychiatric Association’s recent decision to identify depression associated with deep grief as mental illness, not a natural reaction that an individual should be encouraged to feel and move through without guilt or shame. Leave it to American culture to take a fundamental human emotion and classify it as a condition.
I reflected on how I handled my father’s death to help me cope with my situation with my trans son, but that only brought back memories of how poorly American culture handles even this most timeless of losses.
All I remember of the moment when I first heard my father had died were the white walls of my small bedroom, my mother by my bedside shaking from the stress of what she had to tell me, the sense of dislocation I felt when she spoke the news. I remember wrapping the cotton bedspread around my shoulders and leaning into the softness and warmth. I don’t remember leaving the room or going downstairs or how I told my friends. I now associate white, not black, with death, and have purple, lilac, deep blue, yellow, and other colors on the walls in my house, but not white.
The general world treated my loss as sad, unfortunate, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I wasn’t expected to return to school, to sports teams, to my student work job at my high school within the week. We had a church service, a burial; I missed a few days of classes and that was it.
Only now, as an adult researching grief and loss, have I discovered that just 4 percent of children in the United States under age fifteen lose a parent. When I asked my sister to guess the percentage (and she’s a health-care professional), she said about 25 percent. In places and time periods in which such losses were more commonplace, the larger society was better equipped to recognize grief and loss as an ongoing experience—not something with concrete stages that you go through in lockstep, but something you carry with you, often always.
In American culture we do not celebrate a Day of the Dead, as they do in Mexico; we don’t have secular altars in public spaces to honor those who have passed, as in many Eastern cultures. Here grief is more of an individual responsibility, a framework that encourages isolation and often morphs into debilitating depression. The fact that modern American life continues to add ever more complex types of loss just exacerbates the problem.
My emotional journey with Donald seems to more closely mirror more nebulous losses, such as moving away from someone I will never see again. The average American moves twelve times in his or her lifetime, and one in five children eventually move far away from their families, a geographic mortality rate, for want of a better term, that’s startling when you consider that for most of human history, the majority of people rarely traveled more than fifty miles from where they grew up.
Similarly, a single woman like me with a decent job can have dozens of romantic relationships over a lifetime, a tremendous freedom that comes with a price: you become intimate with a much larger pool of people, but, conversely, you also experience the loss of that intimacy anew each time it doesn’t work out.
I call that “good-bye grief.”
When Donald came home after the top surgery, he felt freed of the physical binds he had used to compress his breasts for years. He could wear a light t-shirt with nothing on underneath on a hot July day. His shoulders sprang back when he walked now, instead of slouched. He held his head differently, more confidently, and looked outward instead of downward. He felt more at home in his own body.
I looked at his now slim torso and saw a fawn before me—all legs, reddish-brown coat, and so vulnerable I wanted to hire a bodyguard for him.
Donald’s radical adjustment has made it easier for me to remember to use male pronouns when referring to him; I only slip up when I am out of Donald’s presence and around strangers who ask about my family. At one point, while Donald was still in college, a contractor building a porch for me wanted to know if I had children. Without thinking, I said, yes, I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college.
Two weeks later Donald came home, and as we pulled into the driveway the contractor stuck his head in my car to say hello.
“Oh,” he remarked later, “so you have two kids.”
Oh.
I had no vocabulary to explain the complexity of my situation in such quick passing conversation
s.
Instead, despite taking great pride in being an honest and direct person, I say little and am left with what I wryly call my own grief geography, territory that no one else can navigate or fully know. Of course our ancient ancestors had their own grief maps as well, terra incognita to us now. Which leaves me with the timeless question: Why did we evolve to grieve? It leaves us despondent, lethargic, and plagued by headaches and stomachaches; none of these things are sexy or enhance our ability to interact with others. The trauma is so great that stress hormones can literally cause the heart to enlarge temporarily. Research in evolutionary biology proves that even though we don’t want to experience this emotion, we can’t be fully mature without it.
At a physical level, our faces cannot fake either happiness or sadness. When a person forms a sincere smile, they engage the muscles around the eyes that lead to crow’s feet. You cannot fake that motion in the face.
There is also a sincere grief muscle, the corrugator muscle, which pulls together the eyebrows and wrinkles the forehead.
At a deep biological level we evolved to know for certain if someone is truly happy or sad.
At a deep biological level our entire body systems are programmed to handle losses, to allow emotions to vent and wax and wane as we recover. Indeed, most emotions only last seconds and rarely last more than hours.
I must acknowledge that at a fundamental level I actually gained some benefits from losing a parent young. I turned inward, rethought assumptions, felt less entitled, developed more empathy, paid closer attention to other people with sorrow, and emerged with a new identity, one infinitely more layered than the self-absorbed athlete I had been.