by Mary Collins
And as a teenager, I had listened to my father. I took his advice. And when he was gone, I had his words, and I did not challenge them.
“Be sure to love your work. Be good citizens and enjoy what life can offer. It can be a lot of fun if you let it,” he advised in a handwritten letter in pale blue ink that now hangs in my study. “Remember me and the good times that we had and don’t dwell on the sorrowful aspects of life.”
I turned down law school and became a writer and a professor of creative writing, in part, because he empowered me with these words and with his early death.
Love your work. Be a good citizen.
I have never admitted that I benefitted in any way from experiencing such a deep loss at such a young age because I’ve somehow felt it inappropriate to express such conflicted feelings. In America, you’re either grieving the loss of someone or you’re “over” it.
I either love my trans son or I don’t.
How do we do a better job of breaking free of such rigid thinking so we can accept a much wider range of griefs (yes, I am making that word up) as we face an ever evolving range of losses in modern life?
Step one: Get over the shame.
When I first started working on this essay, I felt so self-conscious writing about grief and loss for an American audience that I labeled the story file “G-Stories,” so anyone walking in and out of my office area would not pepper me with questions about what I was writing. I feared they would think I was sad (I was not) or depressed (I was not), otherwise how else could I explain focusing my precious writing hours on such a topic?
At least one of my distant relatives lacked such inhibitions.
While clearing out an estate for an aunt on my father’s side, my family came across some handwritten letters in a cloth bag hidden behind a picture frame. The time line at the top of one of the first pages read Clonmel, Ireland, November 12th 1871. My great-grandmother’s father was sending news from the home country to his daughters in America. He wrote of church yard sales, the death of his son, and his longing and sadness because he knew he’d never again see the children who had sailed across the Atlantic. Now that the son who stayed in Ireland was gone, “we are left lonesome,” John Sheedy wrote. “We have neither son nor daughter to call on when we have need of them. The grave and America left us a lone couple in Our Old Days.”
His grief, hidden behind a frame for decades, came fully into my heart as I read his careful penmanship. At first, all I could think of was the Catholic knack for laying on the guilt, but then I also saw that by simply writing, by putting his true feelings to paper and sending it across the ocean for his daughters to feel, he’d let go of shame about his situation.
I am sad. I am lonely. I am full of grief because you are gone and your brother has died.
Clearly his daughters shared their father’s pain, and perhaps even felt motivated by it to do the best they could in America, so that all the loss would result in true gains: good jobs, a good education, and a better world for their own children and grandchildren.
I cannot say these things for certain, but they did save the letters.
Now, John Sheedy’s great-great-great granddaughter has become a grandson. The girl I set sail into the world came back across the water a different gender. Like John, I know my daughter will never return. Like John, I have put my various griefs in a bag and hid them behind a proverbial frame.
But the geography of my grief was terra incognita in his time.
Despite the counselor’s advice, I pull it out now, like a map, with this essay, for all to see.
Birds of Spring
Donald Collins
“D’you want to change?”
“It’s the only evidence of life.”
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
I have a tattoo of a robin on my left bicep, a medium-sized traditional piece, and my first. Tattoos became a part of my ever evolving vision of self sometime during my junior year of college. When I was working a paid internship in New York and had extra cash on hand, I found a reputable artist and started decorating.
I prepare to tell my mother about this tattoo as we depart from a local coffee shop. I’m waiting for the magic moment between the car’s air conditioning really working and us reversing out of the parking spot.
So many long, difficult talks between my mother and me have taken place in a car. I remember her visiting me at boarding school, taking me for a much-needed lunch and a drive. We would park somewhere and talk at length in our seats. She would ask questions with the kind of frustration that comes from knowing that someone is unhappy and not knowing how to help that person. I would desperately try to impart any understanding of the unhappiness I had no name for. Then, with something short of relief, she would return home and I, to school.
Today we are both in good spirits, and I am hesitant to stir up any trouble. But the opportune moment lingers and luckily, I’ve paved my own way. These hundred difficult talks of ours, some harder than others, make my admission near casual.
“I got a tattoo in New York,” I tell her. “I thought about it for a long time, and I’m very happy with it. I just didn’t want to surprise you.”
I show her the tattoo, and she is surprised, but polite.
“It’s very well done,” she remarks.
After getting the tattoo, I found out the robin is the state bird of Connecticut—site of my coming out, my boarding school years, and my family’s current home. I chose it because robins are, mythically, the bird of springtime, of new beginnings. Its seasonal arrival heralds the budding of trees, warmer weather, and migrations.
Being trans, or my way of being trans, involves a lot of starting over. I filled out hours of paperwork to create this person. I celebrate new birthdays and anniversaries for myself. I have a new name, a new body, and a new will to enjoy life. Opportunities and friendships ripen around the arrival of this new person. He is welcome, more than welcome, in this long-hibernating world of his own making.
I wear my robin like a badge and bring my own spring with me.
While I was experiencing this spring-of-myself, my mother grieved for her daughter of seasons past.
Parents and guardians often experience a profound sense of loss when a child articulates a trans or gender-variant identity. In their handbook The Transgender Child, Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper divide this loss into two primary categories: grief over “lost dreams” and grief for “the child who goes away.”
My mother grieved my symbolic feminine future and my literal feminine present. Her vision for my life became complicated, was rearranged, and fell out of focus, while I began to see things clearly for the first time.
I had just started boarding high school at Loomis Chaffee when I intuited a severe misalignment between my physical and mental gender orientation. My parents had divorced in the months previous, and while Dad remained in Virginia, Mom and I moved from my hometown of Alexandria to her hometown of West Hartford, a Connecticut suburb. I had only seen pictures of the house we moved to, a sweet but drafty colonial home a block from the town center.
Despite the pressures of starting her new teaching job, my mother was revitalized and clearly relieved to be away from the emotional toxicity of our previous home. It was my own childish protesting that had kept her from moving away a year earlier. But while my mom may have been ready for her new start, I wasn’t ready for mine. I failed to connect with our new home. No end of painting and rearranging made my chilly (and now terribly painted) room comfortable. I took to sleeping in the TV room on a spare mattress.
Even though Loomis was within driving distance of our house, boarding was a more practical option. It meant my mom, being my primary parent, didn’t have to stress about how I would get to school every day. It would give her some time to adjust to a demanding new position as a professor, and me a much-needed sense of community. My mom and all her siblings had gone to Loomis, and it was the only place she would allow me to board. It was also the only
high school I applied to.
The school is still a relative baby among the New England prep elite, a class of expensive institutions including the hundred-years-older Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, and Miss Porter’s. Perhaps its “youthful” 1874 founding contributes to Loomis’s distinctly new-age vibe. We’re just a little more chill, which by prep school standards isn’t actually that chill.
Every morning began with signing in at breakfast and participating in a mandatory “work-job,” a rotating chore that could be anything from trash pickup, busing dishes, or delivering papers. To leave campus on foot you had to sign out, and to leave in a car you had to get written permission from a faculty member or have a parent call ahead. Low-level misbehavior resulted in restrictions to campus, and upper-level conduct violations, called “Level Twos” (drinking, drugs, and wanton fornication), resulted in students having to complete “work hours” for the school. Overall, the system was benevolent, involving more red string than red tape—especially compared to our British counterparts—but still enough to stifle distracted seventeen-year-olds.
My first two years of Loomis went by in a melancholy blur. I enjoyed my coursework, met a few close friends, but otherwise deteriorated quickly, slipping into intense periods of depression.
In eighth grade I had participated in hyper-feminine presentation, complete with long hair, rings, scarves, and tailored clothing, believing it would help me fit it more and banking that I would adapt to it with time. My mother encouraged my child-self to be active, confident, and allowed me to dress in boyish clothes. But as I grew up, she and the world around me gradually enforced the bodily reality of gendered culture.
Girls don’t wear boys’ clothes.
This is gender socialization, a set of codes, stereotypes, and expectations relentlessly baked in until they become the norm.
My “girl” clothes caused me great discomfort, but everything was easier when I wore them. People didn’t correct my behavior or appearance. I didn’t stand out. But though the long hair, rings, scarves and tailored clothing helped me fit in, by the end of my freshman year, I packed everything away, feeling suffocated. Girls’ clothes were like the sweaty trappings of a theater costume, right for the part I was playing but not for me. Within months of being at Loomis, I cut my hair sloppily short and took to wearing oversized thrift-store men’s clothing. I became less and less recognizable to my mother. My dad wondered if I was gay. Friends struggled to interpret my behavior. I was talkative, cheerful—then suddenly morose, beyond reach.
“You wear that sweater every day,” my friend Sus joked one morning.
“Cut it out,” I snapped at her. “Don’t make fun of how I dress.”
I had weekly sessions with Kendall, an agreeable, grounded therapist, for over two years. She was the first adult I expressed my gender dissonance to. Kendall was one of several mental health practitioners who visited Loomis weekly to conduct on-site appointments. Despite not being technically classified as a “gender therapist,” she became my tether to a kind of gender-enlightened sensibility. I can still visualize us sitting opposite each other in the scratchy chairs of Loomis’s health center attic. The stuffy, cream-colored infirmary suggested, and still does, that Red Cross nurses would burst in any moment with news of an armistice.
“Sometimes,” I told her, “I feel like my life would have been so much better if I were a boy.”
Being the soft-spoken professional she was, Kendall never steered our sessions, though she may have been long aware of the dissatisfaction I couldn’t pin down. She provided me a space to sort and categorize my own thoughts, to express feelings I had long repressed and devalued. I didn’t know my “life” as a boy was possible until I started talking about it, until I started needing it to be possible.
I don’t understand the hard-and-fast “therapy doesn’t work” mindset, because therapy is an individual process and experience. It worked for me. It indulged my hopeless self-obsession and allowed me to revisit the sites of my shame and interrogate their meanings. It helped me feel less angry, less damaged. It put me in control of my own betterment. After my “coming out” session with Kendall I took the time to lie quietly in my room and explore the shocking (at the time) words I had spoken.
During our next appointment I got specific: “I think I’m transgender.”
On a winter weekend home from school my senior year, I very emotionally told my mother these exact words in our kitchen. I noticed a blank expression in her eyes. I should have known in that moment that the word did not make contact with her. She didn’t understand. She reassured me that things were going to be okay and thanked me for telling her. Emboldened by this response, I began to elaborate on my plans (whoops!). I was changing my name and pronouns at school and would begin living “as a man” full time immediately. Then I saw the word connect, and the mood changed.
“What?” she said, incredulous.
By the end of the evening we were both exhausted from crying and arguing. I felt deeply offended that I’d had to endure a Socratic discourse to get permission to be myself at school (I was taking Intro to Philosophy at the time). I also felt deeply disheartened about my progress with this new, seemingly insurmountable roadblock in my way. Not only was my mom forbidding me to come out; she was devastated by my choice.
My mother would later explain to me that her conception of “trans” informed her confused reaction, because she believed it signified identification with both male and female traits, understandable considering that the word trans comes from the Latin root for “across” or “beyond.” Indeed, many trans people do identify with both male and female genders (also with more genders and no genders). But to my mom’s mind, the identification was milder. I was a “girl” who felt a little like a “boy” sometimes. This was fine with her as long as it didn’t involve me changing any part of myself. Not surprisingly, that didn’t work for me at all.
She asked me not to come out at school, to put it off, to give us some time to think all this through. I’ve never been one to disobey my mom or my family, but her request was directly at odds with my sense of well-being.
“Don’t do this,” my mother said.
I came out at the Christmas party of my (almost) all-girls dorm a week later.
“We have a short announcement before the party ends,” my dorm parent Mrs. A. shouted into the giggling crowd. Everyone quieted, and she gestured for me to speak.
I scratched nervously at the back of my neck, itchy from a new haircut earlier in the day. My red mop top was now carved into a ridiculous faux-hawk, one of the few choices I can honestly say my mom was right in protesting.
“I have something important I want to tell you,” I said to the room of attentive girls, standing amid streamers and tables of cupcakes. My words were clumsy, a second test flight hot on the heels of my first coming-out disaster.
“I identify as transgender,” I continued slowly. “I feel like a boy, even though I was born a girl. Everyone here knows me as ‘J.,’ but I would prefer to go by the name ‘Donnie’ and male pronouns.”
In my senior year of college, more than four years after coming out at Loomis, I was a guest speaker at a gender studies class. The class, taught by my favorite Emerson professor, had just completed their readings for the “transgender” unit. I functioned as a kind of primary source, an interactive exhibit.
The discussion veered toward my previously toxic feelings toward hegemonic (traditional, stereotypical) femininity. I found myself being honest with the class about my high school anger toward my “feminine” body and my earlier beliefs that masculinity was a superior, more desirable identity. For months, I told them, I even refrained from saying the word “cute” because it was “girly.”
“How do you feel about women and girls now?” piped a student in the back.
Completely off guard, I began to cry.
“I love girls,” I stammered. “Girls are amazing. Girls saved my life.”
I told them about that night a
t the dorm, my first coming-out “audience,” those forty girls who hugged me, supported me, and respected me. Girls who corrected their peers, checked in on me, remained some of my closest friends in the years to come. I fell asleep in the dorm that night hating every part of myself called “girl,” and yet the whole time it was girls who had carried me toward myself.
Remembering my own devaluation of women and girls because the gender was forced upon me—and wasn’t right for me—brings me great shame. My confrontations with these memories are difficult, but essential. I am finally able to express gratitude toward the women, including my mother and grandmother, who made me possible. I am finally able to treat the Loomis girls, those first allies of mine, with the same care and respect with which they treated me.
I continue to repair.
As much as the support of Palmer Dormitory meant to me, it was not the same as the support of a parent. Indeed, there was nothing perfect about my coming-out in high school. I was asked invasive questions, I got called out in bathrooms, and I resented being four years into an all-girl living situation and sitting at all-girl tables during weekly “family style” dinners. But despite its feeble imperfections, Loomis was my home. Like many of its alumni, I hated it, and it saved me. But senior spring, as I strengthened my relationship with this school “family,” my relationship with my mother reached new lows.
My college counselor, Beatrice, called my mom at home with the answer to a simple admissions question. She used the name “Donnie” when referring to me. This is how my mother learned I had come out at school. And she didn’t even like Beatrice to begin with.