At the Broken Places

by Mary Collins

  Dealing with the issue of J.’s transition should be easier when it comes to strangers who have no inkling of our past and present, but it is not, because for most of us there are only two gender categories. When my last book, American Idle: A Journey Through Our Sedentary Culture, came out, I traveled the country as a guest speaker for two years and invariably people would ask, “Do you have any children?” Yes, one, I’d say. “A boy or a girl?”

  Think of all that is inferred by that simple question: You have a boy or a girl in diapers. You have a boy or a girl learning to walk. You have a boy or a girl who just braved his or her first day of school. You have a boy or a girl who plays on a sports team, loves an instrument, or embraces the theater.

  You have a boy or a girl.

  Sometimes I deflect the question, not out of shame or shyness, but simply because the situation doesn’t call for any depth or true connection. I might say, “My Donnie is in college now,” or something like that so I never directly say if I have a son or daughter. On occasion someone does retort, “So he’s in school,” with an emphasis on the pronoun.

  More recently I have noticed that I give different answers depending on the time period the stranger asks about.

  Yes, we used to summer at a lake in New Hampshire before my divorce, and J. loved to play on the rope swing or canoe with a friend to pick blueberries on the island.

  Yes, J. deeply disliked the mind games girls played in middle school and stayed off online social sites like Facebook without being asked. She figured she’d be bullied and mocked.

  Yes, J. has a childhood I can give you in story form.

  Yes, Donnie is in college now and loves the city.

  Yes, Donnie works so hard to help with the cost of college.

  Yes, Donnie is funny, a fine student, has plenty of friends. He joined a fraternity that he loves.

  Yes, a fraternity. In this new narrative line, J.’s story has ended and Donald’s past has begun.

  At the New Hampshire vacation camp, I brought up the fact that I have a trans son with a stranger because we had a mutual friend who knew our story, but I almost never do that. Peculiar things happen to people’s body language when I move this directly to the truth. Most of the real feelings come through the face, the confusion in the eyes, the earnest effort not to react or seem judgmental or surprised. They really do not want to miss a beat and come across as transphobic. But I know I have made them uncomfortable, and many do not even truly know how they feel about such a turn of events in the conversation, in our society.

  One of the most complex social groups I deal with is the distant relations I might hear from every two or three years, like a cousin in San Diego or New Haven. They send the Christmas Letter. They ask about J. They know she’s getting older and must “be out of college now!” Sometimes they even call because they’ll be in town. How’s the family? Your mom? Your siblings? Your daughter?

  I feel like shouting, “We’ve crossed into a different Gender Zone!” All of your saved Christmas letters from us tell you that I had a daughter, but that past is wrong. I was raising a trans child all along but just didn’t know it.

  These distant family relations hear the story, try to catch up, but slip up again and again. They still ask after J. They sometimes correct themselves, but it’s all too hard to pin down, to give away a daughter’s childhood and replace it with a trans man’s present. Some manage to shift to the correct name but almost never to the correct pronoun.

  My immediate family has fully embraced the transition story now after many rough years when some of us thought J. was moving too fast to become Donald and was too young to make such radical changes to her/his body. Some of us thought it was a passing phase; some accepted it immediately, in part because they weren’t all that emotionally invested in J. to begin with, so they didn’t feel they were losing anything.

  My ninety-year-old mother wept when she heard that her beloved granddaughter wanted to be embraced as a grandson. For many months, my mom went through a strange period of grief, continuing to reach out and embrace J. as Donald but mourning the slipping away of all evidence of J. as a girl. The golden-red hair became a cropped buzz cut and the gift of a Vera Bradley bag got stowed in the closet.

  It was as though in a matter of days she had held a funeral for one grandchild and then crafted a new memory book for a different grandchild. I was astounded at how smoothly she pulled this off, the eldest of the extended family, the one with the longest track record of loss (two husbands, most of her friends, several of her siblings) on a racetrack to a new space so she wouldn’t lose her grandchild entirely.

  My ninety-year-old mother was the first to bring Donald to buy clothes in the men’s department.

  My ninety-year-old mother was the first to tell me to my face without flinching that J. was never coming back and Donald was here to stay and I must accept it.

  My ninety-year-old mother still talks about when J. was a child and visited her in Florida or lost to her at Scrabble or went to New York City to watch the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall and bought a ten-dollar chocolate-covered strawberry at Rockefeller Center. One strawberry for ten dollars! They photographed it before eating it.

  She shifts more easily than I do between such recollections of her beloved granddaughter’s past and the reality of now. She has a wry quality about her whenever she talks about any of it, as though after nine decades it’s not that she’s seen everything, but that she has somehow weathered all that she has seen.

  Just last year she disclosed to me that one of her sisters also has a transgender grandchild; my aunt’s son’s son became a woman named M.

  I know that someplace in the future people will be more accepting of this entire process, the shifting gender continuum, and won’t flinch when asked to overlook the fact that the man in front of them had a girlhood not a boyhood. But in these years of transition, and our growing but limited awareness about transgender people, in this window where my daughter, J., is still someone that many people knew even just a handful of years ago, I must move like water myself, flowing in this direction and that depending on the shape of the moment.

  Among various professions, when it comes to disclosure, safety and context are everything, but even those measures change radically, especially when you look at how transgender people are treated globally. Even the most basic online search brings up color-coded charts and maps of the world that make it clear that most of Africa, India, and the Middle East consider sexual relations between two people of the same sex illegal. If I shift my focus to something more relevant to our family situation—gender expression—things muddy quickly.

  Some countries that might put a person in prison for having homosexual relations, actually accept a person’s right to change gender. But—and this is where I must step back and catch my breath—some of these same countries require people to have themselves sterilized before the government will acknowledge their new gender.

  Require.

  I felt marginalized when teachers, advisors, and counselors kept me out of the conversation about Donald’s transition because he was sixteen, and they had no legal right to disclose anything to me, his mother. But at least I knew he was choosing his way to his new identity.

  In such environments, a misstep along the line between disclosure and discretion could result in a person losing complete control over his or her own body. In India, for example, authorities would have made him shut down his ovaries.

  Of course the US State Department and local registries of motor vehicles want full disclosure for official documents, such as a passport or driver’s license, but the system hasn’t caught up with Donald’s reality. He’s changed his name and presents as male, but he had to go through an incredible series of steps to finally shift from female-to-male on his driver’s license. I know he’d probably be offended to know that I feel the state should take care with such things. Not that I would wish the state to deny an individual such rights to choose and shift, but I st
ill feel some deliberation makes sense, especially for people under age twenty-five.

  I must also acknowledge that trying to get a new gender designation all lined up on everything—Social Security, driver’s license, passport—created bureaucratic inconsistencies in Donald’s record that have made him a target for skittish public officials in our post-9/11 world.

  Are you a man or a woman?

  Somehow the answer to that question doesn’t seem a matter of national security, and Donald feels targeted, feels sneaky, feels uncomfortable. When he has the choice, he opts for the bus.

  To remind myself how prejudiced and off such inquiries must feel to Donald, I consider that if he were a lesbian, there would be no disconnect on his official identification, no new information to “disclose.” Society and official agencies really do need to catch up. Perhaps Facebook’s fifty-plus categories for gender aren’t as farfetched as they feel to me. Perhaps agencies should just ask for gender identity, as many college applications do now, and let the person fill in what fits, or drop the question of gender entirely.

  I almost didn’t write these essays, which disclose so much about what Donald and I think about what happened to our family as he went through his transition. I thought we could work it out, that we were that close. But the breaks between us started to feel permanent. The decision to use something we both love—writing—to truly divulge the full measure of our feelings engendered more compassion and empathy between us.

  But is this more public conversation the right way to go? I felt cynical, even angry, when, in 2015, I heard that Bruce Jenner planned to talk about being transgender with Diane Sawyer on national television. Right, I thought, he’s eager for fame, money, and as much attention as possible. I judged his decision to disclose with a ruthlessness that surprised me.

  Then I watched the interview in May of that year, along with nearly a hundred million other people, and his sincerity came through. When Sawyer asked Jenner if he were a reporter what question he would have asked, he replied, “Are you going to be okay?” So Sawyer asked the question and, after a pregnant pause, Jenner answered it.

  “I hope so,” he said. “I feel like I’m going to be okay.”

  I felt teary-eyed with empathy.

  But I was also struck by the interview with Jenner’s former wife, Kris, which popped up on social media a few days after his interview. She wept while one of her daughters from the famous Kardashian clan reprimanded her for not accepting the situation.

  So it’s okay to disclose you’re transgender, I thought as I watched, but not okay for family members to disclose their grief over the person and relationship they’ve lost? I’ve experienced the same sort of reprimanding looks and comments whenever I openly mourn the loss of my J.

  Sometimes when we celebrate openness for a marginalized group, we wind up marginalizing someone else. The conversation around all of this continues to lack nuance and sophistication.

  We all circulate within several social circles—family, friends, neighbors, coworkers—and when it comes to transgender rights, each circle can have conflicting social ground rules.

  • Christian bakery owners don’t want to be forced to craft wedding cakes for gay or transgender couples.

  • The US Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage is now legal in all fifty states.

  • Employers in many states can still discriminate against transgender workers and refuse them employment.

  • President Obama signed a law making it illegal to discriminate against transgender people employed by the federal government.

  • Landlords in many states can refuse to lease to LGBTQ applicants.

  • When Donald flies back to LA after visiting me at home, he can legally use a men’s restroom in a Connecticut airport but not in North or South Carolina when he stops to catch a connecting flight.

  I use bullets to capture the tennis ball–like bounce to all of this. One reason for the disconnect: We have few positive avenues for honest conversation. Everyone digs in with hard-and-fast points of view and shows little respect for the other side. We demonize each other.

  Like some right-wing baker in Georgia, I deeply disagreed with my daughter’s decision to change her name. I wept over the fact she would no long have my father’s initials—JFC—and took on a name I had never even heard mentioned in our home. Now I see that the name was one of the first tools she had at her disposal to act on her need to alter her identity. I can still feel my sadness, the regret, but I dropped the judgment.

  But I started with a value system handed down to me from generations of my family. My shift took time. I gave myself permission to work through my own transition in values and found it only here, in these essays, certainly not from the professional medical world. I entered into a conversation with myself because I could not find space to safely enter into that conversation anywhere else, except among some very close friends and family.

  I still wrestle with the question, when does discretion tip into deceit? I had a mixed-race student who came to class for months with blue eyes and then suddenly came to class with brown. In an essay for the course she confessed that she idolized the white Barbie-doll ideal and had worn tinted contacts to make herself feel prettier.

  We all hide things—hair color, eye color. Now we can add gender to the list.

  The freer I feel about disclosing that I have a transgender son, no matter the social situation I’m in, the more discretion I show about flashing some of my darker feelings about the entire experience. Some of my closest friends and family were quick to start referring to Donald as my son when in conversation with me. I know they wanted to embrace me, him, and all of our changes without judgment, but the first few times that happened, I felt violated.

  How dare you assume that I think I have a son, I thought, an irrational flash of rage that I later realized was really grief over the complete erasure of J.

  How could I ever say I have a son when I never had a boy? It simply felt like a smoke-and-mirrors game. Each exchange demanded that I let go of a daughter I knew I had, a sacrifice I could not put into words.

  Now I can say with confidence that I have a son, but I also tell people about my daughter’s childhood whenever the conversation demands. My revised world view now includes a new gender continuum that can hold these two things in my mind at once. A grown man can have a girlhood.

  As a transgender man, Donald has a right to actualize his own identity. As a mother, I also have a right to remember and cherish my baby girl. Those two lines can fit into the same paragraph and not destroy each other.

  Rights

  WORD BANK

  The phrase gender confirming describes any medical process that helps people feel more comfortable with their gender.

  Hormone replacement treatment or therapy (HRT), as it relates to trans health care, is a gender-confirming medical process wherein one takes a monitored hormone dose to bring about secondary sex characteristics that align with one’s gender identity. Testosterone is stereotypically associated with trans men, and estrogen with trans women. A more in-depth description of HRT is given further in this section.

  HRT is monitored by an endocrinologist or “endo,” a doctor specially trained to treat glands, the organs in our bodies that create hormones. Examples of glands include ovaries, testes, and the pancreas.

  Top surgery is a colloquial phrase that refers to any gender-confirming surgery designed to alter the chest. Top surgery can indicate a double mastectomy, which removes breast tissue and creates a flat chest, or breast implants or augmentations.

  Right(s)

  Mary Collins

  An advisor at my daughter J.’s high school dropped me an e-mail about someone named Donnie Collins’s college application file. You have the wrong family, I said in a voice mail. I don’t know anyone by that name.

  She never responded. Instead, her boss called me.

  Thus began my saga down the wormhole of shifting parental rights for those with children ages si
xteen to eighteen. Against my wishes, my daughter had asked her teachers to refer to her by a male name, Donald, and by male pronouns. She also asked the college admissions advising office to allow her to apply to college under her new assumed name.

  When J. told me she was transgender, I had never heard of that word and did not grasp what that might entail. We discussed the name change, but I begged to have J. slow down, to wait until starting college to pull the switch, when it would be a natural new starting point. I thought she/he had agreed.

  Then, the phone call.

  It turns out that at school she had been a he for months, but no one had told me because under Connecticut law, a high school does not have to share such things with a parent if the student is sixteen or older. Donald did have to wait until age eighteen to make the legal name change on his own, but by his junior year, he had the right to be called by whatever name or pronoun he chose at school.

  The fact that he was at a boarding school and never attended public schools in Connecticut meant I also never got to know any other parents, who might have heard about what was going on and made some effort to communicate with me.

  It proved a perfect storm for an information whiteout.

  I had hoped Donald would use a name more like his legal name, something he said he would consider. But he wound up using new first and middle names that I had never heard him mention. Only now, years later, do I see what an impossible half-step I was asking him to take, the word “trans” on my tongue for the first time, my biggest concern still to protect J., not to help craft Donald.

  Two years later, in front of a judge in my hometown in the state where four previous generations of my father’s family had resided, without me there or without my consent, my high-school-aged daughter took her next bold step toward becoming a man and legally changed her name to Donald Oliver Collins. The irony: He inadvertently cut off the only connection we had to a positive male role model in our lives, my beloved father, who had died when I was fourteen. He and J. had shared the same initials and the same middle name, something Donald discarded.