by Mary Collins
The backstory for the biological father is complicated, a tale of an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a decade coming back into my life for what proved to be a life-altering month fling. I got pregnant using birth control. We agreed to keep the baby, but I knew I did not love this man and made it clear from the moment we saw the positive test that I would not marry him. Life with a gun-toting, dog-loving, truck-driving guy wouldn’t have been good for me, and my unhappiness would not have been good for him. After six months of jostling back and forth on what to do about the baby, he walked away.
No wedding meant no help and, as it turns out, no involvement with J. whatsoever, even though I pleaded with him to stay in his own child’s life.
It turns out that biological dads have few responsibilities if they do not marry the mother, whereas, under American and international law, the mother must step up and accept full responsibility for housing, feeding, clothing, and educating her child. I considered the father a good friend, and I wanted him to stay involved. But when he left, without any offer of child support, I let him go, full of guilt over my lack of commitment to building a family with him. I regret only the guilt because, I felt, he had a responsibility to his biological child no matter what happened between the two of us.
It took generations of women to earn me the right to refuse to marry or live with the biological father of my child; many countries today would not even grant me that freedom. Only now, reflecting on all that Donald did to win his new name, despite our close relationship and all that I have done for my child, do I see a parallel between our decisions. In each instance, we respected and valued the other person—in my case, the father of J.; in Donald’s case, me—but acted to realize some basic right in our own lives. The father never saw this, and I did not see it when Donald so aggressively severed my parental control over his life.
My child’s biological father loved me, and I loved my child, but love bestows no rights. The father thought because I valued and admired him as a friend and bore his child, that I had to stay. I thought that because the most emotionally tender moments of my life came while reading to my young daughter, that she would always be with me, and by with me I mean emotionally, physically, morally, and intellectually. When J. did something so fundamental to her identity without me, it shook me to the core, and I have never recovered.
Whenever I tried to speak with other adults outside my extended family about my experiences raising my trans son, people invariably would chime, “Oh, she’ll outgrow it,” or, “Kids go to such lengths for attention,” or, “It’s a phase.” But I had more respect for my child’s seriousness and self-awareness than that and knew it was never going to stop at the name change.
And it didn’t.
For all of human history, across most cultures and religions, parents’ rights over their young children have been sacrosanct. A cursory comparison of the Bible and Qur’an, for example, show tremendous overlap. In Islam, one story recounts how a man asks the prophet whom should he show the most kindness and the prophet responds, “Your mother.” The man asks the question again, and the prophet says, “Your mother.” And again. “Your mother.” Only on the fourth inquiry does the prophet say, “Your father.”
And, of course, in Christianity, to honor thy father and mother is the Fifth Commandment from God. And why? “So that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.”
The second part of that commandment infers that you’re not long for this world if you are disrespectful toward your parents, probably more of a reality in the much more violent ancient world, where kin and tribes ruled. Now we live in a world of nations governed by laws, which in some instances can override the authority of parents.
Obviously, many of these laws are in place to protect children from abusive relatives. To my shock, I learned in online conversations that many people assume that transgender men who go through all the aggressive changes that Donald has gone through, including steroid shots, a double mastectomy, and a hysterectomy, must come from abusive households. Once a woman even told me that to my face when she heard I had a transgender son.
“All the people I know that are like that were sexually abused as kids,” she said.
The world of law over the world of tribal and parental rights saves abused children, who can become wards of the state. I have heard plenty of stories of overly controlling, vicious parents who are shocked when their son or daughter turns sixteen or eighteen and takes advantage of his or her newfound rights to do everything possible to snub, hurt, disrespect, and disown the mother and/or father. I firmly believe that J. was not doing anything remotely like that. At the time that’s how it felt, but now, with more distance from all that happened, I believe our parallel acts of independence—me setting off on my own as a single parent, J./Donald setting off on an identity quest that he grasped but I did not understand—have more in common with each other than I like to admit. I did not act to hurt the father; I acted to protect my own life and happiness. Donald did not act to hurt me; he acted to find his authentic self.
But knowing this does not stop me from becoming defensive about the sentiment that Donald was a victim of abuse. I feel obliged to make my case that J. and then Donald received the full measure of my attention and devotion, despite having started out as a single-parent household with no child support.
The first step I took was to walk away from a writing career that had begun gaining momentum after my first book. I moved from Washington, DC, to New England to live with one of my sisters so I could be at home with my baby full time. I turned down some amazing jobs, including one at Harvard, to honor my responsibilities as sole caretaker. I did this willingly and by choice, grateful to somehow work out a way to spend as much time as possible with my child.
My mother embraced her charming grandchild as firmly as any grandparent could. My siblings cared about their roles as extended family and brought J. on trips and tried to bridge the age gap between the cousins (my daughter was the youngest) by including J. on many family adventures.
Of course the biological father had walked, a level of rejection I cannot imagine since my own father offered only unconditional love. There was no male figure for J. to give her candy or meet her after school. Later, when a stepfather came into the picture, then wound up several states away after a divorce, it was another leave-taking, another incomplete emotional connection.
But our dad deficit was no greater than many other weighty things children in the world must bear. On a day-to-day basis, J. had a stable home, spent the bulk of her childhood in the same town, and had a biological parent fully engaged in her welfare.
To presume abuse presumes mental illness and great dysfunction, but I know Donald discounts this theory and sees himself as being the product of a normal household. In his view, no amount of counseling can get at his “problem” because being transgender is not a problem. And for those who presume that my child must have sprung from a brutal home environment, I can only say that I have never loved anything more in my life than my only child and I gave her all I had to offer emotionally and financially.
I took J.’s right to an education so seriously that when a second-grade teacher told me to get my intelligent, creative, super-sensitive child out of the public schools, I did. It took a team of people to pull off a first-rate education for J. and, later, Donald, but in my darkest moments, when I felt completely marginalized as a parent, I took great solace in the fact I was doing all I could to give him a tremendous education.
Another primary responsibility as Donald’s sole parent, good health care, proved the most vexing.
What’s good health care when a clinic will give your eighteen-year-old child male hormones with few questions asked just six weeks after he’s first arrived to college in a big city?
What’s good health care when a doctor is willing to strip your child’s body of perfectly sound parts so his physical self can better match his gender identity?
Once Donald
turned eighteen, none of those doctors ever had an obligation to consult me on anything or answer anything I might ask. More germane to this essay is that when Donald was sixteen, a counselor sent him to an LGBTQ support group led by people who had transitioned from one sex to another and celebrated anyone else in the group with the courage to do the same. I know some of those people are heroes to Donald, but to me they took over my parental rights at the very moment I should have been able to exercise them most vigorously. Since I did not agree with the groupthink, I felt ostracized. Parents who embraced all of it gave me the silent treatment.
There has to be a middle ground.
At age twenty-two, when Donald was firmly his own person legally and emotionally, he elected to have a hysterectomy. I could not bring myself to assist in the sterilization of my only child, so I did not drive him to the procedure or pick him up afterward. I marked the occasion in my own way: by burning a baby picture of my lovely daughter down to ash, then spreading the ashes around a favored rose bush in my yard. I did it at night, the flames licking the side of a stainless steel pan that I often used to cook pasta. In that moment, I also showed caring and love as I honored the daughter in Donald and my child’s ability to bear children.
All turned to ash.
Donald went out of his way to show me great respect through his other actions. He worked hard as a scholarship student, spent two years as a resident assistant in his dorm, a grueling way to earn room and board. He never became aggressive, angry, or rude when I disagreed with his decision to have the surgeries.
Yet, he stripped me of my rights as a parent to achieve his goal and used others to help him do it. At the time, I thought it was the worst thing that anyone could have ever done to me. But what would Donald’s biological father say to me, the mother of his child, who refused to marry him? Did he feel stripped of all of his dignity by my rejection, and by most of his rights, a move so demoralizing that he never sought to reclaim any of them, even though I welcomed his involvement in our child’s day-to-day care and lived within miles of him for twelve of our daughter’s first fourteen years of life?
Our hard-won rights to be transgender, to be a single mother, to be so many special things in American society come with great costs. Part of me finds myself looking up parents’ rights advocacy groups online, wondering how my child becoming sixteen could result in such a draconian flip, in which in one month I am fully in control and ever mindful of her best interests, and in another so marginalized that I don’t even know my own child’s name anymore. Based on my cursory research, I realized that most of the parents’ rights advocates simply want to homeschool their children (considered legal in the United States since a 1925 Supreme Court ruling) and philosophically sit on the far right of the political spectrum with the anti-choice folks, creationists, and the pro-gun lobby.
That’s not a bench I want to sit on.
But the marginalization I have experienced further motivates me to demand a longer bench, a place where someone like me can plead that the professionals and parents who excised me out of the conversation about my own sixteen-year-old’s actions take a harder look at what they did and what they could have done better to help Donald and me find common ground. The more they stonewalled me, the more silence they directed my way, the more I wanted out. Completely. They took the thing I loved the most in the world away from me without so much as a phone call. That may have been their legal right and Donald’s legal right, but it’s not right.
The conundrum of meeting everyone’s rights becomes even more apparent to me as I reflect on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first championed and passed under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, herself a great gender bender. A paraphrased sampler from the thirty rights (in my language and with my thoughts about them):
2. Don’t Discriminate
Twenty years ago—or even more recently than that—Donald would have faced tremendous discrimination when in high school and college he transitioned from female to male. In fact, he received resounding support at each level. I hope the larger society can continue to embrace our transgender citizens. Even just ten years ago, if I had questioned what was going on, educators, counselors, and medical professionals would have rushed to include me, but today they discriminated against me because I was not fully on board about J.’s transition to Donald from day one. One gain, one loss.
11. Always innocent Until Proven Guilty
A complete stranger accused me of raising a child in an abusive household.
Complete strangers accused me of being homophobic and prejudiced whenever I questioned what Donald was doing, especially the pace at which he moved at such a young age. I am none of those things.
19. Freedom of Expression
My right to engage in this essay project is the most affirming experience I’ve had as a parent and a human being concerned about the welfare of my child since Donald was fourteen years old. I invited my transgender son to join me with his own words so he, too, could feel freed by honest expression.
30. No One Can Take Your Rights Away
When Donald became eighteen, all my rights as a parent were taken away. That happens for all parents in America, but should it?
To cope, I had to forget about my sense of entitlement as a parent because I loved my child, and, unlike Donald’s father, I had decided instead to focus on my duty. This much steadier, deep-seated emotion sustained me during the murkiest moments and most unforgiving hours. I had a responsibility to raise my child to the best of my ability no matter how unexpected the situation, and that basic tenet guided my decision to continue to pay for Donald’s education and to continue to try to create a space in my house so we could both still call it home.
On one occasion I crossed paths with a parent who had taken Donald in while he and I were wrestling over the rate of his transition from female to male. For several weeks during his sophomore year in college, I so strongly opposed his decision to inject himself with hormones and surgically alter his body at such a young age that I would not let him come home. I felt as though he wanted me to support something akin to a drug addiction under my own roof.
We both now have a more nuanced understanding of what happened to us and what continues to happen to us, but at the time we had to reach this nadir in our relationship before we could climb to a more affirming, mutually respectful middle ground. My mother—Donnie’s Gran—in particular kept hammering home to me that J. and Donald were the same person, and kept reminding Donald that I was grieving the loss of J. and that he must show me more compassion.
A year after this period, I found myself helping Donald move into his dorm room at college. As I waited in the suite’s living room, the mother of one of his roommates swung onto a stool next to me, not quite sure who I was.
I introduced myself.
“Oh, you’re Donnie’s mother,” she said, her body rigid with disgust, her voice low and sour.
In her eyes, I had abandoned Donald. She never once thought for a moment that perhaps I was giving all I had, down to my last breath, to save J., my daughter whom she had never known.
“Yes,” I replied, my own voice like a fist. “Be careful what you say, because you do not know the whole story.”
She walked away.
I continued helping Donald move into his room.
Hidden Fees
Donald Collins
I’ve heard parents say all they want is “the best” for their children, but the best is subjective and anchored by how they know and learned the world.
—Janet Mock, Redefining Realness
Spring 2011
The first openly trans adult I ever met was Tony Ferraiolo, a genial trans man in his late forties who co-ran, and still runs, a youth support group for gender-variant teens in the New Haven area. I attended this group on and off my senior year of high school. We all just called it “Group.”
Originally, Tony told me, Group started with him and two members but grew within a year to
encompass dozens of participants of all identities and backgrounds. He even started a group for parents and an art-based one for younger kids.
When I found out about Group and told my mom I wanted to go, she was highly conflicted, but eventually agreed to drive me to the next Saturday meeting. The first time we made the forty-five-minute commute, we got terribly lost and both ended up red-faced and stressed out of our minds. It reminded me of a game I played when I was younger, where I would leave the radio on an annoying station and see how long before my mom couldn’t take it anymore. It was always a big joke to me, because eventually she would cave and turn the dial.
But on the way to Group, I was terrified she would just say “fuck it” and turn the car around. And it wasn’t because of some static-infused banjo riff on FM. We were sitting with my gender trouble, seeing how long we could both last before something had to give.
“I don’t know if I’m the best parent in the world or the worst,” she sighed as we parked across the street from the meeting location.
I didn’t think she was either; I just wanted to get the heck out of the car.
Down the block I saw Tony outside the meeting address, stocky, bearded, and tattooed, emanating this energetic warmth. I remember thinking, to quote Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”
I only attended Group for a couple of months, but knew the formula well. We went around and introduced ourselves with our name and pronouns, maybe a line about what we liked or where we were from. We shared highs and lows from our week, got words of encouragement from other members and the adult facilitators. Sometimes people cried, really cried, but the mood wasn’t always low. Group members mingled afterwards with a kind of ease that you can’t cultivate anywhere but a safe space.