by Mary Collins
For much of my early transition, I believed in a person no one else could see. I couldn’t expect my mother to understand what it feels like to recognize this disconnection in oneself, the disconnection hormone treatment helped me bridge. What I wanted, more than my mom’s understanding, was her trust. By not supporting my health-care decisions, I felt my mom didn’t trust me to know what was best for myself.
Gradually, over time, my newfound confidence and well-being helped her to reactivate this trust. Though she still does not agree with my surgical decisions, she doesn’t deny the significant, positive effect they’ve had on my quality of life.
7/25/2012
The judge asked for my Social Security number, which I had stored in a note on my phone to keep from forgetting. I read it to him, glancing at the screen.
“You really shouldn’t keep that on your phone,” the judge chided. “You should have it memorized.”
I remember him saying this so clearly, and to this day it still bothers me so much. I’ve told the interaction to countless people in the hopes that eventually I will crack that mysterious re-memory code, the one that makes dumb tiny things stay with us forever.
Now I’m convinced I remember it because I wanted nothing more in that moment than to say, Shut the fuck up! Fuck youuu!
The summer of my name change, I worked at a day camp in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, with two of my roommates from college. The camp, which I attended as a child, paid well and gave me somewhere to be that wasn’t Connecticut. For three months I stayed locally with my dad, Andrew, a native Virginian who champions waterfront conservation and has built shelves especially for his rock collection.
As previously mentioned, my dad is technically my step-dad, as I have never really known my biological father. I met him once at fourteen for Thai food, but it failed to lead to any grand reunion, definitely nothing to make a movie about. My mom didn’t want to marry him, and he didn’t want a child growing up between two homes, so he stepped back and she had the baby (me!) on her own. We never asked him for any child support, never got any, and when my mom started a conversation about him possibly helping with college, he denied paternity. As a lawyer, he knew the procedures and paperwork required for DNA testing would go past my eighteenth birthday, absolving him of any responsibilities.
“That’s pretty douchey,” I said when I heard.
“Yeah,” my mom had replied on the phone, “it is pretty douchey.”
My mother married Andrew when I was five, and they were together on and off for a decade, divorcing when I entered high school. We had some really good years and some bad ones. I never took my parents’ divorce personally or too hard, and I don’t really consider it a defining point of my adolescence. By the time they separated officially, the wheels had been in motion for a while, and I wasn’t stunned. I accept what my mom and Andrew separately contribute to my life and try not to get hung up on some sepia-toned dream of a perfect family (although clearly I struggle sometimes).
Andrew and I correspond long distance, and I see him once or twice a year. We have a good relationship, albeit an incomplete one. He’s never been a live-in parent like my mother, whose last name I have and who was always, rightfully, my sole guardian.
That is to say, when I came out as trans to him, the stakes weren’t as high.
The Alexandria weather was sweltering, sometimes criminally polluted, and I counted my luck to be a computer lab counselor, indoors with air conditioning and access to a ubiquitous amount of cold diet sodas. Somewhat less lucky was the uniform, a jumpsuit orange T-shirt.
If you bind your chest, you come to see single layers as a near impossibility. Beneath my orange staff shirt, I wore an undershirt, two binders, and another undershirt to create the appearance of “nothing.” I frequently slouched, fidgeted, and adjusted when I thought no one was looking. In the heat, I wilted.
My campers tugged at me all summer to swim during the camp’s pool period, and I always brushed them off with some excuse.
“I didn’t bring my bathing suit,” I would say. “I didn’t bring a towel.”
“You said that six weeks ago,” my camper Ryan would counter without fail.
To him, I was just a party pooper.
My torso’s miserable quality of life slowly but surely overshadowed my original summer name-change objective. Imagine this, but with a flat chest, became the recurring thought. Imagine drinking this coffee with a flat chest. Imagine going for that run with a flat chest.
My sizable weekly paycheck gave me the confidence to begin planning. It was groundwork only. I could afford my chosen surgeon’s hundred-dollar consultation fee and the thousand dollars down to secure a date, but beyond that, I was counting on insurance to come through. And all of it would have to wait until I was back in Massachusetts for my fall semester.
Despite knowing this, I would obsess spasmodically about my surgery planning, tallying payment options on Sticky Notes and napkins, and dumbly berating myself for the merest personal expenses. I didn’t need that ice cream; I didn’t need that night at the movies. Then I would always return to earth.
My surgery is not going to happen today, tomorrow, or next week.
Yes, I needed to plan, but I also needed to focus on the task at hand. And I was allowed to make the present livable in the meantime.
A legal name change required a hearing at my local probate court, which otherwise deals mainly with estates and wills. Since I was a Connecticut resident, that meant taking a train up the coast from Virginia and going to the West Hartford town hall.
To obtain a hearing, I needed to fill out PC-901, the official adult “change of name” form, and send it to the probate court along with my birth certificate and passport. And since I didn’t have my birth certificate, I contacted Virginia’s Office of Vital Records to order another. It cost me a few bucks and, temporarily, my driver’s license, which I sent along as identity verification.
My mom kept the original birth certificate at home in my “memory box,” and asking her to mail it so I could be Donald on paper was not a phone call I needed to have in my life.
As much as I hated having to take a seven-hour train ride to court, I lucked out with my standing as a Connecticut resident.
I’ve never really considered the state my home but rather like a way station between lives. I didn’t grow up there and only moved back to go off to boarding school. Upon arriving from Virginia, I didn’t like our drafty colonial house. I never really got to know other kids in town because I spent all my time boarding. These are my spoiled grievances.
In 1992, Connecticut was one of the first states to pass a law explicitly banning discrimination regarding sexual orientation. In 2011, Governor Dannel Malloy signed “An Act Concerning Discrimination,” adding gender identity to the list of protections. I remember attending a local ACLU function in celebration and listening to several trans folks speak about their employment experiences, dishing about what corporations to avoid and who had real insurance benefits.
As these people taught me, passing laws didn’t guarantee a discrimination-free experience, but it did speak to the state’s strong community-based advocacy, and policies worked in tandem with other social-support networks. There are Connecticut chapters of LGBTQ organizations like GLAAD, PFLAG, and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), as well as information-laden Planned Parenthood chapters and local support groups like the one I attended.
One bonus as a Connecticut resident was the state’s approachable policy on name changes, which its Supreme Court declared were to be “granted liberally.” I imagined an Oprah-like giveaway. Name changes for all. This was optimistic.
The fee to change your name in Connecticut is $225. I gathered together a check, my birth certificate, the completed forms, and my best vibes, sending everything to the probate court. My application was accepted, and I scheduled a hearing a few weeks away, on July 25, got the day off, and booked a train ticket to Hartford. By that point, the p
rocess had taken around seven weeks.
As Thomas Page McBee writes in his slow-burning memoir Man Alive, “The tasks felt manageable, if endless.”
On July 25, my friend Helena picked me up early from the train station, all smiles. She and I had met while interning for a local theater my last summer of high school. She was a few years older, a recent performing arts grad, and together with our third intern, Maha, we became best friends. Helena and I look strangely related, preternaturally youthful and alert, like the secret-keeping village children of a Grimms’ fairy tale. She accompanied me to the name-change hearing as my witness and would later drive me to my top-surgery consultation.
Like Skylar, Helena somehow made the chores of transitioning fun. Having hamburgers and milkshakes with her and Maha later at our favorite lunch joint, I realized I wasn’t as “behind” as I thought. In fact, at that moment I was right where I wanted to be.
The courthouse in West Hartford was a generous half mile from my mom’s door. I don’t even think I told her the date, only that I was pursuing a hearing. As Helena and I strolled down Farmington Avenue, I felt a tinge of guilt color our otherwise carefree afternoon. I felt sad, and a little paranoid.
After the judge rebuked me for keeping my Social Security number on my phone and signed my probate orders, Helena took a picture of me holding them up in a folder outside.
It’s sunny out, a perfect day, and I’m dressed too preppy, khakis and a polo. In the background, a man intrudes to pour a bucket of water on a sidewalk spill.
My work as “Donald Collins” had only just begun. The probate order opened the door to the real business, starting with a new Social Security card and continuing to this day with a passport I have yet to correct.
My wallet’s makeover thinned it out. Each document requires separate paperwork and, usually, a fee. Insurance, bank cards, driver’s license, passport, school ID and e-mail—everything has a process. When friends asked me about the wayward “F” marker on my license, I told them the truth: I just got tired.
In fact, I recently changed my gender marker when I switched my driver’s license to California. After a humiliatingly useless first visit to the DMV, I was forced to have a doctor fill out a form confirming my gender as “male” and my transition as “complete” before they would assign me that tiny “M.”
“Do you have any letter to prove this?” the clerk had asked me upon noticing my application said “male” while my passport said otherwise.
“Only my life,” I replied.
A few months after my name-change court date, I returned, on the radar, to West Hartford and sat for a family dinner at my grandmother’s. We all gave it our awkward best. My name rang strangely in everyone’s mouths, like a code word.
Donnie is enjoying Boston. Donnie is going out with friends tonight.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, there was already another “Donnie” in my family, a cousin of my mother’s who was a fighter pilot. My mom had hoped for a more gender-neutral name for me, or a boy’s name she liked better. “Hayden” maybe, or “Ian.” If I had been “born a boy,” she had planned to name me “Russell,” which I briefly considered adopting. I dabbled with a derivative of my birth middle name, but ultimately decided I wanted a clean break. I can’t really explain how I settled on “Donald,” only that the movie Donnie Darko probably had nothing to do with it.
In the swing of the 2016 election season, I remind myself of the good Donalds: Glover, Antrim, Sutherland, Faison, Westlake, Duck. Sure, there are a weird slew of serial killers with that first name, but then we’ve got Donald David Dixon Ronald O’Connor, best known for his role as Cosmo Brown in Singing in the Rain. Three of my best friends’ dads are named Donald.
Although I originally stuck with the nickname “Donnie,” I now prefer “Donald.” I like its vintage and the way my friends say it. I like that it has fewer search-engine results, fewer embarrassing photos. I like that it’s kind of a new start within a new start.
My mom noticed the change in my e-mail signatures and asked about it. I was surprised when she did, even though we talk about so much now; the issue still seemed immortalized with a kind of parental revulsion.
“I can never call you ‘Donnie,’” she had once said, weeping in the den. “I can never call you ‘my son.’”
Now, as I plan a trip to the East Coast, she says, “Donald! It’ll be so nice to have you home.”
A Story Exchange
A collection of first-person accounts from a wide range of parents, transgender people under thirty, and advocates. All interviews in this section were conducted and compiled by Mary and Donald Collins. Where noted, names and places have been changed to protect the privacy of those subjects who asked not to be identified.
Parent Story Exchange
Mary Collins
No One Way
Not all people who transition from one gender to another embrace every possible surgery and medication. Not all families of transgender children are either fully on board or opposed to what a transition might entail.
Instead, we sit at a roundtable with no clear start or end, some children happy to simply shift their names and pronouns, while others choose aggressive surgeries. Some parents reject the entire process, while others feel comfortable with at least a portion of what their child plans to do to transition.
We need a new language that reflects those of us sitting at the roundtable. Right now, even the best-intentioned organizations and individuals speak in ways that feel like insider conversations among those who understand and agree with the group.
Imagine if at some point early in our experiences with Donald’s transition someone had sat us down and asked:
Donald, are you scared? Yes.
Mary, are you scared? Yes.
Donald, do you agree with your mom’s viewpoint on your transition? No.
Mary, do you agree with all that Donald’s doing to transition? No.
Donald, are you afraid your mother will no longer love you? Yes.
Mary, are you afraid your child will leave you and no longer love you? Yes.
Look at all of that shared fear just sitting there for both to see. Simply acknowledging this common ground could have led to more empathy, which is where our book project has brought us. In the end, we would not be saying to each other, “Just get it!” Instead, we would be saying, “Please don’t leave me” and “How can we understand each other better?”
To repair, families need to see there is a range of paths that can lead to reconciliation and healing. If one group does not offer you the right answer, keep searching. There are so many parents and transgender people out there with so many points of view and all sorts of facilitators with their own unique styles.
Somewhere, there’s a chair waiting for you.
Finding Parents Willing to Share Their Stories
She takes my call or e-mail but then says no, she does not want to be interviewed. He apologizes. They are all afraid. I assure them they do not have to be identified; all I need is their story so we can share it with other parents going through similar tensions and trauma.
I was lucky with my first attempt, but after that I sent out more than twenty e-mails and made half a dozen pleading phone calls before I coaxed another parent to share how he/she felt about what happened to their family when their child told them he/she/it was transgender. We wanted a wide range of voices: immigrants, economically disadvantaged individuals, fathers, small-town families. But a third of the people who agreed to be interviewed, ultimately changed their minds and asked me to pull their text.
And, of course, the parents who feel most marginalized rarely show up at support groups. PFLAG organizations nationwide offer outstanding help to gay, bi, lesbian, trans, and queer individuals, but such groups are not as well set up to handle the angry or terrified parent. Discussions usually focus on how to help a child through his or her transition and how to help the parent “get it.” All of that is understandable, because the teens and
college-age young adults going through a transition already face enormous pressures and obstacles. The counselors and medical professionals feel they must first focus on the young.
But if I wanted to find parents with a range of experiences, I could not rely solely on national LGBTQ organizations, because the pool of parents who work with those organizations is self-selecting. They are on board enough to go.
I was not.
Eight years ago, if a reporter had called me, I would not have agreed to tell my story. I would not have trusted anyone, because I felt every time I expressed any doubt, shared my grief, or felt shocked by the medical options available to my child, I was quieted, even spurned. An aggressively questioning parent like me did not fit into the available groups. I needed to get further along toward acceptance before I could sit in the circle. At one point, someone actually told me that, so it wasn’t just that I assumed or “felt” that sentiment.
These many years later I realize I should have looked harder, because the majority of parents of transgender children—at least initially—feel more in line with how I felt at that time. At least 40 percent of transgender children wind up homeless at some point, which, to me, translates to mean that nearly half of all parents of trans children are so conflicted about what’s going on that they are drowning.
There are not enough places right now for those parents. Many of them will come to fully embrace everything about their transgender child, others may just come to some satisfactory space where they agree to disagree and move back to what they love about each other. Those who do make this more positive journey are largely out there on their own right now. I seriously believe the homelessness rate for transgender youth can be cut in half with more support programs for conflicted parents. If they felt more respected, felt “heard,” and weren’t told to “get it” before they even know what “it” is, they might not become so afraid and enraged.