Читать книгу My Trans Parent - Heather Bryant - Страница 8

When I first learned that my dad is transgender, I was in fifth grade getting ready to switch to a new school. For the first time in nine years, my family was living together under the same roof. My dad lived on one side of the house and my mom, sister, and I on the other. I had just turned ten, and to me, all that mattered was that we were back together again as a family. My father’s hair had grown long, past her shoulders, but she still wore a button-down shirt and jeans. The skin on her face was smooth. She’d started electrolysis and hormones, but my sister and I didn’t know this.

The last time my dad dressed as a man was when she had to go to my old school to talk to the principal. My parents weren’t happy with the school, and wanted to pull me out and get a tuition refund. It worked. She put on this charcoal gray suit, pulled on a hat over her growing hair, and laced up her black dress shoes. She went to the school and the principal gave us a refund. My mom had tried to go alone, and they wouldn’t give it to her. The charcoal suit worked. Soon after that, my dad stopped dressing as a man entirely.

It happened overnight. One day, my dad had long loose curls almost down to her shoulders. The next day, a headband swept the curls back and smoothed them, and the skinny jeans were swapped for a long skirt. Just like that our family changed.

We didn’t sit down as a family to talk about the transition, but I remember the day I learned her new name. We were sitting in the kitchen when she told us. Her hair was swept back in a headband, and she wore a button-down shirt and a long skirt that covered her legs.

“Dana Victoria Brown” was the new name she gave herself. It sounded strange to me. The first name, I didn’t know what to do with. I’d never met anyone with that name. The middle name I recognized. There were girls in my class named Victoria, and also my aunt and a Queen of England. That part I liked. The third name was another one I didn’t know, a family name, but not mine. She would have a different last name now. “Okay,” I thought. It didn’t occur to me to protest or raise questions. The only thought I had was that I might forget her new name.

“What if we’re out together and I shout ‘Dad’ on accident? What if we’re at a bookstore and I shout it across the way?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” Dana said. She didn’t seem worried or afraid.

The name still felt strange to me. I said it, but it didn’t feel real. Also, it didn’t belong to me like Dad did. The whole rest of the world shared it. Mom said it, too, and all of our neighbors. It didn’t occur to me to come up with anything else.

I didn’t know that I would miss saying “Dad.” At the time, I was mainly concerned with keeping up the façade.

In actuality, the transition had started months before with hormones and electrolysis and years before with my father’s internal struggles. My dad struggled with depression when first married to my mother, and then lived for nine years as a gay man, but a piece was missing. To me, though, it didn’t start until that fall; until, to the outside world, my dad was no longer Daniel.

The fact that someone might be born and look to the outside world like a boy but feel closer to being a girl on the inside was something I didn’t know about yet, but when I did, it felt like an expansion of what was possible.

No one said, “Your dad is transgender.” If they had, the word would have sounded strange to me. We didn’t use a label. All I knew was that Dad wouldn’t dress up as my dad again. Instead, Dad was now Dana. Dana wore skirts and headbands, and flat shoes, and sometimes lipstick when we went out to dinner. Dana, we told people, was my dad’s sister, because the rest of the world wasn’t ready to know who she really was.

When I learned my dad’s new name, Dana, I was supposed to say the new name, but it didn’t come naturally, so I didn’t say anything. I just let her walk ahead in her skirt and headband, and hoped no one noticed. Even our neighbors who met our dad as Daniel didn’t ask questions. They just said, “Nice to meet you” to Dana, and I wondered how they couldn’t tell she was the same person on the inside. Even I wondered if she was the same person on the inside since Dana was a little different and wasn’t silly goofy wild fun and didn’t sing so loud, though sometimes she whistled in the other room. Still, she seemed a little different from Dad, but I went along since this was all I knew.

It was 1987. Reagan was president and the AIDS crisis was spreading across the country. In television, movies, and books, I didn’t see a single transgender person. In my daily life, no one I knew crossed the gender lines. At the same time, I was at an age when I didn’t question my parents. They knew how the world worked. I looked to them for definitions and explanations about the world. So I went along with this new twist in our family life without asking too many questions.

For my family, the first steps were getting used to calling her Dana and introducing her as my “aunt.” It felt like a big trick we were playing on the outside world. The movie Tootsie was one we related to as a family. In that movie the main character, Michael Dorsey, played by Dustin Hoffman, dresses as a woman to get a starring role in a TV show. At the end of the movie, Dorsey does a big reveal to everyone’s surprise—Tootsie is really a man! In our story, we couldn’t go back. Aunt Dana couldn’t just switch back to being Dad Daniel. Instead, we experienced a gradual shifting until Dad and Daniel disappeared. It wasn’t a disguise like in the movie. Our dad’s body and face were changing.

At first, it didn’t feel like a change on the inside. We were the same bookstore-going, pancake-making, movie-watching family. We thought our family only changed for the outside world. This is my aunt, we were supposed to say, but it felt awkward to say it. My aunts lived on the opposite side of the country with their own families. Dana was my dad under all the layers, but we couldn’t say “Dad” because people would look at us funny like we were confused.

Mostly, we just said nothing, because it felt safer. We swallowed our words, and hoped no one would ask. It helped that we lived thousands of miles away from anyone who knew us before. We could tell this new story, and no one could say it was otherwise.

The transition had already started before my sister and knew about it, but we lived apart from our dad at the time.

Some people I interviewed found out before their parent told them. Sharon S.’s sister discovered some photos in the trash. At the time, Sharon was eight and her sister was five. Her family was living in Chicago. Sharon described what happened: “My sister was going through the trash in my dad’s office and found a couple of old photos that had been stuck together and she peeled them apart. They were photos of my dad wearing a dress and so she brought those photos to my mom and said, ‘Why is Dad dressed like Grandma?’” This led to a conversation with their parents, who told them then. “My parents decided to just tell us that Trish was transgender, which was kind of amazing in retrospect—I think it was the ’80s.” Sharon’s family moved to Northern Michigan after Trisha started to transition.

Even B. from Oslo confronted his parents about mysterious monthly gatherings at their house. Each month, as a child, he was sent to his grandparents’ house and he wasn’t allowed to return until the gathering was over. Sometimes, before he left his house, he saw people arriving and noticed that everyone was nicely dressed and polite. At first, he thought his parents were in a cult. As he got older, around ten years old, he asked for an explanation.

“I know there is something going on here,” he said. “You have to tell me what this is.”

His mother looked at his father, and they nodded. Even’s father took him to his office, and said something like, “Your father likes to dress up as a woman.”

“Like Carnival?” Even asked.

“Well, maybe yeah—we could say that,” his father said.

Both Sharon’s and Even’s stories happened in the ’80s, like mine, before the age of social media and before many people knew about being transgender. As Sharon said, “We didn’t know the word ‘transgender’ or anything back then—we didn’t understand.” Not having the words to describe what this meant was an obstacle. My sister and I witnessed our father stepping into the role of woman, but we wouldn’t have known what to say or how to describe the change.

Monica C. was 17 and visiting her dad, stepmom, and half-sister in Western Massachusetts when her dad told her. Her parents were divorced. She and her sister, age four, were playing together, coloring in a coloring book. Her sister pointed to the people in the coloring book, and said, “Some people are girls on the inside and girls on the outside like you, and some people are girls on the inside and boys on the outside like Dad.” Her dad overheard the conversation and told her the rest. Sometimes a very young child can describe something better than adults. Her sister’s description bridged the gap.

Morgan G. was living in California with her family when her parent transitioned from female to male. She doesn’t remember the first conversation well, since she was four years old, but she later heard that she said, “I don’t want you to be very tall.” Her parent tried to explain to her in the moment that she would probably change more physically over the next few years than he would, but she didn’t fully understand at the time. She knew her parent was going to change, and her first reaction came from what she pictured that change might look like.

Justin B. was eight years old when his parent told him. They were living in East Tennessee. His first reaction was that he wanted his parent to be okay. “I remember just wanting my parent to be happy. I was like—okay—this doesn’t seem like the biggest deal in the world to me. I remember initially being really accepting.”

Sarah W. noticed something going on with her dad, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. There were some physical things going on that she couldn’t quite sort out. At the time, her dad identified as a cross-dresser, so first he told her that he was a cross-dresser. Sarah said, “It threw me—I didn’t quite understand what that was.” Her mom struggled too, and her younger sister didn’t know at first. “We kept it a secret from her, which was awful.” Five years later, her parents separated, and at that time her dad came out as transgender and started transitioning physically.

Noelle H. was in a mall parking lot with her mother, parked in their car, thinking about the jeans she’d just bought, when her mother said, “Your father likes to wear women’s clothes and is moving out of the house—we’re gonna be away from each other.” Noelle was processing this new information about her dad immediately after an ordinary trip to the mall: “It’s still burned in my brain—that memory is very vivid of everything and the way the rain was rolling up on the window.”

Sandra P.’s mother told her on a shopping trip to Target. It was summertime, and she had just moved out from living with her parents. Her dad told her mom, and then planned to tell each of the kids individually. Sandra recalled, “My mother was heartbroken and shocked and floored, and she told me the next day, while we were shopping at Target.”

For Jennifer R., it was part of her daily life growing up in New Hampshire. “When we were younger, she always had long hair and she always wore skirts around the house, but it wasn’t something she talked about or really addressed to us.” Only later did it come up in conversation. “At one point, she just sat us all down and she was like, ‘Listen, this is how I feel, this is the plan, what I’m going to be doing—I’m going to be living full time as a woman.’”

For Jennifer’s parent and many others, including mine, doctors required living for a full year in the chosen identity to qualify for surgery. Sometimes it’s on the brink of that year when the news comes out in some form. Not everyone opts for surgery, though, so the timing is unique for each family.

After seeing the movie, Milk, Amy S., then 23 years old, said to her father, “I don’t understand how someone could live with a secret so big for their whole life, it must be the worst and most oppressive thing. I just have no idea how someone would even be able to live like that.”

To that, her father said, “Well, I have something to tell you.”

At the time, Amy didn’t know the difference between transgender, transvestite, and transsexual. Her father explained this to her.

Becca L. was taking a selfie with her dad’s phone when they were out together in Boston’s South Shore. She went into the camera roll thinking, “I have to send this to myself—I want to post it,” and she saw a picture of her dad as a woman, but at the time she didn’t know it was her dad. “I thought it was another woman my dad was with.” A few weeks later she went back on the phone to try to see what was going on. She found the Facebook app on her dad’s phone.

“Dad—let’s be friends on Facebook,” she said. “This is so cool—you have a Facebook? You’re on social media?”

“No—it came with the phone,” her dad said.

“Yeah, uh huh,” she thought. She went on the app, and saw her dad’s account as Dee, which was her new name. All the pieces came together.

Becca said, “I put everything together in a matter of five minutes. That girl that was on the camera roll…was actually not another girl—that was actually my dad, and it was this whole spiraling thing.” She didn’t say anything at first. Months later, her parents brought it up. “They noticed I was acting very standoffish and just rude and I was just mad all the time—and I was becoming a teenager too.”

When they sat her down that fall to tell her that her dad is transgender, her response was “Yeah, I already know.”

“We kind of knew you already knew,” they said, “but we didn’t want to say anything.”

Becca’s parents were waiting for the right moment. “It was this whole elephant in the room that no one wanted to talk about until we actually talked about it,” she said.

Leila, age eight, lives in Portland, Oregon with her two dads, Carson and Sam. Her dads adopted her and her brother, and then decided to expand the family. Like many other trans men, Carson decided to have the baby. “If my dad wasn’t transgender,” Leila said, “I wouldn’t have a baby brother, so technically it works out, because my dad can’t have a baby if he’s not transgender.” She found out her dad is trans through a conversation with her family. “He told me,” she said. For her, it’s a measure of love. “I really love my dad so they’re probably going to tell me that he’s transgender.” In her view, families talk about who they are and how they want to be in the world.

A few weeks before her parent told her, Danielle C. opened the door on the topic. She was in school for a master’s in social work in Pennsylvania. Her parents called one day and asked what she was working on, and she replied, “I’m putting together this group presentation on transgender people and their families for my class. This is really interesting to me and I’m trying to find information on family members of transgender people and I can’t find anything—there’s nothing out there.”

Shortly after, she was out to dinner with her parent at a sushi restaurant. In the middle of dinner, her parent shared a dream about choosing between wearing a skirt suit and a dress. Danielle’s first thought was, “What’s going on? Wait a minute. Is this… Is my stepdad coming out to me?”

Her parent went on to tell her, “When I retire, I want to retire as K.” This wasn’t a big change, but she still wasn’t sure what it meant. Her parent’s name was Patrick K. Her whole family used the nickname, “K,” but this sounded different.

“Like ‘Kay’—‘K-A-Y?’” she asked.

“Yes,” her parent replied.

The next thing Danielle wanted to know was: “Are you staying together with Mom?”

“Yes,” Kay said. “It took her a little while, but we’re staying together. We’re going to go through the whole thing.”

At times, it takes someone outside of the family to connect the dots. Olivia C.’s fiancé saw her dad posting on Facebook with an account using a female name. Olivia had seen the same name on her dad’s Twitter a few years before but she didn’t think much of it. She just thought, “My dad is checking out the newest frontier of social media—and doesn’t want to use his real name. I didn’t think much about why he might be using a female name.” She decided to look it up, too. She went online and found some pictures from the sports leagues her father played in. “She plays a lot of rec sports—that’s her big thing, so I looked up a lot of that stuff online and I saw how she was competing at pretty big things as a female, and she had been living as a woman for quite a long time. At that point, I confronted her about it. It was a really intense experience. I didn’t know what was going on.” At the time, her whole family was at a wedding in Malaysia. “There were 25 of us staying at my grandma’s house. I wanted to talk to my mom about it, but there were people everywhere.” She finally found a way to talk to her mom in the middle of the maze of relatives and wedding events. “It turned out my mom had already known for seven years, so she wasn’t shocked obviously, but they had never talked about it again. My mom found out and they didn’t talk about it for seven years.” Ultimately, it took Olivia’s fiancé to bring it into the open. Olivia said, “I almost feel like it took someone from outside of our family to bring it to our attention because in retrospect a lot of things in my childhood instantly were clear to me and in retrospect it’s sort of like—we really only see what we’re looking for.”

For some, the news was mixed in with other issues that came up, clouding the news at first: drug use, estrangement, or diagnoses of mental illness. Fiona B. from Florida spoke of hesitating to share her story, because she thought it could ignite transphobia. Her parent came out three years after being diagnosed as bipolar. “He was 52. This was not the culmination of a lifelong struggle or process of discovery. He made the announcement to our family that he was going to become a woman because he had been receiving guidance from a goddess who told him to become a woman. To this day, she maintains that story.” The stigma around mental illness has kept her from sharing the story.

Christy P.’s father had been avoiding her for five years when she learned the news. She didn’t understand why her father would be avoiding her until one day her cousin asked her a question.

“Do you think since you’re Mormon that people don’t tell you things?”

“Why would that matter?” Christy asked.

“I don’t know. Do you think maybe they don’t tell you things because of how they think you’ll react?”

“When have I ever reacted badly?”

“You know if I were you and I thought someone wasn’t telling me something,” her cousin said, “I would call them and I would say, ‘I just want you to know that I love you very much no matter what, and our relationship is important to me no matter what happens in your life.’”

Christy took a pause. She thought, “Clearly someone’s hiding something from me and I need to make a bunch of phone calls.”

She called around and when she reached her father, he told her, “For the last five years, I’ve been living as a woman.”

After absorbing this information, she felt a wave of relief. “Okay, whatever. Are you happy—does that feel better?” she said.

“Yes,” her father said. “I thought you’d never want to talk to me again.”

For Christy, the biggest challenge came not from the change in gender, but from the rift that had formed after five years of being out of touch.

A parent’s knowledge of their own identity can impact their decision to tell and when to tell. As in my family, a parent’s awareness can sometimes come over time. My father lived as a gay man for nine years before coming out as trans.

Riley P. had a similar experience. His mom came out as a lesbian when he was five. “I’d always had an experience of my mom as someone who was not like every other parent at school, and in those days, he did cut his hair short and was a bit more masculine.” Ten years later, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group called the Yes Institute came to Riley’s school. Riley recalled: “My mom went to a parent workshop and saw an interview of a little kid and the punch line of the story was ‘I’m not a girl, I’m a boy,’ and when that little kid said that, my mom had this experience of—oh that’s been me my whole life—that child was me and I’ve been searching for who I am all of this time, all these years, and never really thought to think about gender as the piece that was missing, the thing that I should investigate the most.”

Soon after this realization, Riley’s mom sat him and his sister down for a conversation and said, “Look guys, this is going to be a big change in your life, but I am coming out as trans—I’m going to start dressing more like a man.”

Riley said that this was “the start of our journey.” “Our journey”—that’s what this book is all about. When one person in the family transitions, everyone does.