Family Values

In our quest for equality and the passage of a gender inclusive anti-discrimination legislation, the opposition has made family values an issue. These are our family values…

‘Maddy’ Just Might Work After All

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
New York Times
Published: April 24, 2009
Decades later, my two children and my wife and I were sitting around the kitchen table, eating dinner. I was mid-transition. My older son, Zach, gave me a look.

“What,” I said. He was 7.

“We can’t keep calling you ‘Daddy,’ ” he said. “If you’re going to be a girl. It’s too weird.”

…Because of the love of my spouse, Deedie, not to mention that of my boys, I found the courage, somehow, to traverse the weird ocean between men and women, to make the voyage not only from one sex to another, but from a place where my life was defined by the secrets I kept to a new one, where almost everything I’d ever held in my heart could finally be spoken out loud.

“Well,” I said to my sons. “My new name is Jenny. You could call me Jenny.”

Zach laughed derisively. “Jenny? That’s the name you’d give a lady mule.”

I tried not to be hurt. “O.K., fine. What do you want to call me?”

“The important thing, boys,” Deedie said, “is that you pick something you’re comfortable with.”

Zach thought this over. He was pretty good at naming things. For a while we’d had a hermit crab named Grabber. Later on, we’d owned a snake named Biter.

“I know,” he said. “Let’s call you Maddy. That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy. And anyhow, I know a girl at school named Maddy. She’s pretty nice.”

…
By the time my boys were in middle school, our family began to seem normal to us again. I was in charge of waking everyone and making breakfast and getting Sean to practice his French horn and Zach his three-quarter-size tuba. Deedie was in charge of dinner and shepherding the boys through their homework and coaching Sean’s traveling soccer team.

After a time, Deedie and I even began to seem familiar to each other again. And the things that had changed in me seemed, incredibly, less important to Deedie than what had remained the same.

Was she crazy to stay with me after I’d announced my intention to transition? Maybe. Whatever the reason, she decided that her life was better with me in it than not, and if this makes her nuts, well, fine, have it your way, she’s nuts. Sweet, though.
…
A MONTH later, he had to write an essay for school about an experience that had changed him. He wrote this:

“An experience that changed me is that my dad is transgender, and became my ‘Maddy.’ A person who is transgender has a lifelong sense of being born into the wrong body.

“I was about 4 when Maddy began the ‘transition.’ I don’t really remember the experience well because it was over nine years ago. Once the transition had taken place, I was comfortable with it. But I was worried what my friends would think. I kept it secret for a little bit, but eventually they found out. They all accepted it a lot better than I thought they would.

“Maddy is funny and wise. We go fishing and biking. We talk a lot, about anything that is on our minds. One night this spring, Maddy and I had a fancy dinner at a restaurant in Waterville. It was a special night. I wore a jacket and a tie. I had a steak. It made me feel like Maddy and I were really close. Maddy said that she thought I was growing up and that she was proud of me.

“Sometimes it’s true that I wish I had a regular father, but only because I don’t remember what it was like to have a normal family. Sometimes it’s hard to have a family that is different. But most of the time I think I am the luckiest kid on earth. Even though my family is different, I can’t think of any way that life could be better.

“I know people from lots of different kinds of families. Some families are divorced, so some of my friends only live with one parent at a time. Other families have someone who is mentally challenged in their family. But no matter how different they are, they are all people. My goal is that some day everybody will be treated with love.”

What about the boys, indeed.

Jennifer F. Boylan is a professor of creative writing and American literature at Colby College in Maine and an author of a number of books, including a bestseller, “She’s Not There” in 2001.