What I Learned as a Parent of a Transgender Child
As a pediatrician and mother, I thought I knew a lot about parenting. But I was blindsided by my daughter’s coming out as trans, and that first year was riddled with mistakes.
New York Times
By Paria Hassouri, M.D.
September 8, 2020
Sweat trickled down my neck as I stood in the heat alongside my daughter and husband, waiting for our turn to march in the Los Angeles Pride Parade in 2018.
While I had been a spectator at Pride before, I never guessed that one day I would be marching beside my teenager, dark maroon lipstick painting her lips, a barrette pinning back her now almost shoulder-length hair, a “she” pin fastened to her “love wins” shirt. She was beaming and radiant.
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Once our daughter came out, the language in our home became predominantly negative. Are you sure? Your life is going to be so much harder and you’ll be discriminated against. You are so smart with so much potential, but some people won’t see that. You’ll have a more difficult time getting a job. You’ll have to work harder to prove your worth. You could be the victim of a hate crime.
I have never been a parent but my parents were and from them I learned unconditional love and I think that most parents feel that way. But coming out is a shock to them and it takes time for it to sink in and initially they are like Dr. Hassouri only seeing the rocky road ahead of us.
Once I accepted my child’s gender identity, I had my own ideas of what transition meant. I stepped in and orchestrated various appointments for my daughter according to how I thought her transition should be. While my daughter was eager to begin medical transition, the pace of all the appointments involved was overwhelming at times. Transition can involve social, medical and surgical options, or a combination thereof. Not every trans person chooses every intervention available.
It is not only a learning experience for them but also for us when you stop and think about we don’t have a road map about being trans either, we are all feeling our way to our own path to follow.
Having a transgender child has expanded my heart and mind in unimaginable ways. It has brought people into my life that I would not have otherwise met and enriched my understanding of what it means to be human. Most importantly, it has taught me the true definition of unconditional love and what it means to be a mother.
There are some parents who don’t see it that way, for them it is a shock to their way of life and see it as a spur of the moment or as a result of peer pressure.
I am reminded of a quack research project that coined a term that the right-wing conservatives latched on to… they gave it a fancy name, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). The study looked at the parents, not the children, of course the researcher found that the parents had no idea that their children were trans. Of course to the parents this was a shock but for us it was the pressure we had all our lives.
That is the thing, we are good at hiding our gender dysphoria.
To those that we come out to it will be a shock at first and we should be prepared for their initial response.
So yesterday the appraiser came out to look at my car and he had a long list of items needing repair. He also said that my car was unsafe to drive, he said that the impact tore the fender from the frame and was only being held on by the duct tape and the torn metal.
After he left I drove it to the auto repair shop and left with a rental.
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