One day, the Pied Piper came through town and all the children disappeared
My essay sharing parent stories is up at Fairer Disputations. Thanks to everyone who contributed and everyone who reached out to share their family’s story. I wasn’t able to fit 80 stories in 5,000 words, but I will do more pieces about parents in the future.
The first time I listened to a parent tell the story of how her child came out as transgender, it seemed like a strange tale of a private misadventure, plagued with the kind of disproportion most commonly found in fairy tales. But then I heard another such tale. And another. And another. The stories started to sound less like warped fairy tales fed through a game of telephone and more like an epidemic: the first case you encounter is mysterious, and the symptoms make no sense. The next case is eerily similar. Keep looking, and a pattern emerges.
Or perhaps my first metaphor was the right one: one day, the Pied Piper came through town and all the children disappeared.Â
I’ve come to realize that when one person transitions, everyone in their life gets recast as supporting characters. They are judged along a single axis: how affirming are you of your loved one’s new identity? How quickly do you reform your speech and rewrite your memories?
The change of script is most dramatic for parents, who can do nothing right. They stand accused of missing the most basic facts about who their child really is: a boy, not a girl, or a girl, not a boy. If the revelation comes as a surprise—if parents find out after a child has already come out at school, for example—then the child must not have trusted her parents enough to share this information earlier. Whatever a parent knows about his or her child cannot touch the essential truth of the child’s new transgender identity. While children gain a new language to describe their experiences, parents lose language. They’re not sure what they can say anymore, so they guard their tongues, dissemble.
Unwitting parents will step on landmines left and right, because their children’s expectations have been imported from a very different world. Online, if you change your username or your avatar, you reinvent yourself as someone new. But at home, you have a name that you have worn all your life. You have loved ones who look at you and do not see what you want them to see. You want them to celebrate, but instead they look at you and worry. Online, you can mute, block, report. The offending account vanishes, a tidy absence soon smoothed over and forgotten. Offline, severing connections means broken hearts and empty chairs at the kitchen table.
Parents who stumble over pronouns and new names, ask for time to adjust, hesitate to consent to hormonal and surgical interventions, or express their reservations and doubts may find themselves cast out of their children’s lives entirely. As soon as I started writing about gender, I started hearing from parents. Every parent I’ve spoken to fears losing their child—to suicide, estrangement, or mutual incomprehension.
Eliza your writing is exquisite. You have done lovely justice to the parents stories. I wonder if you have a plan to write about parents of adult children who have transed? There are many of us whose children are 25 and older, past the age we hope their brains have developed into full rational organs. If I hear one more time, "He's and adult, what can you do" I will explode. We elders looked forward to continuing relationships with our children as we age. Such a heartbreak and loss. Who do we turn to?
Such a cruel cult and arguably the first one in the history of modernity to target children and to be backed by the power of the state. No wonder some parents have taken their own lives. No one talks about their trauma.
Beautifully written piece.