For a while, he was the “in between” kid. Little by little he started understanding that you could choose the pronoun you wanted to use to refer to yourself and how you could define who you are. In the group, his voice grew louder and louder. We began by going to the monthly support group for parents, and then a few months later Zee joined the kids’ support group for gender nonconforming and transgender kids. One moment I felt we were the only family in the world going through this, and then suddenly I discovered there was a whole community out there to support us. For the first time, it was as if somebody understood my child and what we were going through. I went up to their website and saw a videotape by therapist Jean Malpas about transgender kids. From there, I found out about the Ackerman Institute’s Gender & Family Project.

They took my contact information and within half an hour I got a bunch of links to Gender Spectrum and other support groups. He’d have tantrums that might last for 30 minutes and cry, “I don’t want him to tell me I’m a princess! I’m not a princess!” Sometimes on the subway, he’d cover himself because he didn’t want people to look at or talk to him.įortunately, I found a group of young men in our Brooklyn neighborhood who were part of the Campaign for Human Rights to legalize gay marriage. It really fits your face.” Over time, that became more disturbing for Zee. You look so beautiful today.” or “Such a pretty haircut. For example, the crossing guards on our way to school would often, in a friendly way, say things to him like, “Good morning, Princess. We began to get more worried when Zee started getting intensely upset by people’s confusion about his gender. We’d never encountered the terms transgender or gender nonconforming. Neither of us could really understand what was happening. Some days his body language was very identifiable as a male some days it was very female, like the way he walked and the tone of his voice. My husband thought that by accepting the various names he used, I was encouraging some confusion. Some days he’d tell me, “I’m Max today” or “I’m Jordan.” Two or three days later he’d be Caroline, his legal female name. I’d pick him up in tears because the boys wouldn’t let him play with them since they considered him a girl, and the girls wouldn’t let him play them either because he liked boys’ toys and never had a doll with him.Īt first, my husband and I thought Zee was just going through a stage of some kind. It wasn’t until he started public school in kindergarten, where the activities of boys and girls began to be so segregated, that he had to encounter the question of where he fit in. At first, it just seemed that he wanted to be like his boy cousins and, since most of the women in my family were considered “tomboys” anyway, no one paid much attention to these preferences. At around age 3, he began to express a strong preference for boyish types of clothes and toys. But since then, they’ve begun to develop new strengths and deepened connections, both with their child and a larger community that validates and supports them.Īssigned female at birth, Zee was a happy, strong-willed child. The individuals who speak here by no means represent all families grappling with gender fluidity, but all have grappled with massive shock, confusion, fear for their child, and profound isolation. All participate in the Ackerman Institute’s groundbreaking Gender & Family Project, which offers a range of gender-affirmative services to parents and children, from therapy and coaching to an array of ongoing support groups. In the stories that follow, a parent and one trans teen talk about these struggles and how they’re moving through them.

But if your child is someone who not just differs from you, but shatters one of the fundamental tenets of our culture-that a child is born either a boy or a girl and will stay that way-parenting can be shot through with a particular depth of bewilderment, loss, fear, and loneliness. Many parents find it especially difficult to adapt to the ways in which their child is different from them. When they’re born, we have no way of knowing what we’re getting-what kind of temperament, passions, behavioral quirks, lovable qualities, and special talents for driving us crazy. None of us is really prepared for our children.

Growing up trans