My
Trans
Parent
A User Guide for When
Your Parent Transitions
Heather Bryant
Contents
Ch 6: Grief and Loss, Gifts and Gains
Ch 10: I Saw It on TV: Movies, Shows and More
Ch 11: The Future Is Trans-Fabulous
Resource Guide: Further Reading and More
Introduction
YOUR STORY, TOO
“Be proud of your family structure. There are people out there that are like you with similar experiences, you just may not know it.”
—CAMERON V., AGE 22
Books like this one didn’t exist when my dad was transitioning. I thought I was the only person on the whole planet with a family like mine. We met a few people through my dad’s therapist, but none of my friends at school, as far as I knew, had parents transitioning like mine. At the time, there were no trans people on television or in mainstream movies. We had no reference points. We didn’t even have a language to talk about it. No one’s family looked like mine.
This book aims to fill a gap in conversations about the many shapes of families. I hope that reading this book will provide you with a built-in community of people like you. Like me. Like all the people around the world with trans parents. This book answers questions and gives a space for more questions.
This is the book I needed as a kid, but it’s not one I would have sought out. I would have been reading it with the cover wrapped in brown paper under my bed with a flashlight. Nothing is different about my family. Don’t look at me. I would have had Amazon deliver it to someone else’s house and then gone in the night to pick it up. At the same time, I needed to know that we weren’t the only ones. I’m still surprised to hear of other trans families, though now I know we are everywhere, across the planet and around the world.
I talked to people in Canada, Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom, as well as every corner of the United States. Whether we were in Tennessee, or California, or Wisconsin, our feelings were often the same. There was a little boy in Oslo, Norway, back in the ’80s whose family also watched the movie Tootsie. Our families were looking for our stories even though the story told in Tootsie wasn’t the exact same as those of our families.
Had I known that at the same time as my parent transitioned, there was a little girl in Michigan named Sharon and a boy in Tennessee named Justin who had parents like mine, I would still have had to go to school every day with kids who didn’t have trans parents, but maybe I would have felt less alone. It’s important to know that you’re not the only one. Yet so many of us looked outside and around us while our families were changing, and felt like we were the only ones.
I had expected to find a sea change since the days when my parent transitioned, but I was amazed by how similar the experiences of kids with trans parents are today when compared to my story three decades ago. The truth remains that it is still the world that needs to change, not our families. As Becca L. said about the neighbors who drifted away when her dad started to transition, “They just need to get over themselves.”
Often what I found in talking with kids in our community was a sense of isolation, of having to go through this alone. It felt like unknown territory for many families. There were no manuals or guides, no suggestions given for the right path.
In the course of creating this handbook, I reached out to trans families all over the world in search of stories. I interviewed, surveyed, and talked to over 30 kids of trans (people with trans parents), trans parents, and therapists and experts working with trans families. COLAGE, a national organization that supports people with one or more LGBTQ+1 parent, linked me to the wider community of trans families. The more I shared about the project, though, the more I found people all around me with trans parents. Friends of friends and people I met in writing workshops popped up saying, “Hey! I have a trans parent, too.”
I talked to one parent and child who’d just reconnected after 38 years of not talking, and to a girl who knew her parent only as trans. I talked to someone with two trans parents and someone with both gay and trans parents. Some had known for many years and some had just found out. Some had never met anyone else with a trans parent and some are now leaders in advocating for kids with trans families. One of the parents came out before my parent did and one is still coming out today. Her daughter still doesn’t know. Some of the kids grew up in the ’80s with trans parents, and some are still growing up today. How is it that someone whose parent came out in 1987 and someone whose parent came out this year could have so much in common? I thought by now everyone was broadcasting about their families and parading around their neighborhoods in celebration. Yet backlashes have delayed progress.
Pride in trans families is a part of daily life in some small pockets of the United States and other countries. Places where people are more aware. In some places, kids grow up in communities where schools celebrate rainbow days and educate students about gender expansiveness from a young age. As more kids grow up in a world that understands that gender identity is not a matter of checking a box and that this is part of human experience, more families will start with trans at the center instead of in the margins. Jordan L. found that everyone he told in recent years had one degree of separation from someone trans: trans kids, trans parents, trans people in their communities. All across the world, people are transitioning. The more we tell our stories, the more we’ll know we’re not alone.
We are at the very beginning of a bigger conversation about families. There’s no one shape for families, just like there’s no one way to be trans. As Jennifer said, “There’s not one universal experience that all of us have had. People transition in so many different ways—so many different degrees of being out. That’s another thing that people should know—our stories are so different but equally important.”
There’s