The name still felt strange to me. I said it, but it didn’t feel real. Also, it didn’t belong to me like Dad did. The whole rest of the world shared it. Mom said it, too, and all of our neighbors. It didn’t occur to me to come up with anything else.
I didn’t know that I would miss saying “Dad.” At the time, I was mainly concerned with keeping up the façade.
In actuality, the transition had started months before with hormones and electrolysis and years before with my father’s internal struggles. My dad struggled with depression when first married to my mother, and then lived for nine years as a gay man, but a piece was missing. To me, though, it didn’t start until that fall; until, to the outside world, my dad was no longer Daniel.
The fact that someone might be born and look to the outside world like a boy but feel closer to being a girl on the inside was something I didn’t know about yet, but when I did, it felt like an expansion of what was possible.
No one said, “Your dad is transgender.” If they had, the word would have sounded strange to me. We didn’t use a label. All I knew was that Dad wouldn’t dress up as my dad again. Instead, Dad was now Dana. Dana wore skirts and headbands, and flat shoes, and sometimes lipstick when we went out to dinner. Dana, we told people, was my dad’s sister, because the rest of the world wasn’t ready to know who she really was.
When I learned my dad’s new name, Dana, I was supposed to say the new name, but it didn’t come naturally, so I didn’t say anything. I just let her walk ahead in her skirt and headband, and hoped no one noticed. Even our neighbors who met our dad as Daniel didn’t ask questions. They just said, “Nice to meet you” to Dana, and I wondered how they couldn’t tell she was the same person on the inside. Even I wondered if she was the same person on the inside since Dana was a little different and wasn’t silly goofy wild fun and didn’t sing so loud, though sometimes she whistled in the other room. Still, she seemed a little different from Dad, but I went along since this was all I knew.
It was 1987. Reagan was president and the AIDS crisis was spreading across the country. In television, movies, and books, I didn’t see a single transgender person. In my daily life, no one I knew crossed the gender lines. At the same time, I was at an age when I didn’t question my parents. They knew how the world worked. I looked to them for definitions and explanations about the world. So I went along with this new twist in our family life without asking too many questions.
For my family, the first steps were getting used to calling her Dana and introducing her as my “aunt.” It felt like a big trick we were playing on the outside world. The movie Tootsie was one we related to as a family. In that movie the main character, Michael Dorsey, played by Dustin Hoffman, dresses as a woman to get a starring role in a TV show. At the end of the movie, Dorsey does a big reveal to everyone’s surprise—Tootsie is really a man! In our story, we couldn’t go back. Aunt Dana couldn’t just switch back to being Dad Daniel. Instead, we experienced a gradual shifting until Dad and Daniel disappeared. It wasn’t a disguise like in the movie. Our dad’s body and face were changing.
At first, it didn’t feel like a change on the inside. We were the same bookstore-going, pancake-making, movie-watching family. We thought our family only changed for the outside world. This is my aunt, we were supposed to say, but it felt awkward to say it. My aunts lived on the opposite side of the country with their own families. Dana was my dad under all the layers, but we couldn’t say “Dad” because people would look at us funny like we were confused.
Mostly, we just said nothing, because it felt safer. We swallowed our words, and hoped no one would ask. It helped that we lived thousands of miles away from anyone who knew us before. We could tell this new story, and no one could say it was otherwise.
The transition had already started before my sister and knew about it, but we lived apart from our dad at the time.
Some people I interviewed found out before their parent told them. Sharon S.’s sister discovered some photos in the trash. At the time, Sharon was eight and her sister was five. Her family was living in Chicago. Sharon described what happened: “My sister was going through the trash in my dad’s office and found a couple of old photos that had been stuck together and she peeled them apart. They were photos of my dad wearing a dress and so she brought those photos to my mom and said, ‘Why is Dad dressed like Grandma?’” This led to a conversation with their parents, who told them then. “My parents decided to just tell us that Trish was transgender, which was kind of amazing in retrospect—I think it was the ’80s.” Sharon’s family moved to Northern Michigan after Trisha started to transition.
Even B. from Oslo confronted his parents about mysterious monthly gatherings at their house. Each month, as a child, he was sent to his grandparents’ house and he wasn’t allowed to return until the gathering was over. Sometimes, before he left his house, he saw people arriving and noticed that everyone was nicely dressed and polite. At first, he thought his parents were in a cult. As he got older, around ten years old, he asked for an explanation.
“I know there is something going on here,” he said. “You have to tell me what this is.”
His mother looked at his father, and they nodded. Even’s father took him to his office, and said something like, “Your father likes to dress up as a woman.”
“Like Carnival?” Even asked.
“Well, maybe yeah—we could say that,” his father said.
Both Sharon’s and Even’s stories happened in the ’80s, like mine, before the age of social media and before many people knew about being transgender. As Sharon said, “We didn’t know the word ‘transgender’ or anything back then—we didn’t understand.” Not having the words to describe what this meant was an obstacle. My sister and I witnessed our father stepping into the role of woman, but we wouldn’t have known what to say or how to describe the change.
Monica C. was 17 and visiting her dad, stepmom, and half-sister in Western Massachusetts when her dad told her. Her parents were divorced. She and her sister, age four, were playing together, coloring in a coloring book. Her sister pointed to the people in the coloring book, and said, “Some people are girls on the inside and girls on the outside like you, and some people are girls on the inside and boys on the outside like Dad.” Her dad overheard the conversation and told her the rest. Sometimes a very young child can describe something better than adults. Her sister’s description bridged the gap.
Morgan G. was living in California with her family when her parent transitioned from female to male. She doesn’t remember the first conversation well, since she was four years old, but she later heard that she said, “I don’t want you to be very tall.” Her parent tried to explain to her in the moment that she would probably change more physically over the next few years than he would, but she didn’t fully understand at the time. She knew her parent was going to change, and her first reaction came from what she pictured that change might look like.
Justin B. was eight years old when his parent told him. They were living in East Tennessee. His first reaction was that he wanted his parent to be okay. “I remember just wanting my parent to be happy. I was like—okay—this doesn’t seem like the biggest deal in the world to me. I remember initially being really accepting.”
Sarah W. noticed something going on with her dad, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. There were some physical things going on that she couldn’t quite sort out. At the time, her dad identified as a cross-dresser, so first he told her that he was a cross-dresser. Sarah said, “It threw me—I didn’t quite understand what that was.” Her mom struggled too, and her younger sister didn’t know at first. “We kept it a secret from her, which was awful.” Five years later, her parents separated, and at that time her dad came out as transgender and started transitioning physically.
Noelle H. was in a mall parking lot with her mother, parked in their car, thinking about the jeans she’d just bought, when her mother said, “Your father likes to wear women’s clothes and is moving out of the house—we’re gonna be away from each