For Jennifer R., it was part of her daily life growing up in New Hampshire. “When we were younger, she always had long hair and she always wore skirts around the house, but it wasn’t something she talked about or really addressed to us.” Only later did it come up in conversation. “At one point, she just sat us all down and she was like, ‘Listen, this is how I feel, this is the plan, what I’m going to be doing—I’m going to be living full time as a woman.’”
For Jennifer’s parent and many others, including mine, doctors required living for a full year in the chosen identity to qualify for surgery. Sometimes it’s on the brink of that year when the news comes out in some form. Not everyone opts for surgery, though, so the timing is unique for each family.
After seeing the movie, Milk, Amy S., then 23 years old, said to her father, “I don’t understand how someone could live with a secret so big for their whole life, it must be the worst and most oppressive thing. I just have no idea how someone would even be able to live like that.”
To that, her father said, “Well, I have something to tell you.”
At the time, Amy didn’t know the difference between transgender, transvestite, and transsexual. Her father explained this to her.
Becca L. was taking a selfie with her dad’s phone when they were out together in Boston’s South Shore. She went into the camera roll thinking, “I have to send this to myself—I want to post it,” and she saw a picture of her dad as a woman, but at the time she didn’t know it was her dad. “I thought it was another woman my dad was with.” A few weeks later she went back on the phone to try to see what was going on. She found the Facebook app on her dad’s phone.
“Dad—let’s be friends on Facebook,” she said. “This is so cool—you have a Facebook? You’re on social media?”
“No—it came with the phone,” her dad said.
“Yeah, uh huh,” she thought. She went on the app, and saw her dad’s account as Dee, which was her new name. All the pieces came together.
Becca said, “I put everything together in a matter of five minutes. That girl that was on the camera roll…was actually not another girl—that was actually my dad, and it was this whole spiraling thing.” She didn’t say anything at first. Months later, her parents brought it up. “They noticed I was acting very standoffish and just rude and I was just mad all the time—and I was becoming a teenager too.”
When they sat her down that fall to tell her that her dad is transgender, her response was “Yeah, I already know.”
“We kind of knew you already knew,” they said, “but we didn’t want to say anything.”
Becca’s parents were waiting for the right moment. “It was this whole elephant in the room that no one wanted to talk about until we actually talked about it,” she said.
Leila, age eight, lives in Portland, Oregon with her two dads, Carson and Sam. Her dads adopted her and her brother, and then decided to expand the family. Like many other trans men, Carson decided to have the baby. “If my dad wasn’t transgender,” Leila said, “I wouldn’t have a baby brother, so technically it works out, because my dad can’t have a baby if he’s not transgender.” She found out her dad is trans through a conversation with her family. “He told me,” she said. For her, it’s a measure of love. “I really love my dad so they’re probably going to tell me that he’s transgender.” In her view, families talk about who they are and how they want to be in the world.
A few weeks before her parent told her, Danielle C. opened the door on the topic. She was in school for a master’s in social work in Pennsylvania. Her parents called one day and asked what she was working on, and she replied, “I’m putting together this group presentation on transgender people and their families for my class. This is really interesting to me and I’m trying to find information on family members of transgender people and I can’t find anything—there’s nothing out there.”
Shortly after, she was out to dinner with her parent at a sushi restaurant. In the middle of dinner, her parent shared a dream about choosing between wearing a skirt suit and a dress. Danielle’s first thought was, “What’s going on? Wait a minute. Is this… Is my stepdad coming out to me?”
Her parent went on to tell her, “When I retire, I want to retire as K.” This wasn’t a big change, but she still wasn’t sure what it meant. Her parent’s name was Patrick K. Her whole family used the nickname, “K,” but this sounded different.
“Like ‘Kay’—‘K-A-Y?’” she asked.
“Yes,” her parent replied.
The next thing Danielle wanted to know was: “Are you staying together with Mom?”
“Yes,” Kay said. “It took her a little while, but we’re staying together. We’re going to go through the whole thing.”
At times, it takes someone outside of the family to connect the dots. Olivia C.’s fiancé saw her dad posting on Facebook with an account using a female name. Olivia had seen the same name on her dad’s Twitter a few years before but she didn’t think much of it. She just thought, “My dad is checking out the newest frontier of social media—and doesn’t want to use his real name. I didn’t think much about why he might be using a female name.” She decided to look it up, too. She went online and found some pictures from the sports leagues her father played in. “She plays a lot of rec sports—that’s her big thing, so I looked up a lot of that stuff online and I saw how she was competing at pretty big things as a female, and she had been living as a woman for quite a long time. At that point, I confronted her about it. It was a really intense experience. I didn’t know what was going on.” At the time, her whole family was at a wedding in Malaysia. “There were 25 of us staying at my grandma’s house. I wanted to talk to my mom about it, but there were people everywhere.” She finally found a way to talk to her mom in the middle of the maze of relatives and wedding events. “It turned out my mom had already known for seven years, so she wasn’t shocked obviously, but they had never talked about it again. My mom found out and they didn’t talk about it for seven years.” Ultimately, it took Olivia’s fiancé to bring it into the open. Olivia said, “I almost feel like it took someone from outside of our family to bring it to our attention because in retrospect a lot of things in my childhood instantly were clear to me and in retrospect it’s sort of like—we really only see what we’re looking for.”
For some, the news was mixed in with other issues that came up, clouding the news at first: drug use, estrangement, or diagnoses of mental illness. Fiona B. from Florida spoke of hesitating to share her story, because she thought it could ignite transphobia. Her parent came out three years after being diagnosed as bipolar. “He was 52. This was not the culmination of a lifelong struggle or process of discovery. He made the announcement to our family that he was going to become a woman because he had been receiving guidance from a goddess who told him to become a woman. To this day, she maintains that story.” The stigma around mental illness has kept her from sharing the story.
Christy P.’s father had been avoiding her for five years when she learned the news. She didn’t understand why her father would be avoiding her until one day her cousin asked her a question.
“Do you think since you’re Mormon that people don’t tell you things?”
“Why would that matter?” Christy asked.
“I don’t know. Do you think maybe they don’t tell you things because of how they think you’ll react?”
“When have I ever reacted badly?”
“You know if I were you and I thought someone wasn’t telling me something,”