Dear Tranny Answers Your Every Question

Dear Mom in Montana:

Discovering that someone you love, someone you feel you know completely, is fundamentally not who you thought they were can be terribly disorienting.  Such a revelation can invoke feelings of confusion, even anger and betrayal.  These feelings are a common part of the coping process for you. 

Transgender individuals usually become progressively aware of their feelings at a young age. They also learn that their feelings are not shared by those around them and that if they persist in acting on their desires, that very negative repercussions can result from family, friends and society in general.  So they suppress and hide their gender difference often for decades.  Some individuals overcompensate to try to fix themselves or as social camouflage.  Being Transgender is something that doesn’t burn out.  It’s not a phase and though it can be driven underground, the results of such sublimation usually has grave emotional results. 

When transgender people do come out to themselves and begin working through their issues, coming out to parents is one of the most petrifying and anxiety producing barriers they face. Be certain that your child thought long and hard before telling you and delivered the news with much fear for loss of love.

As parents we all watch our children go out into the world and make their own lives and choices with a mixture of pride and trepidation.  Even when the twists and turns are not so great, they do become their own people in the end.

If you can move through your fear and understandable concern for their best interest to support your child, I think you will find that you are not losing them, but will see the emergence of a stronger and more self possessed individual. 

The good news is that Seattle has a strong and supportive Trans community.  Social acceptance is growing, legal protections are in place in Washington State and positive role models and opportunities abound. 

Here are a few books that may give you a starting point in understanding what your child is going through.   Scott Turner Schofield is a young transman and performance artist.  Jamison Green is a prominent elder statesman of the FTM community. Both can be purchased on Amazon.com

Scott Turner Schofield, Two Truths and a Lie. Homofactus Press, 2007.

Two Truths and a Lie is a memoir in the form of three solo plays written and performed by Scott Turner Schofield. From inside the often hilarious-but all too real-moments of his young life on the Homecoming Court and Debutante Ball circuit (in a dress), armed with only a decoder ring and a gifted tongue, Schofield comes out with truly unbelievable stories of a body in search of an identity. By turns slapstick and slap-to-the-face, this drama invites audiences and readers to explore gender, sex, sexuality, and self in their own first person.

Jamison Green , Becoming a Visible Man.  Vanderbilt University Press, May 2004

Leading transsexual activist Jamison Green's new book, Becoming a Visible Man, could reasonably be called the most important book about gender identity since Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Part autobiography, part informational resource, and part tribute to the gender variant community, this work is destined to head the required reading lists in gender studies courses for many years to come. Green has verbalized the hopes, realities, and insecurities shared by many transmen and their allies. With gentle, lucid prose, he confronts popular stereotypes and invites readers to participate in a vision of community in which gender identity truly "belongs to the person who lives it."

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