It Takes Vulnerability To Grow
Many years ago, a mother and father with a 14-year-old teen sat in my office with so much anxiety, fear, and questions. They came to me looking for answers and understanding of their assigned female at birth daughter, who had told them that he was really a boy and wanted to be called a new name. While I could support the parents through their anxiety and their emotional journey, I couldn’t answer some very specific questions for them when they asked me my opinion of whether or not I thought hormone treatment was appropriate. I honestly just didn’t know. I had never personally known someone who was transgender. I had not heard their individual stories of family adjustment, and I certainly was not aware at that time of what was to transpire in my own family. I remember they were working with the Gender Center, and they were getting a lot of information from the Gender Center…much of which they didn’t necessarily understand or agree with. They were so confused. They were so lost and I wish I knew then what I know today.
In Preparation
I remember the day my assigned female at birth (AFAB) son, at the age of 18 decided to cut his long golden locks of hair. I remember the internal struggle I felt trying to understand, make sense of the Joy in his face when the hair stylist turned him around and he saw his reflection for the first time. Back then, he still used She/Her pronouns and went by his birth name, but there was something profound about that moment and how he felt inside his body after that glorious hair cut. As a parent, I knew that the only thing I could do was to put my feelings aside and try to support him as best I could. I turned to my Faith and relationship with God to help me walk through that evening.
I’m not here to push my beliefs on anyone. Yet, all I can say is that in that long grueling night when my head spun with so many crazy thoughts, and my heart felt so unsettled…my God was right there with me! I could almost hear a whisper of a voice that “everything was going to be okay”, and peace came over me that was like no other. This peace was familiar to me, as it was the same sensation I felt when my husband made the decision to take his last drink of alcohol.
The next morning, after the big hair cut, I remember grabbing my son’s face, and with tears telling him…”I love you, I see you, and I want to do this well for you.” I know my critic was screaming “you’re a social worker…get this right!” I wanted that, and I also recognized that I needed some compassion for myself as I walked through the beginning of something very vulnerable and scary for all of us.
October 2020
Well, the one thing I think I feared the most was my son being Transgender. I just didn’t know anything about it, other than fear of what a difficult life could be ahead for him. So when he turned to me at a nail salon and told me his new name was “Myles” and that he wanted me to refer to him as Myles with He/Him pronouns from that point forward…I gulped and took it all in. That weekend his friends, who I learned later had already been calling him Myles for over 6 months and were much more on board with this transition than we were initially, threw a Birthday party for the Birth of Myles! Wow…it took everything in both my husband’s and my heart to show up and celebrate. It’s not that we didn’t want to celebrate him. Really, I wanted to understand…but I also had 20 years of life, memories, pictures, experiences of someone by a different name, gender, and lifestyle. I had a lot of catching up and learning to do. So I grabbed every book, resource, podcast, spiritual literature, etc., and I educated myself like a mama bear on a mission.
Leaving the Church we Knew
Our Faith and belief in God has always been strong. In fact, my husband’s sobriety in 2015 came completely from a “God Encounter” that changed our family, and marriage. Yet at that time we had been a part of a very large church that on the surface professed love, and acceptance for all…until that one day! Dave and I had been serving in the church at a large conference, and we had felt so accepted and as if we belonged until that last day when the Closing Speaker came out and in a large auditorium spoke about how “Gay People Don’t Love God!” Essentially he was professing that being Gay or Transgender was a Choice and that people who make that choice Don’t Love God! We sat there as a significant number of people in the auditorium began to applaud and stood up cheering. At which point we began a complete deconstruction of our faith, and separation from any organized religion that didn’t acknowledge affirmation in their about page. There’s a really big difference between “accepting” with the hope of conversion and “affirming.”
You can read part two of this blog post here.