My son came out to me as trans when he was 12. I was surprised. I don’t know if he was, but this is not his story; it’s mine.
1
That summer we had attended Pride Fest, as we often do. As we walked through Cal Anderson Park, he paused to snap a photo of a sticker on a light pole. “Neopronouns are sexy,” it said. I asked him what neopronouns were. “Gender-neutral pronouns,” he said, “like xe and xir.” I knew the concept but not the term.
The next day, at the parade, one of the marchers was handing out pronoun pins. I watched as my son sifted through a wicker basket with she/her, they/them, and neopronoun options, settling at last on he/him, which he pinned to his shirt.
“That’s odd,” I thought.
At the time I was the proud father of a lesbian daughter. He’s always been “edgy,” the kind of kid who looks for a “hot take” on any received wisdom. He had not asked me to use any pronouns other than she/her. I have a picture of him from that same summer up on the roof top. He had drawn the word “PRIDE” in large chalk letters on the composite shingles and then marched around waving a huge lesbian pride flag for the neighborhood to witness. One of his school art pieces–which we still have framed and hanging above the piano– is a ceramic tile glazed with the lesbian pride flag colors, and in relief the words, “DEAL with it.”
He would later explain to me, after coming out as a gay boy, that he had everything backwards.
When 7th grade started in September, he started using he/they pronouns at school, and it wasn’t long before he told me he liked using he/him, that it felt right, and thought of himself as trans-masc. A couple months later, at his 13th birthday dinner, he said he wanted me to think of him as my son. He also wanted his uncles to think of him as their nephew, and for his grandmother to think of him as her grandson. I asked if he wanted to bear the responsibility of coming out to the rest of the family, or if he wanted me to have those conversations for him. He asked me to handle it, and I accepted the responsibility.
2
I am a gay man born in the late 1960s. The rite of coming out holds an almost sacred status for me and many of my generation. We grow up internalizing all the shame and scorn that society reserves for us. We torture ourselves with humiliating thoughts about what others would think if they knew our desires. Then, as we mature, if we are lucky, we unlearn what society has taught us, gradually, until we have shed enough of our self-loathing to face our creators and proclaim that we are gay, and we are not ashamed. This is what gay pride means. It’s a hero’s journey, and it’s not a bad story to tell ourselves. It can also be seen as a pointlessly traumatizing coming-of-age experience that leaves us with a deep sense of otherness.
To understand what it means to “come out,” imagine a world in which everyone recognizes three fundamental truths: gay people exist; gay people have always existed; and there is nothing disordered about being gay. Yes, a lot of people deny these truths, and that is the point. It’s not that these things aren’t true; it’s that most people don’t accept them as true. Their falsehood is enshrined in numerous theologies, institutions, and laws. If we start from a place of knowing these truths in our bones, then coming out is less a righteous defense of our dignity, and more a bothersome conversation with dumbasses, whose love and acceptance we may or may not cherish.
When my son came out as trans, it wasn’t a trivial revelation, but it was a lot closer to a non-event than it was a tortured proclamation. At least it was from my perspective; I can’t speak for him or others. I thought briefly about pressuring him to endure the rite of passage of coming out, of standing up for himself, but quickly thought better of it. People who come out often encounter loved ones who scoff in disbelief, or outright disapproval, or a withdrawal of affection, or—perhaps worse—having conditions placed on that affection. Interceding on behalf of a 13-year-old is exactly a parent’s job.
A week or so after that birthday dinner, I wrote my father, in an email:
“You’ll want to be aware of a change that’s happening with [X], though I’d imagine it’ll take some time to settle in: around September, [X] switched to using he/him pronouns. I still sometimes use she/her, but I correct myself in the moment, and it has become much easier for me to refer to [X] with masculine pronouns. So when you see me refer to [X] as he or him, that’s why. He identifies as trans-masculine and has told his uncles to think of him as their nephew, and for me to think of him as my son. He’s otherwise the same person we’ve come to know over the last 13 years, and I’m delighted that he’s able to speak candidly about his inner life with me.”
Then I made sure to get the holiday cards out early so that the whole family could be made aware before the big gathering in December.
My family typically has at least four generations represented at any sizeable get-together. The event was pleasant and lively, as it always is. There was one slightly awkward moment when one from the older generation wanted to acknowledge receipt of the information without causing offense. They didn’t seem to know that by saying, “I don’t want to offend,” you offer the possibility that you might harbor offensive opinions, about which the listener is left to speculate. In a large, multi-generational family, I would be surprised if no one held beliefs I might find objectionable, but I try to extend grace to those willing to keep it to themselves. To the younger cousins the news hardly registered as noteworthy, and they went about their business as usual. One even told my son: “I knew it!”
As ‘coming out’ stories go, my son’s went smoothly.
3
The rest of middle school was a bit bumpier. Teachers and administrators were mostly fine and even supportive, though some regarded gender nonconformity with skepticism or exasperation. And some of the students were cruel and even abusive.
Back in 2018, a physician with no background in transgender health care published a survey in which she coined a new phrase: “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” or ROGD. She had made a casual observation that a group of trans teens tended to hang out together, and so she went about soliciting responses to her survey using anti-trans websites, asking for parents who believed their kids experienced a “sudden onset of gender dysphoria.” Her hypothesis was that “gender dysphoria” could be spread as a kind of social contagion that caused kids, particularly those assigned female at birth, to develop a trans identity.
I guess it would be like: “all the cool kids use these social media apps,” or “all the cool kids wear tops that look like this.” Except it’s, “all the cool kids are a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.” They’re all equally plausible, right?
To say that ROGD has no epistemological value would perhaps reveal too much of my own bias, but suffice to say the hypothesis is largely regarded as bunk by every credible scientific and medical organization, many dozens of them. “Not clinically validated” is a polite way of saying that everyone can plainly see the hypothesis was invented by 256 transphobic parents, plus the transphobic physician.
That didn’t stop ROGD from gaining traction among bigoted politicians, policy makers, right-wing Christian groups, and yes, some teachers and administrators at public schools, as well as many parents in a city often regarded by outsiders as “progressive.” I think it would be safe to say that the attitude I most often encounter among parents with cis children is a sort of bemusement, as if to suggest something like: “can you believe it about all these trans kids? It’s weird, right?”
Without putting too much stock in any kind of research about trans people conducted by cis people, it’s generally estimated that between 1% – 5% of the population is in some way gender nonconforming, depending on how you define that term. My son’s middle school had about a thousand kids. There were maybe a dozen kids, I think fewer, who openly identified in some gender nonconforming way. So that’s somewhere around 1%, which would be an expected number.
If there was an unprecedented epidemic of mass transition, the number of trans kids in a population of 1,000 should be quite a bit higher than what would be expected among the general population. It’s not statistically relevant otherwise. On top of that, middle school is a time of discovery, angst, rebellion, and chronic reinvention for most teenagers. Gender and sexuality sit at the center of it all. Adolescence is the time when I’d expect all kinds of nonconformity to peak. Shouldn’t that drive the number even higher? That may in fact be the case, and there may have been many gender nonconforming kids who simply stayed closeted (as did many gay ancestors). Judging from my son’s experiences, I can understand why they might make that choice.
For one thing, coming out as trans often means losing friends. My son had a few besties from elementary school that followed with him into middle school. Several of them were daily companions for all of 5th and 6th grades. By the middle of 7th grade, they were drifting apart, hanging out with different friend groups. I know this is a common occurrence around this age. It is, after all, a time when kids reinvent themselves a lot. My son wasn’t even particularly sad about this. He understood that some of his friends craved attention and acceptance from a popular group of peers, whereas he sought refuge among other nonconformists. Middle school social groups often don’t include a lot of cross-pollination. His take on the situation was non-judgmental and even philosophical.
He wasn’t nearly as charitable about the older boy who threatened to rape him. He also didn’t appreciate a classmate’s insistence on trolling a small group of trans and gay students, trying to cajole them into meeting at a certain spot after school with a somewhat menacing subtext. He didn’t have any kind words for a student who would harangue another trans-masc kid: “You KNOW you’re a girl! You KNOW you’re a girl!” He was a bit shaken by an encounter with an administrator who flippantly yelled at him, “you change your pronouns every week!” despite his having changed his pronouns exactly once. He mostly stopped going to the bathroom at school because there was only one single-occupancy, gender neutral bathroom attached to the nurse’s office.
So yeah. Gender nonconforming kids tend to hang out with other gender nonconforming kids. It’s possible they do so for reasons of safety, acceptance, and community. That’s my hypothesis. If we follow the ROGD hypothesis, kids are persuaded to become trans in order to be cool, because it’s cool to lose your friends, to fear going to the bathroom, to face the hostility of peers and authorities, to risk losing the love and protection of your own parents and family, to become intimately familiar with the 988 crisis hotline, or to face physical abuse or the threat of it. That all sounds really appealing, doesn’t it?
I’d put my hypothesis up against ROGD any day.
I had heard of ROGD before my son came out, but only peripherally. In the months after he came out, that and many other things I’d half-registered began to command my attention. My experience as a gay man could only carry me so far before parallels wore thin. Sexual minorities and gender minorities certainly face a lot of the same enemies, including the enemy within. I had spent considerable time and effort unlearning homophobia, but I had only made superficial efforts to unlearn transphobia. If I had any hope of becoming the father my son needed, I had a lot to learn.
And a lot to unlearn.
4
The summer before 8th grade, I put a “TERF BINGO!” card up on the refrigerator. As the name suggests, it was a 5×5 grid populated with terms and phrases that predictably come up when dealing with various “gender critical” flavors of transphobia. One square would have “AGP,” referring to autogynephilia, a junk science term that transphobes use to characterize trans women as sexual fetishists. Another square had “TIM,” meaning “trans-identifying male,” which many transphobes insist on calling trans women, and another for “TIF.” One said, “blackface actors,” referring to Magdalen Berns’ infamous remark equating the term with trans women. Berns also believed that Jewish billionaires are funding “the trans agenda” for profit, though that one didn’t make the BINGO card, it seems.
Any one of the bingo boxes could turn into a prompt of sorts that might send me to the darkness of the Internet, or in some cases to books and periodicals. The Onion headline might be: “50-something gay dad whose son came out as trans still going down YouTube rabbit hole at 1am and cross-referencing Julia Serano.”
The bingo card itself was also, of course, an outward gesture to signal (mostly to my son) that I had “cast my lot,” and ridiculing TERFs was fair game. This was an important signal to send if I wanted some honesty and depth in our conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality–an honesty that would come in handy if my son decided that he wanted to pursue any medical interventions in his transition.
5
Our relationship with the gender clinic began gradually. I attended a six-week moderated parent support group with other parents who had similar kinds of attitudes, meaning some degree of supportive. My son also attended a “needle phobia” desensitization therapy series, because when he learned that tracking his endocrinology meant quarterly blood draws, he was motivated to overcome his paralyzing fear of needles.
All this is happening, of course, during an intense political effort to scapegoat trans people, trans kids in particular. Moral panics are nothing new. I was nine years old when a minor beauty pageant winner from Oklahoma decided to make homophobia the foundation of her new career in Florida: pimping orange juice and hating fags. The current culture war turns Anita Bryant’s legacy into a mere footnote. The scale has increased tremendously. Terrifyingly.
Moral panic crusaders talk a lot about consequences, except they only consider a vanishingly tiny subset of possible consequences, and it happens to be one of the least likely: regret. Like the anti-gay zealots of yore, the anti-trans brigade predictably claims to be on the side of God. That must be very satisfying.
It’s probably easier than being a young teenager, terrified of needles, being told that a fear of needles will prevent you from accessing the therapy you want.
When I try to regress the moral panic to a common entry point, I cannot find one. The question, “what do you expect trans people to do?” will always return some variation of “don’t be trans.” My epistemology, on the other hand, is populated with three fundamental truths: trans people exist; trans people have always existed; there is nothing disordered about being trans. Any disagreement rooted in a common acceptance of those truths will be relatively minor. Of course, disagreements that don’t share that foundation are irreconcilable.
I know that in my bones.
6
Choices are fraught things if you’re doing them right. Who gets to make them? The parents? The moral crusaders? The insurance companies? The psychiatrists? The physicians? The pharmacists? How many gatekeepers does a kid need before they’re allowed to have a say?
A couple years ago, my son wrote me a letter. We had been butting heads a lot over common parent-child matters: school, motivation, house cleaning, hygiene. He was unhappy at how often I would raise my voice to him. He wrote, “when you yell it makes me feel worthless and like my opinions don’t matter.” It was a fully realized, emotionally mature missive that had a profound impact on my behavior, far greater than any late-night doom-scrolling session, much more effective than any wit-sharpening against the TERF marauders.
You should have seen it. It was beautiful.
My Kitchen Table 