Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week’s topic is tough, and I’ve talked about it before and it was awkward, and I think it’s still gonna be awkward. So let’s just dive into the deep end with: TRANS PARENTS (Mother’s Day).
There are two parts of this that seem separate, but are invariably kind of linked together even in terms of being trans: my own parents and being a parent myself. I became a parent before I transitioned, or even realized or understood my own transness.
I’m sure this is very different for every trans person, and every trans parent. And for trans folks who transition before becoming parents, it’s also probably a very different experience. As always, I can only talk about my own experiences and don’t speak for everyone.
For a lot of trans people, relationships with our parents can be fraught. Obviously because a lot of us have parents who do not, and will not, accept us for who we are. My father died when I was very young and he never got to know the real me and who I really am.
I have almost no memories of him, and some of the few I do have are tainted by his death at a very young age, and the awfulness of the lies my mother made me believe about him. It’s a whole complex issue all its own, which you can read about in the trans tuesday on PARENTS WHO WILL NEVER KNOW THE REAL YOU (my dad).
Relatedly, wondering what it might be like if I somehow got to show him who I really am, and what I might hope to get out of that, is something my wife Susan and I explored in a short comic in the Color of Always anthology, available now!
My mom is an entirely different issue that’s painful in its own way. I’ve mentioned in several of these how my relationship with my mother was… fraught. I went into this a little in the Trans Tuesday on THE PAST, (and why it haunts us).
We did not get along, we did not see eye to eye on basically anything, including some major decisions she made regarding my (much younger) siblings that I strongly disagreed with, and I made sure my feelings were known.
My mother and her mother were abandoned by my mom’s father when she was very young, and I’m sure that played heavily into how overly controlling and manipulative she became. She wanted to find a way to force everyone to stay near her for her entire life.
And of course that’s not the way it works. We all have our own hopes and desires for our lives and sometimes that takes us away from home. We all have to find our own path, but she was much more interested in picking a path for us and getting mad if we deviated from it at all.
She also had these “roles” she assigned all of us in her head, and deviation from that was also a problem. IE there was “the smart one” and “the sporty one” and on and on, and it led to all sorts of problems. As seems obvious! She was STRIDENTLY anti-gay.
I’m always hesitant to say things like this, because a person’s gender is their own business, but she was my mother and my life at home with her was very rough, and in only one way, I see in her so much of what I saw in myself: gender dysphoria.
I can’t diagnose her with that, obviously, but I see so many of the signs. She hated being thought of as a woman, several times she told me she wished she was a man (it’s a joke! ha ha how silly), she hated ANYTHING associated with femininity…
She hated photos of herself, never wanted to be in them, never felt they looked like her. I’m not saying she was trans (though she might have been)…
But even being a woman who just liked to be “butch” or what have you was so far outside the realm of things she could have ever accepted about herself, what I’m one hundred percent sure of is it made her life awful, and that manifested in a hundred different ways.
ANY deviation from the gender binaries in us kids was met with concern and ridicule and anger. Despite the fact that she herself dressed in the most gender-neutral way she could, every day of her life.
She also hated femininity so much she never really even let my sisters explore it, not while I lived at home with them, anyway. So femininity is bad for all of them, but don’t be a boy, and you are very much girls! There was a lot of cognitive dissonance.
A reminder that the gender binary is just part of our societal FALSE DICHOTOMY that messes us ALL up in countless ways. Here’s the Trans Tuesday on that:
I’m telling you all of this so you have the context for this one vital piece of information:
If my mother was alive when I came out as trans (and a gay trans woman at that), she never would have spoken to me again.
She barely spoke to me as it was. She ALREADY poisoned the very idea of me in the minds of my siblings from the moment I moved out, simply because I broke the mold she’d set for me.
She told them outright lies about me, just made shit up, and anything I ever did that broke her idea of the man I was “supposed” to be also got used as fodder against me. She also didn’t like Susan at ALL, because Susan helped me get out of the horrible situation I was in.
My brother told me that once he and I spent the entire day talking to each other in very bad British accents, calling each other by stuffy British women’s names. I have no memory of that, but it definitely sounds like something I would have done. I’m a goof.
But my mother hated it, of course, because we were BOYS. And afterward told my brother that SUSAN was disappointed in us for doing that! Like… what the actual hell? Again, she just made shit up to justify all the feelings she had, and that’s gonna really mess up your kids.
I was not given any room to explore my feelings around gender as a kid. It fucked me up for life. I lived with horrid dysphoria for most of my life because of it. I was MISERABLE, and ALONE, and TRAPPED. FOR LIFE.
If you need a refresher on GENDER DYSPHORIA, see its trans tuesday.
Or on the ways it impacted my ability to even exist in this world, see the Trans Tuesday on CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka WHAT IS HAPPENING aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD when the LACK of dysphoria made life entirely brand new for me.
And if you want to see the hidden ways it muted my life, and kept all that this world has to offer from me, in ways I didn’t even realize and am still discovering, see the Trans Tuesday on FREEING UP MY BRAIN aka LUNCH WITH TILLY.
Can you imagine doing that to your kid? All because you won’t let them try different clothes or hairstyles or ANYTHING outside the false dichotomy of the gender binary, because it makes YOU ~uncomfortable~? Seems like the antithesis of parenting, to me.
I’ve talked to many parents of trans kids who’ve told me these threads have helped them understand their kids, and I ALWAYS make sure to tell him how VITALLY IMPORTANT it is that they’re learning and supporting their kids. I’m so glad some trans kids have parents like that.
It makes a literal world of difference. Something like 80% of trans kids attempt suicide, because dysphoria is awful and they exist in a society (and often in a home life) where they feel trapped with no way out. See the Trans Tuesday on TRANS KIDS AND THE INTAKE EXAM.
All of that being said, I have NO frame of reference for being a parent myself. ALL MY LIFE I have been fascinated and entirely mystified by friends who… like their parents? That’s a thing that can happen? It’s so alien to me.
To be clear I like my father very much, based on the things I’ve learned about him from his family. But again he was so poisoned in my mind by my mother, just as I have been in my siblings’ minds, that for a very long time I didn’t care about him at all.
Actually I actively hated him for abandoning me, when he actually did nothing of the sort! It was my mother who ripped me away from him and kept him out of my life. But our wonderful son was born before I learned who my father really was.
And even still, I don’t have that first-hand knowledge of what he was like as a parent. So I didn’t at all know how to be a parent once our kid was born. I mean I knew how to care for an infant or a child, my mother had me babysitting all seven of my siblings all the time.
In fact it was partly due to all my experience with kids that Susan and I decided I’d be the stay-at-home-parent while she returned to a day job, and oof did we get blowback on that from her parents. I was THE MAN and SHOULD GET A REAL JOB.
As if raising a kid isn’t a real job or harder than almost anything else, as if a man (which I’m not!) couldn’t do it right, as if a woman couldn’t work and provide for her family. Never mind I had the kid experience. Never mind Susan was making more money than I ever had.
None of that mattered. All they were concerned about was upholding the false dichotomy of the gender binary! How weird it is to be more concerned about THAT than the person with more experience being with the kid and the person with more earning potential making the money?
I didn’t understand it then, I still don’t understand it now. How utterly sexist and reductive and ultimately harmful to women AND men (and non-binary people!).
But though I had plenty of experience with kids, I didn’t know how to be a good PARENT, because it was just so foreign to me. I think I’ve done… okay? I know I’ve messed up at times. Hopefully I’ve been pretty good overall, though that’s for our kid to decide and not me.
Often I just thought about what I’d WISHED my own parents would have done for me in a given situation, and tried to do that, rather than repeat any of what they ACTUALLY did. But I know I’ve made mistakes, we all do. And some of them still pain me.
But we’ve always been supportive of him in every way we could. He tells us he’s a straight boy, and that’s fine, but if he ever discovers he isn’t that’s also fine. We let him explore the things he wants to explore, and be who he wants to be. Even when that’s something we can’t fathom.
He has no interest in creative pursuits, really, which is very weird as Susan and I basically never stop writing and creating! Different things just make him happy, and that’s okay. If he’s happy and safe, what else matters?
One of my absolute favorite things is when I came out to him. We were in the kitchen making dinner together, standing next to each other at the stove. And I was super nervous about it. Now we live in California and kids here actually learn about trans people in health class!
And we’d talked with him about trans people and gay people so he’d know it’s just another way some people are and there’s nothing wrong with it. So coming out to him SHOULD go well, right? But still you just never know.
So I worked up the courage and said hey, I know you’ve learned about trans people in school, and I just want you to know I am one. I’m actually a woman, and I’ll be transitioning. So I’ll be wearing women’s clothes, and will start growing breasts, and I’ll change my name…
And his reply? “…okay.” THAT WAS IT. Like UGH why are we even talking you’re my parent and thus deeply uncool, and I do not at all care if you’re trans or not. It was… well, it was HILARIOUS but also absolutely beautiful and perfect.
He accepted me without question, and even stood up for me to family members in a way that I know was very hard for him. But he did it. And just the thought of it still makes me teary. I have never been prouder of him. He’s such a wonderful kid.
But he doesn’t call me “mom.” To be fair, he doesn’t really call Susan “mom” either. He doesn’t call either of us anything, most of the time. We’ve had talks about it, but I’ve never been able to figure out what I’d LIKE him to call me.
I told him “dad” was still fine. I don’t like it, but it’s what he’s called me his entire life (again, on the rare instances he actually calls me anything), and I know he wouldn’t mean anything awful or be trying to misgender me with it.
But I don’t much like the word, as in our society it implies a male-ness that I’d rather not be associated with. But I also felt for a long, long time like he couldn’t call me “mom.” Part of that is because if that was Susan, how could it also be me?
I’m sure part of it was also my own internalized transphobia not believing that was a word that was “allowed” to apply to me. You can see the Trans Tuesday on that for a much deeper dive on all the ways INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA messes with our heads.
So how does one define motherhood? It’s not just cis women who give birth, because people adopt and can earn the title of “mom” in your life even if they never officially adopted you. And there are surrogates too. But how would our son differentiate between Susan and me?
He’s too old now for Susan to be “mom” and for me to be “mommy” or “mama,” so… what do we do? What do non-binary parents do? I don’t know. Why do our words for parents have to be so horribly gendered? Oh right, the false dichotomy.
And so Mother’s Day is a HORRIBLY complex, weird, and slightly awful day for me. My mother died over a decade ago and we had a fairly terrible relationship. My son doesn’t call me “mom,” I wasn’t sure I felt like a mom. Do I want to be a mom?
I don’t want to be a “dad,” but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be a parent. Being our son’s parent has been one of the most wonderful, difficult, challenging, special, beautiful things in my life. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But is there a word for me and what I am to him? For him to call me? Or refer to me by? It’d be pretty damned weird for him to say something like, “My parent just texted me this terrible meme,” for example. So what do we do?
I have absolutely no idea. I’ve been out for nearly three years, it’s been over three years into my full transition, it’s been over eight years since my personal transition started. And I still don’t have an answer.
What I do know is I changed my twitter bio from saying I was a “parent,” to saying I am a “mom,” and it made me feel… good. It felt right. He doesn’t have to call me that. If he did it’d be great and wonderful, but also weird and complicated.
For now, calling myself a mom and knowing that I love my kid more than all the stars in the universe and want nothing more than for him to be who HE wants to be, and to be safe, happy, and loved, is enough.
And maybe that’s all it needs to be.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
UPDATE 10/6/23
Today’s my birthday, and while Susan and our kid were singing me happy birthday, without either of us talking to him about it and completely unbidden, he just called me “mom”.
The feeling is literally indescribable. I will never get a better birthday present.
My heart. 💜😭