| You may be wondering why I am
writing a letter to you even though I am a stranger. Probably the
last thing that you want is to discuss the confusion, embarrassment and
fear with someone you don't know. I understand. You wouldn't
be reading this if someone you loved very much hadn't told you something
you didn't want to hear, that your child is, was, and has been
cross-gendered identified, that what you thought was true was not and
never had been, that a silent agony was being played out for years and
you just didn't know, maybe you didn't want to know, and now you do, and
I'm presuming to talk to you about it.
I am banking on two things in
presuming to talk to you: First, I am banking on a common human
need for information when something new and confusing has entered their
lives. Secondly, I am banking on your courage and on your love for
your child which should be present now if it is present at all. If
you are still reading then I know that you are who I took you for,
people who love and who are ready to listen and to understand an
experience that though rare is bone-deep real for those who experience
it.
In order to grow through what you now know you must be willing to listen
and learn. I'm sorry but there just is no other way. I am
certain that the people before Columbus found it dismaying to learn that
the world was not flat. I am equally certain that most of our
society would like to believe that sexual minorities do not exist.
The fact is that the earth is round and that transsexual people do
exist. Your child is transsexual, and many things besides, but
transsexual and because transsexual in greater pain and confusion that
you would ever wish your child to be in.
I am not going to give you all the facts about gender dysphoria, which
is the scientific name for transsexualism here. After all, this is
a letter and not a treatise. As a letter, it is meant to be
friendly and reassuring, but I have to be challenging at the same time.
Why? Because what lies ahead for you will require the same
courage, effort, commitment, and love that is required when anyone is
forced by circumstances to face facts that one would prefer to deny or
to ignore. My task is easier because denial and ignorance have a
price that is far higher than the choice I hope you will make.
Denial of facts does not make them go away and willful ignorance in the
face of facts when knowledge and healing are available is debilitating,
futile, and when it touches the life of a loved one, culpable. I
assure you that denial has already been practiced by your transsexual
child for years. Your child did not ask or wish to be transsexual.
Its costs have been born for years in the silent hope that the feelings
would go away, but they haven't and the best research indicates that
they never will.
By the time a transsexual child confides, takes the terrible risk of
rejection that disclosure entails, the situation which is to say the
pain has become undeniable. Your child is reaching out to you now
not to hurt you but to show you the love and trust that is the only true
sign of a good parent-child relationship, to tell the truth, the core
fact of a life. If you haven't seen it that way then just pause
and think a minute, would you really want your child to lie to you,
would you enjoy living with a shadow of a person never really knowing
who that person was? Don't be confused here with the question,
Would you rather that you never had to be told that your child was
transsexual. The answer to that one is obvious, of course, you
would rather that the necessity to face transsexualism was not present.
The transsexual condition is not
easy to face, it is one of nature's true anomalies. It may never
be completely understood.
No, the question here is far more simple, Would you want to live in a
relationship with someone you loved and force that person to know in
every daily act that you as a parent didn't really know him or her?
Can real love exist where knowledge is absent? You may answer that this
aspect of your child's life is private like what they do in bed.
The answer to this is that transsexualism is not a minor aspect of life
in that it involves how a person views herself or himself in body,
social interactions, clothing, voice, gestures, friendship, and in
intimacy, in fact in every aspect of life. A lie of this dimension
would be a great lie indeed. In any case, the truth has been
spoken your child has admitted you to the care of her life. If you
are still with me your next question, What do I do now that I know my
child is transsexual? will be met
with a few suggestions.
One brief personal note.
I have asked myself for years how to make my life meaningful in the face
of being transsexual. I realize that I am years behind in the
normal maturation process, that whole continents of human experience
have been denied to me because I am transsexual. I have tried to
mourn the lighthearted joys of explorations that might have been mine in
high school and college, the simple joy that would have come had the
constant pain of exile in a body and social role that did not fit been
eased for a moment.
I have so often wished that I might have been able to experience when it
was possible what I am now trying to cram into the years that are
quickly disappearing before my eyes, a girlhood and adolescence, known
only in moments of fantasy and the vicarious experience of books.
I have had to surrender much of my life to the brutality and
incomprehension of societal ignorance surrounding the phenomenon of
transsexualism. That ignorance and prejudice costs lives is no new
discovery, it is the bane of every age whether it shows up in war or in
civil violence or in silent hatred and misunderstanding. In this
case though it was my own life that has been bled away year by year in
my efforts to correspond to what body may have indicated but my soul
knew to be an alien fabric out of which I could never hope to weave a
complete or a happy life. The only comfort I have for those lost
days and years during which I was a stranger to myself frantically
seeking to garb my soul in the personalities and expectations of others,
is that I might be the last generation to know such pointless suffering.
That is why I am writing today, to spare others lost years, lost hopes,
lost lives.
No other birth defect or
developmental disability is treated with the snide and brutal
complacency of transsexualism. People would be ashamed at the
thoughtless cruelty seen so often in talk shows when brave people have
attempted to tell of their pain and to grope towards a solution both for
themselves and for others. We are in many ways a barbaric society
in spite of all our technology. It is time that such treatment
cease and that compassion that is so rare in society find a home in the
families of the oppressed.
I cannot tell you now to try
and understand what is in its very nature an incomprehensible condition,
nor can I tell you what specific measures to take to ease your child
through the transition to her true life. Your own love, courage,
and imagination must be your guides along this path. I can tell
you this, that no act of love will be a cause of regret, that no one
profits when lives burn on in futility and frustration simply to sustain
society's bland comfort in illusion. You may be the means of
deliverance to more than your transsexual child. In realizing the
truth of her life, you may gain the courage to embrace your own with all
of its sorrow, disappointment, and fleeing dreams. The path of love and
acceptance is not trod alone, transsexual people, so familiar with pain,
may love and aid you in return as you pursue your own journey.
Their happiness is your laurel wreath, their completeness your crown.
Having given them birth will you now give them life? Will you aid
in their restoration to the human community? Will you welcome them
home? |
