Trans of thought: Parent’s Day

As we pass through this brief period of the year when it is no longer Mother’s Day but not quite yet Father’s Day, it occurs to me that this is an apt analogy for how many transgender parents sit between motherhood and fatherhood.

After our transitions, many of us struggle to redefine ourselves as parents within our reconfigured families. Sometimes the choice is not up to us. After consulting a psychologist before I came out to my son, she suggested that for his comfort, it was important to allow him to choose what he would now call the new me. After mulling over the different possibilities, including “father” in multiple languages, he decided to call me by my own created name of Maia. Admittedly, it is not what I prefer as my public identity as his parent has been rendered invisible. Kids don’t usually call their mothers or fathers by their first names.

Other families with a transgender parent have come up with solutions both novel and traditional. Well-known author Jenny Boylan outlines in her memoir how her children chose to combine the words mommy and daddy to create the new parental term Maddy. Still others decide to stick with their old titles of mom or dad despite outward incongruent appearance and the possible risk of public embarrassment. Curiously, few of us seem to be able or willing to make the leap from dad to mom and vice-versa. This perhaps says more about our struggles with guilt and conventional notions of gender roles.

I am sometimes asked why I got married and had children if I knew I was transgender. The simple answer is that I didn’t know, or at least I didn’t want to know. The truth was much too scary to admit to myself. The more complicated answer is that I believe as transgender people, we add layers of restrictions to prevent ourselves from developing our generalized inner sense of gender discomfort into full-blown self-realization. Getting married thus becomes a kind of straightjacket to prevent the pain of coming out and becoming subject to the general lack of societal acceptance and hate directed towards transgender people.

Of course, when we inevitably do come to understand that we are transgender and pursue transition, it often means immense collateral damage to our loved ones. Marriages disintegrate and families, both immediate and extended, are stressed to the breaking point and beyond. Children are caught in the middle and asked to cope with both the stresses of divorce and a parent who is transforming from the mother or father they knew into an unknown form. There are also the unavoidable embarrassments for all involved as a private family matter, by necessity, becomes a spectacle in front of other parents, coaches, educators, church members and even the friends of your children. Charges of selfishness directed at the transitioning parent are whispered behind closed doors and to our faces. The guilt it generates can be crushing.

After all we put our families through, it is no wonder that we find it very difficult to move past the guilt and feel we are deserving of the title in our family that our new gender presentation implies. I vividly remember once being asked by a friend towards the beginning of my transition if I thought I deserved to be happy. Up until that moment I thought that my answer would have been yes, but as I found myself frozen in my tracks and doubled over in tears, I realized that wasn’t true.

However, one day I had the epiphany that it isn’t selfish to survive. That being an alive mom was much better in the long run for my son than being his dead dad. And I do indeed see myself as his mom because that title is not a function of biology and it is not exclusive to one person per family. I think it is at odds to argue that I am and always was a woman where it counts, but that the role I have and do fulfill in my family is determined by my biology. If adoptive mothers can be moms and lesbian families can have two moms, then I can be a mom too along with my son’s biological mom.

It looks like my son is starting to feel the same way. This year, for the first time ever, he bought me a Mother’s Day gift. For the first four years after the divorce he didn’t acknowledge me for Mother’s or Father’s Day, so this was a monumental moment for me and in fact brought me to tears. I am still waiting for him to call me mom, but I have hope we will get there in time. So to those of you who are transgender like me, but are still waiting for a similar acknowledgment from your kids, I wish you a happy belated Mother’s Day and a happy upcoming Father’s Day. I see you and send you my love.

Melody Maia Monet operates a YouTube channel on lesbian and transgender topics. You can view her videos at https://youtube.com/melodymaia.