My daughter is transgender, but she’s also just like any other kid

The author and his wife supported their daughter when she came out as transgender.

As a kid, our daughter was about as easy to deal with as it is possible for a kid to be. She toddled off to school cheerfully and toddled back, babbling about Greek myths or gardening or whatever hippie Waldorf stuff they were doing in her hippie Waldorf classroom.

She hung out with her mom and watched “The Last Airbender” until there was no more “Last Airbender” to watch. When her middle-school friends embarked on dicey extracurricular trouble-making, like stuffing fireworks in bottles to see what would happen, she invariably told them this was a horrible idea and absented herself before said fireworks blew up and scattered glass everywhere.

She practiced her cello without nagging. She kept her room spotless because she liked it spotless. She always remembered to turn in her homework. She was a dream.

And then, adolescence struck.

I begged my daughter not to go away for college and stay home instead. She refused, and I can’t let go of my fear.

My daughter started trick-or-treating without adults when she was 6. We wanted to give her the independence we grew up with.

We weren’t prepared for our daughter’s teenage years

Of course, when you’re a parent, you expect the teenaged child to be somewhat spikier and less accommodating than the pre-teenaged child. We should have been prepared.

We had gotten complacent, though, because while her peers started to become cranky and recalcitrant in 7th and 8th grade, our daughter was still trotting happily off to class well into high school.

The big change came during junior year (which also happened to coincide with the pandemic lockdown, just for bonus misery). That’s the year our daughter came out as trans.

My wife and I were knowledgeable about trans issues, and we were both very supportive as she embarked on the lengthy and frustrating process of finding a healthcare provider and getting access to hormones. And then, when she did get access to them, the hormones did what hormones do in most adolescents.

Slowly, and then all at once, our daughter was not practicing her cello without nagging. She was not cleaning her room. She seemed, in fact, to actively be anti-cleaning her room, which descended into an abyss of filth and clutter that threatened to swallow the cats, and even the large-ish dog (which she would no longer walk).

She was not necessarily in all instances distancing herself from the more ill-advised activities of her peers. She was less interested in watching “The Last Airbender” with her mom, and was suddenly a lot more interested in girls. There were radical wardrobe changes. There was dating. There was angst. There were parties. There was one memorable instance when she dropped her cellphone into a deep lake, from whence there was no return. And there was less interest in school. So much less interest in school. But the parents of her peers were experiencing similar challenges with their kids, too..

Transitioning was a big step for our daughter, but she’s still just like any other kid

Scholar Jack Halberstam points out that it’s not unusual for trans kids to have a delayed adolescence or to experience developmental milestones at different speeds. And, of course, many parents of trans kids feel that their children have, well, transformed.

Public discussions of trans kids often tend to focus on how they’re different from cisgender kids, and on how parents face different challenges in supporting them. And trans kids are different from cis kids in some ways. Transitioning is a big step that changes people’s relationship with their bodies, their sexuality, their past, and their future. It makes sense that it might change other apparently unrelated things, like your interest in school or your enthusiasm for cleaning your room. Or your interest in communicating with your parents outside the occasional grunt.

Also, though, the fact that our daughter transitioned right around adolescence really drove home the extent to which transitioning, while a big step, is pretty similar to a lot of other big steps that are fairly universal correlates of growing up. Children don’t stay the same; this is a good thing when you can stop changing their diapers, and then maybe not as good when they no longer want to watch television with you because they are going out to see a queer hardcore band with their girlfriend.

There are upsides too, though. We like her girlfriend, who is more willing to chat with us than our daughter, perhaps because we’re not her parents. And we are proud of our daughter for figuring out who she is, just as many parents are proud of their kids for climbing up out of childhood and figuring out who they are, even if the person they are doesn’t keep their room as neat as they once did. A big challenge of parenting is adjusting to the fact that children grow up, and that in growing up, they scramble your life and surprise you. But that’s one of the big joys of parenting, too.