(At his request, I will be mainly referring to my father by male pronouns for now, both in writing and in life.)
Living with and loving a transgendered parent is both easier, and harder than it sounds. It is easier because, every day, you get to see that they are still the person you’ve always known and loved. It’s harder because you watch your parent change in strange, beautiful, and sometimes incomprehensible ways. I offer you my story, as a window into the life of a family of a transitioning parent.
One of the hardest parts of the journey as a child of a transgendered person is the first step, when you first find out. Often, the family is blindsided, never seeing the revelation coming. I know that neither my family nor I ever suspected the truth.
My dear father isn’t, should have been, maybe someday will be, a woman.
I was never a Daddy’s girl when I was little, but we were still close. I would cook with my Mom, and learn about computers from my Dad. Mom would take me on hikes with our dog, and Dad would tell silly stories while we drank hot cocoa by the fireplace. When my sister was born, and Mom didn’t have much time for me, Dad taught me card games and magic tricks, and introduced me to the wonderful world of computer games. We were a close family, even after my little sister came along when I had almost finished my first decade.
Dad and I drifted apart a bit when I hit puberty with a vengeance. I was a bit of a late bloomer, but I made up for it in spades, exploding from an A cup to a C cup in under six months, then slowly growing an F cup by my senior year of college. I had always assumed that we had become more distant and didn’t hug as much because he was uncomfortable with having a daughter who was so obviously becoming a woman. I assumed that never having had a sister or any girl cousins near his age, he just wasn’t sure how to treat me. I gave him his space, and I still loved him, but we just didn’t talk as much.
When I went away to college, I started talking to my dad over IM every so often. It was so much easier to talk to him that way than face to face, and every so often evolved into long conversations three or four times a week. Once and a while, when joking around in the third person, he’d call himself “she” or say he was giggling instead of laughing. I thought it was just mistyping (he’s notorious for his typos) or joking around, so I laughed it off.
I was heavily involved in theater in high school; Dad had been, too, back in the day. It never occurred to me that his knowledge of makeup could have come from anything but theater. I mean, once you’re getting into more serious theater, even the guys have to wear at least pancake makeup and eyeliner. It’s just what you do, and those are skills you don’t forget completely. So finding out that he knew a few stage makeup tricks I’d never heard of didn’t phase me. It just meant that I had a super cool dad.
A few weeks before finals during my junior year of college, I found some of my dad’s doctor appointment reminder cards lying out. His desk was a bit of a mess, and they’ obviously fallen out of his medical records folder on the shelf above. Without thinking, I picked them up, to straighten out the pile and put them away for him.
The business card on top was for a counselor of transgender and transitioning persons and their families.
