I can’t stop shivering. For the past nine weeks, my anxiety has steadily increased, and the past few days it’s been through the roof. On day one of his term, Donald Trump signed an order to roll back the rights of gender diverse people in the US. Since then, there have been many more executive orders, and states are introducing and passing anti-trans legislation at an alarming rate. These orders have threatened my family directly and could uproot our very way of life.
My transgender son turned 18 in January. We live in a deeply conservative rural area of the United States. Physically, we are fairly safe. It might surprise some of you, but our small town barely noticed when my son announced, at 14, that he was a boy.
I am a person of faith; I was raised a conservative Christian, and though I have strayed from the conservative part, I still follow Jesus’ teachings and pray regularly. In my prayers since my son came out, I consistently hear God comforting me using the words of Matthew 3:17(NKJV): “And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” The one thing I have always known is I am to love my son the way God already loves him: unconditionally.
If you knew my son, if you had even met him briefly, here are some things you would know about him: He is sweet and caring, funny and creative. He dotes on his four cats and cares diligently for over 50 houseplants. He spent his own money on a 40-gallon aquarium for the goldfish he got for free 6 years ago at the county fair because he wanted them to have the best life possible if they were going to live in a tank. He gets interested in a topic and goes on a deep dive on Youtube to learn everything he can about any little thing, from home organizing to auto detailing to political science. He is taking a class through the local community college. Most of his classmates are middle-aged women; they dote on him, and when I run into one of them in town, she tells me how kind and smart he is, and it makes my heart swell.
My son and I discuss world events, the small conflicts he has with friends, and local drama that we read about on our community Facebook page. His insights expand my mind and help me grow in understanding, and he is growing right alongside me. He’s been working with a wonderful therapist for more than 3 years, and he puts the things she teaches him into practice. He gets grumpy with me when I do things that annoy him, but then he apologizes and hugs me and says, “But could you please not?” Easing his burdens
I am at the tail end of Gen X, born in 1978. When I was a kid, I went to a conservative church and grew up in a conservative neighborhood outside of a conservative city. Growing up, I knew exactly two people who were out as gay.
We knew there were drag queens. We knew there were gay bars. But it wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I began to learn that transgender people existed as regular people doing regular things. I was living in New Orleans in 2002 when I first met a few trans people in person. Their authenticity and kindness helped to pry away the last remnants of my rigid upbringing, like bars being removed from the windows of my mind.
But when my son announced at the dinner table on an average summer day that he was a boy, I was blown away. Not that I was still so sheltered in the year 2021. By then I knew several more trans people, and we even had a distant relative who had a transgender child. My son had shown a few signs that he was thinking about it. At one point he told me he thought he might be pansexual. A few months later he asked if it was ok for him to shave his head, which of course I obliged, because it was just hair. I had shaved my head often when I was in college, and I knew it would be a liberating experience to be a girl with a shaved head. Except, my child wasn’t a girl. The child I had birthed and raised and loved and argued with. The child whose name I adored. The child who was always experimenting with clothing and hats and had the most unique sense of style. This child, who I had called “she” and “her” for more than 14 years, was sitting across our table telling me something entirely new about himself.
I admit I struggled with the pronouns at first. My husband and I accepted what our son told us, but we also had to catch up with his thinking.
I didn’t know how to handle telling other people. At first, I confided to a few close friends. Then I found out a friend of a friend had a trans kid who had come out 10 years prior, so I made a call and got some wisdom from one who was further along on this path. I was determined to get the pronouns right, but it took time to form a new habit.
When I was talking to people who didn’t know yet, they must have thought I was having some sort of neurological issue. I would just not say any pronouns at all when talking about my youngest child. Try having a conversation about a person without using any pronouns, and you will see what I’m talking about. It gets awkward to keep saying their name every time, and “my kid” can only get you so far grammatically, so eventually I would just do this weird little nod and leave a blank space in my sentence instead of saying him or her.
Eventually, I got comfortable using he/him pronouns all the time. But it was probably two years into his transition before I was able to do it in front of people who had known I had two girls. They were acquaintances, so I hadn’t yet told them, gently, that I didn’t have any more kids; I just have a daughter and a son now.
About a year into his transition, my son timidly asked if it would be ok to change his birth name. His “deadname,” the name he was given at birth that he no longer uses, gave him lots of gender dysphoria. He was trying to keep it, because he knew it made me happy, but now he needed to ask me to budge one more time. And once again we had to do the mental work of habit change, of self-correcting, of being uncomfortable to allow our child to feel like himself.
I want to be very clear: I am speaking about my discomfort to help you understand that these are not easy changes to make as a parent. But my discomfort at having to find new words is a grain of sand compared to what it was like for my son to have been pretending he was someone other than himself. My grain of sand would eventually be blown away by the wind or washed out to sea with the tides. My son’s boulder threatened to crush him, and it was my responsibility as a parent to stop complaining about the itchy sand stuck in my shoe and gently and carefully ease my son’s burdens.
During my son’s transition, he’s received the best, most comprehensive, and empowering medical care I have ever witnessed. Every caregiver has accepted and affirmed him, has believed him when he told them, “This is who I am.”
The doctors, nurses, and therapists who walked with us through this process have been kind, compassionate, gentle, and helpful. They’ve given us all the information we needed to understand my son’s experience. They checked in with us as we read the information, answered all our questions, offered counsel around any spiritual beliefs or cultural dogmas that might have been causing conflict. By the time my son came out, he was ready to jump into his transition with both feet. The medical staff helped us go at an appropriate pace. They asked again and again if he was sure. They told us that, ultimately, the mode of transition was a decision for our family to make together, and urged us, and him, to take our time before starting interventions that would cause permanent changes.
When my son started testosterone injections over a year after he came out, he was giddy. He had already been purposefully speaking in a lower voice, so when the first voice cracks started he would laugh with delight rather than embarrassment. When he got his first chin hairs he couldn’t wait to show me. He loved it when his leg hair began to grow thicker. He started to grow his hair long again because he had always had long hair, and he preferred it that way. As his outward presentation started to match the way he felt on the inside, he felt free to stay in touch with the slightly softer, more feminine parts of himself. He was free to be a self-realized human, as we all should be. Now what?
So, here we are in 2025.
The date I write this is March 23. It is 5:12 am, and I have been awake for three hours. I haven’t slept much in the past nine weeks. I feel like staying awake, staying aware of what’s being done to trans people, is the only way I will know how to protect my child. Every day, I have learned some new wrong being committed in the name of “saving women” or “protecting children.” I am here to tell you that the anti-trans legislation in this country is doing a number on the emotional, mental, and physical safety of my child and myself. And I know of hundreds of other families in the same boat.
Here are just a few of the ways that the Trump administration has, either by executive order or memorandum, very quickly eroded the already threatened rights of transgender Americans since the inauguration on January 20:
● The federal government will now only recognize two sexes, male and female, effectively rendering nonbinary identities invalid.
● No federal funds shall be used for gender affirming care for trans people under the age of 19. (Two notes about this one – cisgender children can still, and always have been able to, access gender affirming care with the approval of their parents; and currently this executive order has been blocked by the courts through a second temporary restraining order.)
● They are in the process of removing all trans people from active military service.
● They have mandated that all federal agencies stop recognizing gender identity on forms and surveys. Where it was previously recorded, the new categories will just be blank.
● They have deleted the “T” from government websites that refer to LGBTQ+ people and have removed all references to trans and intersex people from federal web pages.
● They have banned transgender people from obtaining visas to enter the country, and there have been ongoing reports of trans US citizens being rejected and their documents confiscated when trying to re-enter the country.
● They have removed protection from surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security for all homosexual and transgender people.
If you’re trans in this state, your very existence could be a crime.
The federal moves have also emboldened state governments to take previous anti-trans legislation a few steps further. Since my son came out in 2021, states have proposed a total of 2,401 pieces of legislation, and 222 of those have been enacted as law. Here are a few of the more dangerous laws that states have passed or proposed just in the last few weeks:
● Texas has proposed legislation to charge trans people with “gender identity fraud.” This would be a felony punishable by up to two years in jail and fines of up to $10,000.
● Iowa has removed gender identity as a protected item in their state’s civil rights code.
● The Montana House of Representatives has passed a bill that would remove “intent” from public indecency law for transgender people, effectively making it illegal to exist as visibly transgender in public spaces.
● There have also been countless bathroom bans, youth gender affirming care bans, and sports bans being passed across the nation.
These laws do nothing to protect cisgender adults and children. All they do is actively cause or passively allow harm to transgender people as they try to go about their daily lives. And because the knowledge of who is actually transgender is based on perception, it will inevitably cause harm to cisgender people who have androgynous characteristics.
A 2015 study showed that over 60% of trans people surveyed avoid using public restrooms at all costs. Ten years later, I personally know of trans children who suffer from chronic dehydration and UTIs because they are afraid to use the bathroom during the school day. Meanwhile, last month in Arizona a 19-year-old cisgender Black woman was confronted by male police officers in a Walmart bathroom because she looked “too male” to be using the women’s room. An online search reveals countless instances of both trans and cis people being harassed while trying to use public facilities.
You may think you don’t personally know any trans people. But it’s likely that you’re wrong. Current estimates say that less than 1% of people in the US identify as transgender (about 0.5% of adults, and 1.4% of youth ages 13-17). That’s a little less than the number of people that have red hair. So statistically, if you know at least one redhead, it’s reasonable to assume you might also know at least one trans person. The reasons you might not be aware you know a trans person are multifaceted:
● There are a lot of trans people who fully “pass” as their stated gender. You don’t know they are trans because they have received gender-affirming care, and their voice and appearance fully match your perceived ideas of male and female.
● There are a lot of trans people who haven’t begun to medically transition yet. There are many barriers to accessing gender affirming care, including lack of money, lack of family support, and anti-trans legislation that makes it impossible for some people.
● There are many people who identify as trans and nonbinary, but their outward appearance fits your idea of gender norms.
● There may be someone trans in your life who doesn’t think you are a safe person to come out to.
As I write these words, I feel a sense of calm conviction. It is extremely dangerous when a country’s government so blatantly undermines and strips away the individual rights of its own citizens. I know I have to sound the alarm, to make sure people know what’s actually happening.
And then I stand up to go get some water from the kitchen, and my hands begin to shake, and I can feel my heart pounding high in my chest. I am terrified that an anti-trans neighbor could call the Department of Homeland Security and that my family could be subject to monitoring simply because a transgender person lives in our house.
My son has every right to the same protections under the law as any other person in this country. It is shameful that government officials are using transgender people to further their own agendas, to gain more power, and to instill fear into the hearts of their constituents – turning trans people into faceless “monsters” who are supposedly corrupting our youth by their very existence, and at the same time actively persecuting trans citizens, striking terror into their hearts and the hearts of those who love them.
If you have read this far, I hope it is because you are with me in recognizing this injustice for what it is. I am not going to mince words here: This is a genocide against transgender people.
Here is the definition from the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The legal term “genocide”’ refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Genocide is an international crime, according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). The acts that constitute genocide fall into five categories:
● Killing members of the group
● Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
● Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part
● Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
● Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Right now, transgender people in the US are experiencing items two and three on this list. With everything in me, I’m begging you, stand up and speak out for our trans citizens before this goes any further.
