Second Place: Different from Other Mothers

A few weeks after Indigo came out to us as trans, our family attended a Gender Diversity meeting at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Our fourteen-year-old joined the teens in the big room, and Jason and I opened the door to the parent room where a box of Kleenex was circling. During introductions I spoke for the two of us, as I do, and afterward the group’s founder, Aidan Key, raised his hand to break in.

“This is the first time I’ve heard parents say they celebrated.”

Parents whose children come out as transgender are expected to feel overwhelmed with grief. They might say something unkind, deny the truth, raise their voices, and refuse to leap. Weeks or years later, many will come around and use the right name and pronouns, and some will even delight in the expansion of their world. But they are not supposed to celebrate the announcement.

Jason and I were different. I was scared about the world outside our home, but when Indigo said, “Mom, Dad, I’m transgender,” I wanted to shout hallelujah.

“It’s like finding the pieces of a puzzle,” Jason said.

Friends who were watching our life from the bleachers—whose children were not trans—told us we were exemplary parents, and I enjoyed believing them.

This year I trained as a facilitator for Aidan’s support group, which is now national, online, and called TransFamilies. I worried I wouldn’t feel compassion for the mothers and fathers in their little Zoom boxes, but at my first training session my smugness fell away. They cried, misgendered their children, and talked about losing the child they knew—and their desperate love for their babies was palpable.

I did not love my child more than them. I was raised with a different language.

***

For a homework assignment when I was twelve, I asked my mother to share a memory from when she was my age. 

“Sientate,” she said, and I pulled out my chair at the kitchen table.

My mother squeezed two glasses of orange juice before joining me. She would have picked the oranges that morning in our California backyard.

“I remember lying in my bed every night,” my mother said, handing me a glass. She meant her bed in the dorm at the missionary boarding school in Quito.

“I would pray to God to make me a boy.”

I remember feeling sorry for my mother, that God did not make her a boy, but I did not feel surprised. And I didn’t recognize it as gender diversity. When I was a child, I thought the way my mother scrubbed her lipstick off as soon as she shut the car door after church, or walked with her elbows triangled out, was because she didn’t grow up in America and did not know the gender rules.

I did. I was assigned female at birth, and I loved it. My insides felt giddy if I saw a picture of a ballerina. When I was six years old and my family was on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland, I sat on my knees in the boat and leaned over the edge, gazing at the girl dolls. I wanted to be one of them. Several years ago, I read an article by a trans woman who described the thrill of seeing pink and sparkly things when she was a child, and I thought, oh, I remember.

When I was young, I thought my mother was different because she was an immigrant. She fed us cut-up jicama for snacks, and let us walk barefoot to the store. She said things like, “I’m screwing you,” instead of “screwing with you.”

My mother’s oddities allowed my three siblings and me to be ourselves when we were not at church or school. We were supposed to get dirty and be loud, and she never told us to be careful. Our mother grew up in the jungle.

She was born in Riobamba, Ecuador, near the Chimborazo volcano. If you were to climb to the top of Chimborazo, you would stand on the land that is farthest from the center of the Earth. Her parents, the children of Scandinavian immigrants, had moved to the jungle near Riobamba to run a boys’ school. In my mother’s stories, it was an enchanted forest. She was free to play near the river, visit the Quechua village where her nannies lived, and explore “two trees” off the path.

“If I went more than two trees, I would be lost forever.” 

At seven she was sent to the boarding school, where she lost the Quechua language and mastered Spanish and English. The children were divided into boys’ and girls’ dorms, and my mother was taught to conform. The coating of conformity did not permeate her marrow. A few years ago, I watched a documentary about the brand of religious boarding schools my mother had attended. No wonder she kept her prayers to herself.

My mother’s younger sister had a harder time pretending to conform.

“She was difficult,” my mother said. “The house parents didn’t like her.”

Now, having raised a child and taught for more than thirty years, I know there is more to that story, but when I was young I did not question my mother’s words.

My siblings and I used to say there were two brothers and two sisters in our family. We said it only to each other because the labels did not match what people outside of our family presumed. One of my sisters was gender conforming like me, and two were not. In a town where we lived for one year, one sibling told the neighborhood kids her name was Steve. For my sibling’s birthday my mother took her to Sears to buy Toughskins.

“She let me try them on in the boys’ department,” Steve told me.

On our last day in that town, our last morning to play out on the street while the moving truck was being packed, our father yelled out the four girl names he had given us.

“Get your bikes in the truck.”

Three of us biked back, but Steve kept playing. Our dad called out her girl name again. Imagine one of the girliest names from the 1960s. Finally, Steve wheeled her bike around and rode it to the moving van while the neighborhood boys called out, “You’re a girl? You’re a girl!” I didn’t know how to do more than stare at them while Steve rode up into the truck.

Steve says she doesn’t remember anything from her childhood.

In a different town, my mother said she would make curtains and quilts for the room another sibling and I shared. I will call that sibling Alex. I wanted a feminine fabric but knew my mother would choose something neutral since Alex hated girly stuff. Mom sewed while we were at school, and one afternoon I walked into our room with no hint from my mother about what I would see. She had hung our new curtains and made up our beds. My quilt and curtains were pink, covered with purple ballerinas. Alex’s fabric was stars and stripes, red, white, and blue. Our curtains met in the middle of the window.

I knew those curtains were unconventional. I knew the world outside our home was easier for me than for Steve, or Alex, or my mother. Sometimes I would try to teach my family to conform. This is how to be a girl and this is how to be a boy. But their diversity, like our rolled-up sock fights, and jicama, and the fact that we could recite the books of the Bible forward and backward by the time we were six, was the air I breathed in.

When I was in ninth grade, we attended a drab Presbyterian church where the congregants sat motionless while they sang. In our Sunday School classroom, unless an adult made us mix, the girls hung out on one side and the boys on the other. A kid named Diane would sit against the wall between the two groups, head on her arms, which were folded on her knees, which spread wide like a boy. I tried to get her to join our group, and with all my girly charm I could not.

Two years later my mother let me go to a different church. I told her it was for the music, but I wanted a larger selection of boys. My mom and Peggy, Diane’s mother, were friends, and Mom would apprise me of my classmate from Sunday School. Diane had run away from home. She was hospitalized and endured rounds of conversion therapy. She tried to kill herself.

“Peggy called,” my mom said one winter afternoon when I was in high school. “I need to tell you.”

She made us tea, letting me choose the kind. She was quiet until we sat at the table.

“Peggy says Diane is turning into a boy.”

My mother put her hand on mine. In the 1970s, what my Sunday School classmate was doing was called a sex change. I had only heard it whispered, the same way the older women at church would say, “cancer.” Surveys did not ask about trans people back then, and it was said to be a one-in-a-million event. (It is not. In a 2021 Gallop poll, one out of fifty-five people in Generation Z identified themselves as transgender.)

“Peggy says their family is moving to San Francisco and Diane will start being a boy. They’re not telling anyone. They’re saying Jim got a new job.”

I understood that no one would know what had been before.

“Peggy said she has to choose between the church and her child, and she’s choosing her child.” My mother’s voice sounded like my peppermint tea.

I pictured how Diane used to hide behind the hair that was not allowed to be cut. Diane would slouch, miserable. Although the news my mother told me felt extreme, it also felt correct. Wouldn’t a girl have wanted to join our side of the room in Sunday School?

I don’t know if I forgot about my mother praying to be a boy when she told me about Diane, or why I did not connect Diane’s diversity to my family. I did not analyze my mother’s stories when I was a child. Young children think their families are the norm; as they move toward adolescence, they begin to uncover the distinctions.

I saw this as a fifth-grade teacher.

“My mom is so weird,” an eleven-year-old said.

He was a sweetheart, the youngest of seven, the only one born in America. Lured by the sunny afternoon in our classroom south of Seattle, I had let him tell a long story during math time about his mother sneaking a bunny into their apartment.

“Every family is weird,” I told the boy. I said this at least once a school year and watched each crop of fifth graders relax into those words.

***

When my child Indigo was young, they did not conform to gender norms. (Indigo uses they/them pronouns.) One time when I tried to put gender-stamped diapers in our shopping cart at Target, my toddler threw a tantrum and pointed to the other-colored box. So I bought two colors of diapers. Indigo wore a tutu with overalls to preschool, and loved both dinosaurs and Polly Pockets. After Indigo transitioned, a girlfriend gave me a copy of an email I had sent when our children were young: “There are boys and there are girls and there is my kid.”

All of that felt normal to me.

Most of the time I made room for my child’s gender creativity. When Indigo wanted short hair, I cut it short, and when they wanted long hair, they grew it long. But sometimes I would style their hair to look, if not like the gender assigned at birth, at least more unisex. And for a family photo when Indigo was eight, I tricked my child into dressing like their assigned gender. The night before our appointment, I dropped the outfit I wanted Indigo to wear in the corner of their room, as though my child had already worn it. When we were rushing to leave for the studio the next morning, I said to my child, “You need to wear clean clothes. Why don’t you throw that on?” And this is the evil part: I made sure Indigo did not see a mirror before we took the photo. I did not know that my young child was transgender. I did not know that happy children could be trans. But I knew my child did not want to look the way I tricked them to be.

Indigo screamed at me when they saw the photo. Jason and I did not allow our child to yell at us: you can be gender creative, but not disrespectful. I didn’t call my child on the screaming that day, though, because I knew—I had known all along—that forcing my child to gender conform was wrong.

“I will never make you dress that way again,” I told my baby.

I did not know Indigo was trans, or genderqueer, or nonbinary. I didn’t have the language, so I would say, “Not a boy, not a girl.” Years later, though, when Indigo said the words, “Mom, Dad, I’m transgender,” I was ready. It never felt like a loss to me. It felt like the final click that opens a lock.

I understand why I was happy when Indigo came out to us, but why did Jason celebrate? I haven’t met any gender nonconforming people in his extended family. I tell myself he didn’t struggle because he is a scientist and is fascinated by complexity.

“Would you still love me if I realized I were a man?” I asked Jason a few weeks after our child transitioned.

I thought his response would take a while. When one is married to an introvert, one learns to wait for hours, or days, or forever. But he said yes immediately.

“Would you still love me if I were a woman?” he asked.

“That’d be great,” I said, which may not have been the optimal answer, but he is used to me.

Over the years I have asked Jason about the day when our child told us they were trans. Since we may never learn precisely what my lovely man was feeling, let’s get back to me.

When Indigo came out in middle school, at first I did not relate it to my family. And then, in separate conversations when I told my mother, my sibling formerly known as Steve, and my sibling whom I am calling Alex, each of them said something like, “I wish I could have done that.”

I told them they still could, but I was not thinking of them. I wanted to make things easier for my child. We could have a Cedar family trans team.

“I don’t need to change,” said my mom. “When you get older, the men act more like women and the women act more like men.”

Formerly Steve said, “I figure I’m agender.”

Alex said, “It would have made my life so much better.”

Alex and I sat on the lawn in a park in Seattle and imagined my sibling transitioning now. I moved beyond wishing they would do it for my child to wanting my sibling to be happy. And they were, while we sat on the lawn.

Then Alex considered the life they had built.

“Maybe when I retire,” Alex said.

After Indigo came out as nonbinary in high school, my mother, Alex, and my nephew were over one night for Jason’s homemade pizza. Mom was eighty-two that year.

“Now tell me nonbinary again,” Mom said, and Indigo skipped through cisgender, genderfluid, intersectionality, and gender-assigned-at-birth. My mother nodded, but the language was too new.

“You can do it like this,” I said. “You draw three lines and label them female, nonbinary, and male.”

“And nonbinary is?” asked my mother.

“Not male, not female,” said my nephew.

“Or both,” said Indigo.

“And you put an X on each of the lines.” I had drawn vertical lines, and I put an X at the top of the female line. “I’m a lot female.” I moved to the male line and put my X toward the bottom. “I like to lead and that is stereotypically male, so I feel a little bit male. And I feel a little nonbinary because I want to wear a pretty dress while I pound my way through life.” I showed my family how I see my gender.

“OK, I’ll try it,” said my mother. She stared at the lines. “Well, I love baseball,” she said. She paused at the female line and shook her head. In the end she marked herself low on the female line and high on the male and nonbinary lines.

“I’ve never really been female,” she said. “Isn’t that interesting.”

When Jason had the pizzas ready to slide into the backyard oven, he joined us and marked his gender lines with the rest of my family. None of us were one hundred percent male or female.

“Nobody knew about this back then,” said my mother.

***

I did not celebrate when Indigo came out as trans because I love my baby more. Every parent at those TransFamilies groups loved their child to the moon. I celebrated because it was a language that I heard in my childhood. Era familiar.

The grand diversity of gender will be more familiar for children who grow up today. A camp counselor will use they/them pronouns. A classmate will transition in elementary school. At a summer barbecue an older cousin will say, “People don’t have to be boys or girls, Grandma.”

Let us sit on the lawn and imagine a time when a child tells their parent, “I am trans.” And their parent grew up in a world that made room for it, that helped them breathe it in. Let us sit on the lawn and listen to the parent say, “I thought so. How wonderful. Come here, baby.”

-Ren Cedar Fuller

Ren Cedar Fuller (she/her) worked as a public school teacher and ran a preschool in the Seattle area for a dozen years. Now a parent coach, her passion is helping parents support their children’s unique paths, with a focus on children who are neurodiverse, queer, immigrants, or not served well by traditional schools. She volunteers as a parent facilitator for TransFamilies, an online support group for families with gender diverse children. Find her on Twitter @rencedar