Why Can’t I Call My Trans Child by His New Name?
Juliet. What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I still call him “her,” mostly. “Her” is how he grew up. I’ve known him as her since 2003, when he — then she — was six years old and I met, and later married, her mom.
I was a father who took notice. She was a tomboy, liking what I liked: football, basketball, comic books, action movies. (There were a few princess costumes in those years as well).
She came out as a lesbian in high school, then again years later as transgender. (Are there different closets? One outer and one inner? Or did she go back in to pick up more minority, like sliding a cake into the oven a little longer?)
She — now he — has not begun to transition physically, and it is beguiling to keep thinking of him as female, like a dad who looks at his adult child and sees the little girl with pigtails. Or, in my case, pigskin.
It’s a cute conceit. Cute but wrong. That little girl is gone. In her place is Jace. Not his birth name, you understand: one he chose. His doctor, his therapist, his landlord, his employer, his credit card company — heck, the public library calls him that name.
Why do I have trouble doing the same?
Living with a trans person can feel like living with a Mogwai: so. many. rules.
Certain restaurants are off-limits (e.g., Chick-fil-A).
Certain celebrities must be backed away from (e.g., Doctor Who’s John Barrowman).
Language itself takes on a Wonderland quality (e.g., “gender” not “sex”; “gay” not “homosexual”; “gender confirmation” not “sex reassignment”; “sex reassignment” not “sex change”).
Pronoun usage may as well be three-dimensional chess.
And forget saying positive words about the Trump administration (e.g. . . . I can’t think of any, actually).
She — now he — has not begun to transition physically, and it is beguiling to keep thinking of him as female, like a dad who looks at his adult child and sees the little girl with pigtails.
And, of course, names.
A name is the most basic aspect of being human. We receive our names before anything else in this world. I gave my sister her name — Diana — before she was born. Being a fan of comic books, and on my way to building a branch of the Justice League in rural North Carolina as an eight-year-old, I thought we needed a Wonder Woman. Incredibly, my parents agreed.
Despite the genius of that name, strangers and acquaintances routinely botch it, calling her Di-ANN instead of Di-ann-UH. I am often called Andy. My child’s last name is Mc-FER-son, but nearly everyone pronounces it Mc-FEAR-son.
Names. They’re a pain in the ass.
Vis-à-vis trans people who are kicked out of restaurants, harassed in public restrooms, or shot by cops, my child leads a charmed life. He has a home and a family. He hasn’t faced overt prejudice. He was bullied in high school, but as he still identified as female in those days, the bullying wasn’t transition-related. I love his girlfriend like a daughter.
Yet he is vulnerable. If gender is about identity, and names are about identity, and a person is so identity-unsettled that they want to alter themselves physically, then it stands to reason that the wrong name, something most people would see as a nuisance, is for them a source of true anxiety. According to Healthline,
“When you refer to a person who is transgender by their non-affirmed name, it can feel invalidating. It can cause them to feel like you don’t respect their identity, you don’t support their transition, or that you don’t wish to put forth the effort to make this necessary change.”
The change, for me, should be easy. It’s only words, after all. I had a girl; now I have a boy. Her name was X; now it’s Y.
I don’t struggle with other name changes. I don’t slip up and call Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” Daniel Ortberg “Mallory,” or Russia “the Soviet Union.” Just flip the switch, right? Jace himself has implied this, as has his girlfriend, who in her occasional texts to me refers to the daughter I’ve always known — and the girl she met years ago — as “he” and “him.”
(If I’m tired, or have had a bad day, I swear it feels like she’s trolling me.)
Transitioning from one gender to another is a complete overhaul, a total transformation. “Old things are passed away,” in the words of the Apostle Paul; “behold, all things are become new.”
Plus it’s risky. According to a 2015 survey, 46 percent of transgender people had been verbally harassed. Thirty percent had been homeless, and another thirty percent reported workplace discrimination. Almost ten percent had been assaulted.
Jace seems unselfconscious about all this. He discusses transitioning casually, as though upgrading an iPhone.
For my generation, gender was immutable, except by surgery, which was a desperate act undertaken by someone disturbed (like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, about whom Lecter says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Billy had applied for sex reassignment . . . and been rejected”).
Millennials, on the other hand, see gender as this supple, whatever-y thing. We met one trans woman recently at a literary event, and when my son asked her which pronouns she uses, the woman said, “Oh, it depends. She/her, they/them. It varies.”
Transitioning from one gender to another is a complete overhaul, a total transformation. “Old things are passed away,” in the words of the Apostle Paul; “behold, all things are become new.”
I’m not ashamed to have a transgender child. Discussing it with people, however, feels awkward.
Suppose I’m on a date, and the woman asks me if I have kids. Do I say I have a son? A daughter? A son who used to be a daughter?
I could reply “I have a son” and leave it at that, but suppose the woman and I keep dating. She meets my son, who still looks like a daughter, and is surprised.
People my age don’t want dating surprises. They don’t want “drama,” which for twentysomethings means upheavals — fights with parents, workplace conflict, dubious baby daddies, can’t-take-a-hint exes. For my contemporaries, it’s anything that exposes the artifice of dating.
(At our age, we’re supposed to be celebrating china anniversaries, not hitting up randos on Tinder, and we’re a little prickly about it.)
Why don’t I explain things right away? When my date asks if I have kids, why don’t I follow the script I’ve been given: “I have a transgender son who is pre-transition”? The words don’t trip off the tongue, but they aren’t inscrutable.
A few reasons:
- I don’t like follow-up questions.
- I’m wary of blowing my line (Wonderland language, remember?).
- I may not get a second date. I know, I know: I shouldn’t care about this. Anyone who would dump me on the basis of my child’s transition isn’t someone I should want to date. Unfortunately, that stance is the luxury of a person with options. Someone wealthy, good-looking. Someone without three ex-wives hanging around like the weird sisters from Macbeth.
Then there’s the existential argument. Three ex-wives, a transgender child, and dating in my mid-40s are not how I imagined my life shaking out.
I am the son of a Baptist pastor. My parents have been married half a century. Growing up, I knew no one who smoked or drank, except alcoholics my father counseled. Adults didn’t curse around me. None of my friends had divorced parents. I thought all moms were stay-at-home moms. Sex, in my imagination (I certainly didn’t do it as a teenager), was a transcendental experience.
Life has opened my eyes. I was raised conservatively but not in an echo chamber. My parents taught me to think for myself. I’m not afraid of new ideas, which makes my hesitation to use my child’s new name and pronouns indefensible.
Thank God he accepts my effort, if not my results.
If gender is a part of identity, then the identity we think our children have, and thus part of our own identity, is lost. And any loss produces grief.
Speaking of dating, I did confide in one woman, Kathy. I told her the “daughter” I had mentioned before was actually not. I told her he has had no surgery but identifies as a man and wants to be treated as such. I told her I supported this, or thought I did, but I was having trouble saying those three little words: he, him, his. I spoke aloud his new name, “Jace,” which means “healing” in Greek, though that isn’t why he chose the name. (His reason was lamer: it’s a character from Magic: The Gathering.)
I expected Kathy to nod and say a nicer version of, “Sucks to be you.” Instead, she offered an explanation: grief. She thinks I avoid my child’s name and pronouns because I’m grieving for the end of my daughter.
“I don’t think that’s it,” I said. “I think I simply need to make it a priority.” This is a typical response from me. A just-do-it, mind-over-matter, nothing-wrong-a-kick-in-the-pants-won’t-fix response. Good parents set aside their own needs for the sake of their children. Happens all the time. This felt no different.
In my mind, what I said to Kathy was, Yeah, right. Like parental trans grief is a thing. Turns out, though, it is.
- From the Huffington Post: “I was driven by fear . . . I forged ahead into a new life and helped [my child] transition. I didn’t expect to feel such grief.”
- From Prevention: “We were simultaneously grieving the death of our daughter and birthing a son, and birthing a whole new language.”
- From Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of the highly praised She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders plus twelve other books, in the New York Times: “In spite of everything I know about being trans, I still had lots of my own dreams tangled up in my daughter’s — formerly son’s — life. I loved that child exactly as they had been. The idea that this person was now going to be different made me think, at first, that something precious to me was being taken away.”
Researchers Kelly Ellis and Karen Eriksen described six stages of the trans family experience: shock and denial; anger and loss; seeking support; feelings of change within themselves; acceptance; and pride. These are similar to the traditional stages of grief.
Perhaps Kathy was saying that my identity as a parent was not simply being a parent. It’s being a parent of a girl. A girl named Michaela, not Jace. If a name is important — and it must be, for someone to want to change theirs — then it is important to everyone, not least of all the parents who issued that name. Likewise, if gender is a part of identity — and it must be; otherwise, why adjust it? — then the identity we think our children have, and thus part of our own identity, is lost. And any loss produces grief.
I’ve read stories of kids transitioning at age four. Four! For those parents, transgender was a way of life from the beginning. Jace said nothing about it until he was out of high school, though I’m sure it was a war within him for a long time. He has decided to undergo one of life’s most all-in transformations.
And I didn’t see it coming. And I don’t know why he’s doing it. I know, but I don’t know know. It’s like childbirth. I understand the vocabulary and can discuss the mechanics, but I don’t have that visceral knowledge that mothers have. I haven’t walked a mile in their shoes (or lain an hour in their stirrups).
Perhaps what I’m grieving, then, is an intimacy deficit.
The thing about deficits? They can be overcome. I will ask Jace about his motives in transitioning. His hopes and dreams. His fears. He isn’t changing just his gender — he is changing his essence. I want to understand.
Once I do, I’m sure I will have advice. All fathers do. And though I don’t know — yet — why he wants to transition, I know the advice I will give.
Go get ’em, son.
