How I’m uplifting and affirming my trans child amid the hate

This is universal, is it not? We’d die for our children. Any day, every day, any way — if only to protect them, save them and love them in the most desperate and steadfast of manners.

A mother’s love for her child is bipartisan, surely. Why, then, is there such a chasm between us in matters of gender identity?

As the parent of a trans nonbinary child, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion I know the answer — though it’s no more heartening than it is sustainable. It revolves around the cis-heteronormative model, which exists at the intersection of colonialism, misogyny and white supremacy.

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This dominant narrative is built upon binary thinking, and it’s made of the same stuff that asks us to contemplate right versus wrong, good versus evil, familiar versus foreign. This model teaches us that cisgender identity and heterosexuality are the default, and any deviation from this is an unnatural aberration.

And it’s within that rigid framework that transphobia is allowed to exist and thrive, as though in a petri dish in a scientific laboratory. It’s man-made, carefully controlled and intentionally disseminated.

M, my 9-year-old firstborn, is a happy, healthy, well-adjusted kid who can do an expert cartwheel and who’ll happily play Roblox until their eyeballs have turned into tiny TVs. Believe me when I tell you that there is nothing dangerous or unnatural about my child. If not for their purple hair and side-shave, you’d never be able to pick them out of a lineup.

M was 6 when they told my husband and me with great distress that they don’t identify as the binary person we’d always assumed them to be. And even though love has always existed among us, we made a point thereon to instill an intentional framework of unwavering support, validation and acceptance inside our home.

M knows that not only do we love them for the trans person that they are, but that by now, their gender nonconformity is unremarkable. Simply put, it’s so commonplace that it’s boring.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. There are conversations to be had, and they are consistently taking place. In the years that have passed since M first came out, we have spent countless hours exploring the spectrum of gender, deconstructing that binary mind-set and working through the social construct of gender itself.

We have talked to M, reminded them that we are a safe space with whom they can share or ask anything and, as a family, bundled up in our winter gear and trudged over to our state Capitol in Minnesota to protest the harmful anti-LGBTQ bills that our legislators propose at will. M is supported at home, at school and in therapy, and it is my privilege to be able to say such a thing.

I am doing everything in my power to protect my child from harm, and I know I’m doing it well. The proof is in seeing exactly how confident and self-assured M is. There’s so much peace in that.

And yet you must know exactly how bone-tired and terrified I am.

Two dads took their kids on a trip. A stranger called them ‘pedophiles.’

Over the past three months or so, we’ve seen a massive uptick in anti-trans rhetoric, as increasing numbers of Republican state legislators work with great aplomb to, in effect, erase the transgender community. In states across the country, parents of trans minors are being threatened with investigations, gender-affirming health-care providers are suspending their work, and both cisgender parents and trans people alike are being labeled as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” In no uncertain terms, what we are seeing take place is an active attempt at trans genocide.

As the lines between church and state become increasingly blurred, we’re seeing a rise in fervor from a decrepit political party that believes that White patriarchal control is necessary to survival. It is as terrifying as it is absurd. I’ve been called a child abuser countless times for loving and accepting my trans child. And while I’ll never understand how love can be so sickeningly construed as abuse, I am reminded of the very foundation of this anti-trans movement: It’s red herrings like this that serve to show the spaghetti-noodle legs upon which transphobia stands.

As anti-trans legislators scream about the shielding and protection of our children, I have yet to understand: Shield and protect them from what? Could it be, perhaps, that this isn’t about some skewed concept of protection at all? Consider instead that this is just the routine mental gymnastics of a party that’s fixated on conflating protection with control in a desperate attempt to keep the existing power structure intact.

As a mother, the instinctive drive to protect my children is knit into my DNA. Like so many others, I walk that delicate line between wanting to scoop my kids up under my wing and hunker down in a cave until the worst has passed and wanting simultaneously to give them the world — to build them up into the self-assured, confident and ready people we hope they’ll become. I suspect there’s nothing anomalous about this.

So imagine the anguish I feel as I watch this anti-trans movement take shape. The efforts to harm the transgender community are relentless, dangerous and exhausting; I’ve wept over them in fear and rage more times than I can count.

But beyond the exhaustion exists determination, and one thing is clear: This is about protecting the most vulnerable in our midst — so if the pro-life party won’t fight for the very people who are begging to live, then I’ll just do it myself.