#ModRafael | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

parentsplusblog-blog · 9 years ago

Text

Testimony

I don’t know if I can say the exact moment I knew I was gay. I don’t even know if I knew when I was very little. I only did what I liked to do, which was play with my sister, my girl cousins and my girlfriends and I liked to do the same things they did.

When I was a bit older and a teenager I started to realize that I actually liked boys, but it is one thing to admit it to yourself and quite another to tell other people about it. It was hard and for some time I didn’t even want to admit it to myself. I decided that it was time to come out when I met a boy who I was very much interested in, and I wanted to talk with him and get to know him better. This gave me courage and even got me a bit excited about telling the world about him. I also wanted to give this good news to my intimate friends who knew that deep down it would make me happy to take this step and come out to the world.

One of the most difficult things about coming out was the embarrassment I felt to tell my mother. I feel like a mother should be someone who knows you better than anyone and I should have been able to have that trust to tell her since she has always known me, but I felt an immense heartache. Later I came to the realization that everyone was going to understand and accept this but that each person was going to need time and space in order to come to this understanding. And, of course at the end of the day you need to follow your happiness, I want happiness for everyone but also for me. I am happy now that I can be who I am and now that the world can see me for my true self. If you can achieve this without harming anyone, as I have then it is okay and normal to be who you are. And it is completely normal to love, of course, but each of us need to find out who will be the object of our love.

#ModRafael

0 notes

parentsplusblog-blog · 9 years ago

Text

Mother of Transgender Girl -Testimony

I did think I was having a girl, from the moment I found out I was pregnant. Due to a difficult relationship with my mother, I had huge fears about having to negotiate a mother-daughter relationship. Before I knew or understood the complexity of gender for a child my husband and I felt a kind of crazy excitement about what the gender of our firstborn might be. A good friend and co-worker and I decided we would reveal the gender of my baby in a unique way, and we spent hours together one day (while we were supposed to be working) looking for quotes about boy children and girls. We decided that after my appointment to discover the gender, I would send out a text that would contain a gendered quote to all my family and friends. The boy quote (and the one I ended up sending out) was something about how a mother learns the secret world of men when she has a boy. The girl option was brooding and complicated, reflecting my previously mentioned fears.

Our Sam was so gentle and quiet from the start. We were new parents, and clueless of course. My friends would tell me that they could not believe how calm our baby was, especially compared to their boys. Sam would sit and look at books and puzzles while the other children ran circles around the room. When Sam was just a baby at about 18 months, a therapist friend bought a doll, stroller and high chair which Sam played with for hours. We didn’t think anything of it, except maybe that we were open minded, liberal parents. Little by little, Sam would ask for more girl type presents and I would spend hours online and in stores debating about buying a pink one or searching for the most gender neutral or even boy colored shopping cart, kitchen, doll, etc. It was exhausting.

For quite some time we just thought we had a feminine boy. And we were o.k. with that. We let our child play with anything, even though it meant we had to be a bit uncomfortable sometimes or think outside the box. Then everything changed during a trip to overseas to visit our family when I overheard my nephew telling other children that Sam is a girl. My first thought was that my nephew was making fun of his cousin, but Sam later told me that she had confided in him that she felt like a girl.

I think we sometimes think of that trip as being an important event in this journey, because after that things went pretty fast. A few weeks after the trip, Sam started expressing distress over her body. She asked, “Why do I have a penis?” and sometimes she would hide and when I found her she would be pushing her penis down and would say “Mama when can I have a vagina?” Sam always played with cars and trucks, so we thought this was normal for a boy to do. It wasn’t until we had her brother that I started to think there were quite a lot of differences in how they both played with cars. For example, Sam would have all of her cars in a circle and they would talk to each other, and she would sometimes put them to bed or take them to the table to feed them. Her brother, on the other hand, would endlessly crash them together and make car noises all day long. Sam would pretend to breastfeed her dolls and would pretend to be pregnant and give birth to her stuffed animals. She would say, “When I grow up I’m going to be a mama and have a baby in my belly”.

Sam was showing more and more signs of unhappiness, and at the same time showing more interest in girl things like painting her nails and Barbies. One day we were sitting in the living room and Sam went right into the kitchen and got a knife. I stopped her on her way to the bathroom and asked her what she was doing. Very seriously she told me that she did not need her penis anymore and was going to cut it off. She was 4 years old. My husband and I panicked. I immediately made an appointment with our doctor, an amazing pediatrician who has a lot of experience. To my surprise, the doctor did not seem surprised. She pulled Sam aside and told her that her family loves her and supports her, and that she can be herself but that she cannot hurt herself because it could lead to her going to the hospital or even dying. Then the doctor turned to me and said, “I have some referrals for you.” Incredulously, I asked her: “Does this kind of thing really happen?” She said, “More than you think”.

After that, there were more requests from Sam. Her first dress, growing her hair out, female pronouns. At first we only used them at home, and we only wore dresses at home but it came to a point that this was not enough. After Sam had almost completely transitioned, she still wanted to perform in her dance recital even though she would have to do it as a boy and she just stood there almost the whole song. She was disappointed with her costume which was not nearly as nice as the girl’s costumes.

One of the things that still surprises me is the incredible turn around in our kid after we let her be herself, she is happy and healthy and it’s clear we’ve done the right thing. We went from having a kid who seemed depressed and would hide from play dates when they came over to having a happy little girl who is just normal. Well, normal in a very special way that is. We love her so much it is crazy, before you are a parent you can never understand what kind of love that is. Accepting her has never been hard, what’s hard for a Mom (from my perspective) is the fear of how people might treat her, how it might be harder to protect her, and how she might face discrimination just for being who she is. I won’t stop reading and advocating and asking questions and forming support groups and getting experts involved. I want Sam to be proud of herself, and we have some challenges ahead. But I think she will be ok. The newest studies show that trans kids with supportive families do just fine. We are a strong family with a lot of love, which it seems is the best we can offer.

#ModRafael

1 note · View note