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25 thoughts on What about the children?

  1. I read that yesterday–loved it!

    I think my favorite may have been the “big revelation” of the son….Maddy and Mom, I decided want to be……

    A pacifist. Who doesn’t play tuba.

  4. I loved this article, but it infuriated me that it was in the Fashion and Style section. WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH FASHION?

  6. Didn’t you know, foxglovefinn? Ladies love fashion and style. It’s in the very fiber of our being. Since this article was about a lady, clearly it belongs in style.

  7. I saw her last week on an update show on Oprah. I think it is wonderful that she is o public with her experience. I hope that people read this and know without a shadow of a doubt that all that really matters is the love we share with the people we care about.

  8. I love that the kid’s friends were supportive of him and his family. It could so easily go the other way, with bullying and ostracism.

  9. Ummmmm–guys? It’s in Fashion and Style because it’s a Modern Love column. They’re always in that section. Nothing to do with this one in particular. There are Modern Love columns from all gender perspectives…

  10. That’s a great article. And I did cry.

    However, it goes with the theme of the day. I have the day off work and while catching up on some stuff around the house, I was also catching up on my backlog of This American Life podcasts and I listened to the Valentine’s day one from this year. I bawled at the story of the parents raising the transgender girls on that one–and I wanted to reach through the ipod and smack the one dad upside the head for being an asshole to his child. The whole story was just so sad and sweet, all at the same time.

  13. wow. i did cry.

    i like to think that i would have been cool enough as a child to accept one of my (way too many) parents transitioning. i don’t *know* that i would have been, but i hope so.

  14. I think this quote from her son’s school essay was perfect:

    I know people from lots of different kinds of families. Some families are divorced, so some of my friends only live with one parent at a time. Other families have someone who is mentally challenged in their family. But no matter how different they are, they are all people. My goal is that some day everybody will be treated with love.

    Mine too. 🙂

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  17. My boy is 7.

    My transition was unusual, a matter of natural causes rather than medical intervention, but it’s clear I should have transitioned long ago. Too scared to.

    My son was 3 at the time.

    I’m Zeddie to him now. Daddy when he’s scared or upset. And my partner and I pretend to the just another lesbian couple to the outside world. It’s safer for him.

    He’s intersexed too, and had genital reconstruction before age 2. We opted for minimum risk, so although everything works and he’s not in pain any more, the cosmesis is imperfect. We’ll leave any decision on further surgery up to him.

    The story in the NYT is typical of the successes when the children are under 10 during transition. Older than that… it’s not so good.

  18. I can’t quite figure out why I find this article depressing. Maybe my standards or expectations are just too high. I mean, Boylan is a decent writer and good at conveying her particular experience of being trans. Of course the kids are adorable, of course it’s great that they’re defying expectations of broken marriages and inability to deal and psychologically scarred children. I guess I find those expectations really aggravating to begin with, which is not surprising, but it also makes it hard to feel in awe, touched, or grateful for when wow, it turns out that marriages don’t have to break up due to one person being trans, and that kids actually turn out OK. I mean, that should be perfectly clear and the normal state of affairs. Even if “normal and healthy” is, in fact, always a miracle that we should be grateful for. But that’s true across everyone, not just trans people.

    I am probably just spoiled from being around people who would consider it more of a tragic departure from what’s hoped and expected to break up with someone due to being trans or transitioning — or even transitioning multiple times. Or from being around plenty of trans families where there’s not much fuss around what to call parents and where coming up with a “half-male / half-female” name like Maddy might seem a little odd or disrespectful.

    But then, I am from a generation where (at least in our mid 20s – 30s) most trans folks I know are getting involved and having kids AFTER transitioning, not before or during. So there is none of the stuff that Boylan had to deal with where her kids grew up knowing her as their father; it’s much more complicated. But in my experience, Zoe is right — kids under a certain age are really flexible mentally about this stuff, and care way less than adults. The real miracle is that kids in general can handle all sorts of things and take them in stride because they haven’t gotten all baked and hardened like us adults.

    So, I don’t know. It is a sweet story. At the same time I see you guys being like “Awwww, sniff!” and on other blogs as well, and I am a little bit like “Uh… really?” The world certainly is a shitty place for trans families right now, and we should celebrate the exceptions. But also, those exceptions are becoming less and less rare! There are so many trans families where this stuff is totally commonplace and unremarkable!

    And hopefully before long it will seem a little strange to be touched by this — just like it would already seem strange to be deeply moved or relieved that a child raised by two women or two men is actually normal, or didn’t “turn out gay,” because I think most people who know same-sex parents are no longer under the impression that there’s anything real to worry about in “oh no what will a boy turn out like if he’s raised by two lesbians.” It seems ridiculous, right? I don’t think Boylan is ridiculous at all for worrying if her kid will be screwed up for having a trans parent, the emotions are totally understandable, but in another generation I hope nobody has to feel that way.

  19. I’m with you Holly.

    I was glad to see an essay about and by a trans parent in the NY Times. I am so over all of the articles *about* trans and gay people and what “they” want/do/think etc. I am always glad to hear from “non-traditional” families speaking for themselves (although that term squicks me out – we all come from “non-traditional” families if you look at say, the early 20th century, and traditional marriage is not so awesome anyway). But I found the bit about “Maddy” depressing. Not because children shouldn’t, you know, express their creativity. But because I would feel so sad to hear my (future) children addressing their father as anything other than their father, medical history be damned. But, of course, we’re in that group of people who will be having children after transition, not before. Unless, I suppose, my own feelings on the matter were to change, but even then I wouldn’t want to let the closest people in my life give me a title that was anything less than affirming of who I am. I hope that “Maddy” is comfortable for Boylan and her wife, and I don’t mean to say I doubt that she’s being sincere. But many folks would be uncomfortable with that sort of compromise, and I can’t help reading it in that light and feeling sad.

  20. I think that this story is sweet. I read the Modern Love column every week, and this is one of my favorites. It’s just a family coping in its own way with transgender– and even though there are a lot of exceptions, as Holly says, a lot of times they aren’t reported, in favor of sensationalistic pregnant-man stuff. It’s nice to see the good side getting shown for once.

    Perhaps we should send a copy to every transphobic person in the entire world? “See, here is a family with a transwoman in it, and it is perfectly functional and loving and really normal—complete with small children saying adorable things. Therefore, you cannot hate transgender people anymore, because they are just like you and not the Other at all.”

    Because I think that’s the best thing this story might do. Not just that it’s a great story for trans and allies to sniff at and coo over—which it is—but that it’s something for the people who haven’t thought about trans issues at all, whose idea of transwomen is drag queens and John Travolta in a fat suit. It gives them a new mental image—that a transwoman is not something scary and Other, but someone they can relate to. Someone who struggled with having to be someone that she’s not. Someone who hopes for a better world where all families, no matter how unusual, are accepted and loved. Someone who loves her wife and her children, including the non-tuba-playing pacifist ones.

    A Maddy.

  21. Yeah I don’t want to overlook the fact that the NY Times is actually publishing a story BY a trans person about trans experiences, which is significant. However, it’s also Jenny Boylan, who probably has the most prominent voice of any individual trans person talking about trans issues at the moment, certainly in writing. (Maybe Calpernia Addams and… Buck Angel?… on screen.) I don’t think that’s just because she’s a good writer, although she is. It’s partly because she was already established as an author and an English professor at a tony east cost liberal arts college well before she transitioned, she’s a white middle-class professional academic and now she’s added “expert on trans issues” to her resume… not without merit but sometimes a little more than makes sense. She fits comfortably into some mainstream narratives about trans lives, as does this article. Which is not her fault by any means, of course; it’s her life. At the same time, insert usual complaint here about which voices are heard most frequently and which are just objectified or stared at curiously through a camera lens, etc.

  22. I think its the whole “even trans people can live normal upper middle class lives too!!!” aspect to the story that pisses me off. Her story has so much privilege in it, I don’t even know where to start. Her class privilege, alas, isn’t something that a lot of trans people have in common with her.

  23. You know, I would rather be regarded as a “Maddy” than a totally scary other, but can we maybe stop acting like being called “Maddy” is such a great thing? I mean, it’s not like I want to take that away from their family, the point of understanding they reached about what had happened in their lives and the kid’s way of processing it and all that individualized beauty of a particular family’s journey. But so many blogosphere comments are cooing over the word “Maddy” now — and honestly, if anyone ever called me anything like that or suggested that as a term in my family, I would curl up into a ball of disgust. If my girlfriend and I were to ever have kids, I suspect they would just call one of us “Mom” and the other “Mommy” or by our names and yelling “Mom” for whichever one of us was nearby. It’s not that weird.

    I guess I just have this paranoid fear that some well-meaning blog reader is going to say “hey, your kid can call you Maddy like that sweet story in the New York Times” to some trans person, who is going to be totally horrified and upset by the weird “parent of neither this gender nor that / both-genders” implication, which is really not consonant with the feelings and identity of a lot of trans people. But most of you reading this are probably savvy enough, i HOPE, to get that what’s right for one family is not for all.

  25. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!!

    I’ve had a couple of drinks tonight so I can still look macho if I say that’s the reason I cried when I read that piece, right?

    That was beautiful. What an amazing son Jenny is bringing up. He might end up becoming a hero for us all, if he hasn’t already.

    What a beautiful story. In case I forgot to mention it, thank you for posting this story.

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