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Every time Tina Healy comes out to her mom, it’s great

Caperton

Tina Healy, a disability support worker and an advocate for Gender Diversity Australia, came out as transgender three and a half years ago. But she comes out to her mother every few weeks — her mother has Alzheimer’s, and her dementia started developing two years ago, around the time Healy first came out to her. Healy visits her mother every few weeks, and every time she does, she comes out again, and every time she does, she gets the “same, beautiful” response.

“When I told her I was a woman, she just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, what do you know? I’ve got a beautiful new daughter!” Healy said. “I started to cry, and she pulled me to her shoulder and said ‘Cry it out, dear. Cry it out.’ My partner at the time cried as well.”

Healy added that after crying, her mother, who used to be a “beautiful seamstress,” then said, ‘Well, now you’re going to need some new clothes! What do you need?”

8 thoughts on Every time Tina Healy comes out to her mom, it’s great

  1. To me, the story is creepy. I mean, good for the daughter, yippee, but think of that poor old Mum. It’s not her fault that her memory’s gone, and one would think a grown child would be more sensitive to the mother’s illness. The old lady is still human, in spite of the dementia. She doesn’t deserve to be treated like a senseless robot.

    There was this Spanish movie about a fellow who found a key chain shaped like a woman’s head. The key chain repeated “I love you, I love you” in a mechanical voice whenever he wanted it to. The guy grew so attached to the key chain that no actual woman could compete because women kept trying to say and do more than just mechanically repeat, “I love you.”

    It seems like the daughter in the story wants a key chain like that and not a human mother.

    1. Really? Come on. This daughter is going through the pain of slowly losing her mother–and Alzheimer’s disease is AWFUL and extremely painful for families, even in the best of situations. Finding some beauty in her mother’s reaction is a coping mechanism, and one that is extremely shitty of you to begrudge anyone. Do you seriously think this woman is happy that she can’t move forward with her relationship with her mother?! It’s not like this woman has any type of choice and is keeping her poor old mother in a state of confusion for her benefit, so it’s extremely callous and insulting of you to say she “wants” this. I can’t even fathom where you’re getting this “treated like a senseless robot”: her daughter is trying to maintain a relationship with someone who can’t form new memories since well before a major life change. She’s doing what she has to do, and she her realistic choices at this point are 1) repeatedly come out to her mother, 2) dress in a gender-dystonic way around her mother and deny her true self, or 3) not visit her mother. Option #1 wins out of those three by a country mile.

      Also, it’s entirely reasonable for someone to experience the stress of coming out, especially with someone who cannot remember recent changes in social norms. Someone’s inherent temperament and beliefs come through when they are disinhibited by neuronal degeneration, so for this woman it is naturally going to be extremely valuable that her mother is an inherent and loving person, even without the veneer of politeness and remembering social conventions we put on this sort of thing.

      1. Agreed, except these degenerative diseases can alter ones personality entirely, it doesn’t mean that’s a persons inherent traits coming through. Heart surgery can change people too. It’s weird.

      2. Pheenobarb, I guess I shouldn’t have been quite so categorical, and yes of course people can have major behavioral changes (it depends on the disorder in question and also just the luck of how it affects that particular person). But, there are plenty of people whose natural temperaments become unmasked or more extreme as illnesses progress, which was what I was trying to get at here.

    4. Mom and daughter are enjoying each other as best they can. I think it is a beautiful exchange for both of them…it only makes me smile.

    5. I agree with the commentators who say you’re off-base here, but I also think I understand where you’re coming from. Alzheimers is truly horrific, and I think maybe what you’re having a reaction to is reading a ‘sweet’ story juxtaposed against that illness (while mostly glossing over that inherent horror). I don’t think anyone is doing anything wrong here — not the daughter, not the reporter, not Feministe for reposting the story — but I had a similar moment of emotional whiplash.

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