My daughter came out as transgender and I can’t accept it

Dear Jane,

I am the proud mother of four kids. Three boys, one girl.

I love all my children equally, but after having two boys I was overjoyed to have a girl and have always loved the time we have been able to spend together as mom and daughter.

But last week my daughter – who is 17 – told me and my husband that she is transgender. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I didn’t know what to say. How to respond. I just sat there in silence as she told us that she always felt unwell with herself. That she never really felt natural or at ease. And that after many years of doubt she is now certain that she was born with the wrong sex and body.

I just don’t know what to do. She’s always been a bit of a tomboy I guess, but she always liked doing girly things with me, like shopping and manicures and real housewives. I suppose guys can do those things too, but I just never could have imagined that while we spent all this time together, she secretly thought she was destined to be a boy?

I know that, as a supportive parent, my first instinct should be to help her and guide her through this. But honestly I just don’t know if I can ever understand the idea of ​​my daughter wanting to be my son? She started talking about hormone therapies and surgeries and name changes, and I stopped.

It’s been a few days since she broke the news and I couldn’t stop crying. I am so confused about how to handle this. And I am too embarrassed to tell my friends or family because I have no idea what they will think. Then I feel like a terrible mother for not supporting her in the way she needs.

I don’t consider myself a closed off person, but I really don’t know how I can accept this and continue our relationship in the same way as always. Is that even a possibility? I feel like I’ve already lost my daughter forever.

Van, Lost in Transition

Dear Lost in Transition,

You sound like a mother who loves her children very much and wants the best for them. I have tremendous empathy for the pain you are in, and indeed for the pain your child must be in. Being a teenager can be ridiculously hard.

In the past, we often resolved our discomfort by expressing our nonconformity and deep feelings that we did not fit with our clothes and our hairstyles. We wore mohawks, dyed our hair, stuck safety pins through our ears, all while listening to “alternative” music. Today’s teens are even more anxious than we are, and their options are very different.

The first thing I want to say is that you need to put aside your judgments and feelings and unequivocally support your child. That doesn’t mean you should hide how hard this is for you; in fact, it’s much better to tell her that this is a lot for you to understand, and it may take a while. I would advise talking less and listening more.

I keep thinking of a woman I know whose daughter went through the same thing. Her daughter announced she was a boy and spent the next several years as a boy. Her parents were as devastated as you are now, but learned to live with the discomfort.

And they set clear boundaries. While encouraging their child to dress the way they wanted, to get off the internet and spend more time outside in nature, they also refused to pay for hormones or surgery. Several years later, their daughter has decided that she is not a man, but herself, woman, sometimes butch, without needing a label.

Your child is only 17, which many in science believe is too young to make life-changing changes to the body given what we now know about the teen brain. The prefrontal cortex of the brain — the part that responds to situations with good judgment and awareness of long-term consequences — doesn’t fully develop until we’re around 25.

Love your daughter, support her in dressing and living the way she wants, and keep the lines of communication open between you. Encourage her to get off the internet and into real life, whoever she wants.

Dear Jane,

My childhood was miserable, if I’m being honest with you. I grew up with two parents who were incredibly cruel to me and my siblings. They never used violence as punishment, but emotional abuse was rife in our household. Horrible comments about my weight, manipulative tactics to pit my brother against each other, and threats of beatings that left us terrified for our safety, even though the beatings never came.

I won’t go into more detail except to say that it took years – and a lot of therapy – to overcome the trauma caused by their abuse.

Three years ago I became the mother of my own child, a beautiful boy, and I always swore that I would never be the kind of parent that mine was. And that I would never expose my son to someone who showed the same cruel behavior my parents showed towards me and my brother. I can proudly say that I feel that I have succeeded.

But a few months ago my parents got back in touch – I broke up with them a decade ago and hadn’t spoken to them at all until they reached out. They insisted that they have changed, that they have put a lot of thought into how they raised me and my brother, and that they want to make amends for everything they did to us.

They also said they are desperate to meet their only grandchild, my son.

My immediate response was ‘no’, and to be honest I just ignored their first email, but they’ve since sent a few more, all of which were very kind to their honor, but all of which included pleas for a arrange a meeting between them and their grandson.

I honestly don’t know what to do. On the one hand, I feel selfish for preventing my child from having a relationship with his grandparents, but on the other hand, I can’t even entertain the idea of ​​letting my son come face to face with two people with such an capacity for malice.

My husband thinks we should at least meet and listen to them, but I’m terrified that seeing them again will bring back all the horrors of my past that I’ve tried so hard to overcome.

What do you think?

Van, Childhood Trauma

Dear Childhood Trauma,

Brava to you for getting a therapist and doing the work to make sure you were a completely different kind of parent. The hardest part of dealing with this kind of trauma, I believe, is the last part: learning to forgive.

I know a little about a troubled childhood and I applaud you for all you’ve done to keep yourself and your family healthy. And it’s important to recognize that no matter how emotionally abusive your parents were, they probably did their best with the knowledge they had. If anger was prevalent in your childhood home, then I suspect your parents were raised with anger themselves and – given the time frame – had no access to therapists who might have taught them to do things differently.

But until you accept that and truly forgive them, you are the one carrying the pain, a pain that still stands in the way of your own healing. The fact that you are terrified that seeing them will bring up old traumas tells me that forgiveness is where you need to put your focus.

And what my many years have taught me is that the worst parents can become the best grandparents. They sound like they already know what mistakes they’ve made, and are desperate to prove it to you.

There is no harm in listening to them, and more, introducing them to your son. It may be that watching them light up in adoration, as most new grandparents do, will be the most healing of all.