Every parent is also a child

I decided to write this blog to share my experience as a trans or non-binary parent.

But every parent is themselves a child. This last month I have been very aware of the experiences of my own parents. Informed in their eighties of their child’s transition, they were hugely surprised, confronted, and a little upset. While parenting is a never-ending journey, it’s tough to have such a major change in direction sprung upon you when your kid is fifty years old.

My parents handled it with enormous grace and kindness. Theirs is a generation for whom transgender identity was an almost unknown concept. It is a generation for whom sex or gender-based minority status was often severely medicalised, and sometimes criminalised. While the world has changed in recent decades, the legacies of both past attitudes and residual societal prejudices instilled in my parents a great sense of fear for my welfare.

For several years after I first told them, they would keep asking if I was safe, had I experienced discrimination or abuse, did I still have a job, and would I ever be able to get another one. Each time, I was able to honestly report that I have never, and still have not, been subject to personal transphobic insults or assault.

At the same time, their fears were being heightened by the behaviour not of people in the streets, nor of friends or family or acquaintances or employers, but of vicious and small-minded political so-called leaders, from Australia’s then Prime Minister Morrison down. I was assuring my family I was fine, but it was hard for them to have confidence, as they read the news in 2021 and early 2022.

I hope that, someday, the Scott Morrisons and Katherine Deves of this world will hang their heads and apologise, not merely because they held some misguided and often factually erroneous views, but because of the harm they have done to parents and children, filling them with worry and a sense of rejection.

In complete contrast, my mother not only accepted changes in me, she came on the journey and took pleasure and comfort in the closeness of mother and daughter. I was the same person yet found myself transformed, often in small ways. How I moved in their apartment; how I helped her with her clothes; how I perceived the flow of conversation. My mother welcomed and fostered those changes. I felt more emotionally bonded to her than before, even though we were always close. We went clothes shopping together, and our favourite haunts were charity stores. We had always enjoyed the hunt for hidden treasures in second-hand stores. But through clothing it became a more personal experience, more intimate, than when we had looked for books, knick-knacks, or scarves.

In her final months, my mother had sat with me and said how glad she was to live some of her life with a daughter she would not otherwise have had. It was such a beautiful experience.

My mother’s last weeks were spent at hospital, and the last fortnight of that was in palliative care. I was there most days, and as it became clear that she would not be leaving hospital, I camped in her room. Sleeping on a fold-out bed, I listened to her sometimes-troubled breathing, and helped the staff each morning at 4am, when they rearranged her in the bed, working to avoid pressure sores. There I was, a person obviously born assigned male, tiptoeing in and out of the ward every day, six feet tall with my hair up, eating my meals in the hospital cafeteria in skirt and stockings. The staff without exception treated me as what I was: a devoted child and a human being.

My mum passed away on 22 August 2022. My father and I were there, each holding a hand. I looked at our fingers, together. I realised we were both wearing the silver rings that I had made at a local silversmith’s workshop. She wore the band I made for her every day until she died. What love she had for her daughter. I miss her.