I get asked ‘why’

It is about six months since I started wearing women’s clothes in public. About a year and a half since my wife and I separated.

Winter is folding in around us. It is dark outside, and the apartment block murmurs with the sounds of a community settling into its evening. I come in to my son’s room to lie down on the bed for a while, which is part of the night-time routine these days. His hair is a mass of dark brown that completely obscures his face; on weekends his ponytail flies when he’s playing soccer. Through hair-mask and pillow, in the half-dark we have the longest conversation yet about my gender identity. Which is to say, it lasts a good couple of minutes. He favours short conversations about big things, then there will be nothing for weeks. But it’s all going in. Also, he is scarily smart. He will deduce more from a few sentences and some body language than anyone else will.

“Why are you transgender? Did you always know or was it after I was born?”

I am troubled by the implication of the framing, and quickly seek to correct any sense of causality.

“Oh, it wasn’t to do with when you were born.”

He, immediately grasping that I was concerned he might have thought he ‘caused’ it, corrects me. “No, I didn’t mean after I was born, just was it in the time period since I was born?”

I’m listening intently to the inflexion in his voice and watching body language for signs. I tentatively conclude that he really had just meant it as a reference to a range of years. But I remain wary, just the same.

He circles round again to the question of why. Is it straight curiosity? My child likes watching all sorts of documentaries, including ones with gruesome medical procedures where I have to look away – like lots of kids, he is deeply inquisitive. But I do still wonder whether there, beneath his interest, is perhaps a slight sense of “why us?” Why did this occur in our family?

The hardest things to explain to my child are the ones I don’t fully understand. Which is okay when it’s about something external. If he asks me the capital city of Albania, I can tell him I don’t know, but Google will. When he asked how an electric motor works, it wasn’t difficult to answer that I was the wrong person to ask. But it’s different when the question is about me. Aren’t I supposed to at least know the answers to questions about myself?

I do my best to talk about the when. About not really knowing until recently, yet looking back and seeing all these signs. I am aware that none of this really responds to his question, “why?” It is a question I will get asked again by others.

Later, as I wash up dishes, I wonder if, for him, exploring the ‘why’ is tied up in the question of why mum and dad separated.

In my own mind, I had insisted that these events were unconnected. I remember saying it to a counsellor. But as I listen through the open door to his breathing steady into sleep, I begin to let go of that idea. It seems unlikely that these things were not linked.

I don’t like not being able to answer my son’s questions. And if I had any advice for those coming after me, it would be to understand yourself as much as you can, to best respond to what your children want to know.

I’m happy in an important way, though. Because for me there’s one thing more important than having an answer: it’s knowing that he feels he can ask.