Today’s lesson
I go to my son’s high school and run a guest session for the English class on writing biography. The fabulous teacher meets me and asks how I want to be introduced. “Do you want to be Ms Holland, or just Hannah?”
I ask about the naming conventions for teachers at the school – do they all go by last names? She says they almost all do. So I say, “How about Dr Holland?”
The class is an amazing group of 12 year-olds who clearly enjoy learning, and we all seem to have a fun time.
That night, I am sitting on the bed next to my son. He says, “I think you should perhaps have mentioned the transgender thing.”
“Do you think people needed it?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. But without explaining, maybe they are just sitting there thinking ‘what the?!’”
This makes me laugh out loud. I ask if he could suggest what I should have said, but he sensibly deflects that back to me, in a way I admire: “They’re a bunch of twelve-year-olds with big brains. You can use whatever elaborate words you want, they’ll get it. It’s up to you what you want to say.”
I think about this later. That on the one hand, it is up to me to choose what to say but on the other hand, my son’s right, people often want explanations, or notification, or…something. Permission is the word I settle on – permission to see the transperson and not to have to think about whether it is a secret, not to have to worry about whether or not they want to pass. The person interacting with me does not want the emotional anxieties of wondering about how I inhabit the world and whether it accords with their perception of me. And I want to give them that permission. I feel uncomfortable when I imagine someone sitting with their thoughts about me, rather than just listening to whatever I have to say. I wish I had said something.
Once he raised this, I started to wonder if I had misjudged the dynamic in the room. Was I wrong thinking it was a success? Were they were less engaged than usual? He doesn’t think so. I was aware of a few who were looking at me very intently. But by the end everyone was involved and participating.
I contemplate following up with the teacher to see if any of them checked in with her or had a question. But even as this crosses my mind, my son says he’s pretty sure there’s at least one trans kid among the students he’s seen in his first weeks at this new school. It’s normal for this generation.
Suddenly the conversation shifts as a whole different question gets asked. “So, if you could go back to when you were younger, do you wish you could have realised and changed then, so you could have had hormones and grown more like a girl?”
I prevaricate. He sensibly adds an additional condition: “but you know, if everything else was the same, like, you still had me.”
I was glad he recognised the important thing!
I say that I’m not sure. I wish I had realised my identity when I was younger, so I could have experienced living and presenting as a younger woman, not just as a woman in her fifties.
Inwardly, though, I feel quite unsure about the impact having transitioned younger might have had on the intimate relationships in my life. Maybe now has been the best time. I wonder whether my son would think so? He may have his own view of when might have been the ‘right’ moment.
Though I think about it often, I don’t ask him that question because, in the end, I know that asking could place a burden on him. It is not his responsibility to have to think about my identity or emotional wellbeing. It is mine. I had to make a decision about what I could bear and still be myself. With my choice came a responsibility to still be the best parent I could be, whatever name I chose to go by, and whatever clothes I put on the morning, and whatever I felt like on the inside.
Yes, I wish I had spoken directly, briefly, about my identity at the start of that class. But, most of all, I’m deeply happy I went in and taught those children skills for narrating the life stories of themselves and others.
