Just Another Story About a Regular Dad Who Loves His Transgender Girl

We saw the Sally Struthers commercials on television and sang along to “We are the world” with Michael Jackson and the rest, but had no real idea of the devastating effects of famine.

We knew Elton John and Boy George were gay, but had no idea that several of our classmates also were.

It’s shameful and embarrassing in retrospect. Nobody should need a friend to come out to them or to meet a mentally disabled child to realize that they shouldn’t be calling each other fag or retard. It was a different time, but that’s not an excuse, it’s a justification for mocking things that we didn’t see, that we didn’t understand.

Things are much better today. More open, more inclusive, more understanding. Kids today still insult each other, but they don’t do it by comparisons to other segments of society.

Even the most optimistic would agree, however, that there is still much work to be done. The number of people who still fear, still discriminate, still don’t understand, is depressingly large and increasingly becoming more vocal. People that will only change their views when face to face with those they don’t understand—they need to meet the subjects of their bigotry in order to recognize their ignorance.

I’d like to think that I’ve come a long way in the thirty years since I was that boy, but I’ll admit that there are some things that I still have a hard time comprehending.

I’m willing to accept an adult’s decision to live their life as a member of the opposite sex as they were born, but have a hard time understanding how a parent would allow their young child to make that choice.

So I asked one.

That one being a blue collar, everyday guy, owner of his own construction business, with a conservative family in a conservative town, raising his genetically born son as a girl since she was six years old.

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One of the things that stuck with me about his story is how quickly things became apparent to them. It’s not unusual for a two-year-old boy to enjoy girl’s clothing and dolls. My daughter likes Red Sox T-shirts and dinosaurs, but this father was able to sense that this was something different—a comfort level that went beyond playing dress up and a different stubbornness than that of a willful preschooler.

I also was surprised by the amount of guilt he felt about those early years.

The throwing away of anything girly, the fight over a haircut, the insistence that this was a phase his son would grow out of and a denial of what he knew to be true all along. Reactions that to me seem perfectly reasonable but that he described as “I thought I was protecting my kid from teasing and bullying, but I was bullying her.”

A first born son, a Junior that shared his name, that he feels bad about not  allowing out in public in girl’s clothes until she was six, that it wasn’t until age nine when he started referring to her as she.

It wasn’t an easy path, of course, although a move to a different school for unrelated reasons helped. A chance to start fresh as a girl with no preconceived perceptions. Some family members took longer to accept than others. The unfortunate reality that “it seems like the older you are, the harder it is to accept.”

Issues that seemed almost an afterthought, a part of the story mentioned in passing. I heard no sense of bitterness, no regret, no anger at those that would judge him or his daughter without ever knowing them, ever doing the one thing that almost without fail changes people’s perceptions.

Meeting her.

What I heard a lot of was pride.

Pride in her strength. The courage to put together a presentation for her new school. Speeches in front of large crowds, from colleges to hospitals. The friends she makes at camp and her love for riding her quad. All the people whose opinions and attitudes have changed once they met her.

In the end, he was just another dad talking about his little girl—his hopes, his fears, and his love.

Things that we can all understand.