I sat bawling from 1000 miles away as my child’s Principal explained how they were going to handle my transgender son’s social transition at school.
Not because it was bad. On the contrary. I couldn’t hope for a better school, a better program, or a better support system. I cried because, as she explained they were going to read a book, Red by Michael Hall, the description fit my son so well in words I never knew I needed.
“It’s about a blue crayon that’s mistakenly labeled as red at the factory.”
A blue crayon, mistakenly labeled as red, or a vivacious, strong, imaginative boy mistakenly labeled as a girl at birth.
My son is transgender, but he has always been who he thought he was. We are the ones who gave him the wrong tag. The Principal’s next words made me cry harder. “We don’t want you to think you’re going through this alone. We’re all learning together.”
I’m not going through anything. I love my child. Period. End stop. But every parent wonders if they’re doing things the “right” way, the “best” way, and every parent agonizes at some point over whether they’ll take a wrong turn and end up scarring their kid for life. I have no doubts about my son’s social transition—he wants it and is ready for it. No doubts about him being transgender. But did I listen early enough? Did I understand quickly enough? Those doubts hit me all the time. Will his friends understand and support him? I hope they will and fear they won’t.
So “we’re all learning together” means the same thing as “we’ll all do the best we can together.” It’s comforting in a way I didn’t expect.
I think about all those crayons that were labeled correctly. They’ll go through life drawing beautiful pictures that conform to society’s standards, and that’s wonderful. But my little crayon that was labeled incorrectly, will he get chosen to draw the most unique pictures, or be left in the box?
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Only time will tell. But for now, for this moment, I know he has the best teachers and advocates he can have. Not every transgender child has that, so it’s a pretty monumental thing.
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S.M. Roffey is a writer, mother, former early educator, comic book lover, and volunteer cosplayer who lives in the Northeast with her genderqueer spouse and 3 LGBTQ kids. By day she is a virtual assistant to #RevPit’s Jeni Chappelle, and at night she writes adult fiction fantasy. She has studied Anthropology and Early Education, and her personal essays have been featured on The Good Men Project, Shethority, Huffington Post and BlogHer. She is currently writing a novel and blogging about books and writing at www.smroffey.com.
