To Love My Trans Child Is to Be Afraid

I followed my daughter Asher around the folk-art fair, trying not to look like that’s what I was doing. People moved everywhere with the weary, satisfied languor that settles into a body after days of heat, sand, and seawater. Asher appeared at ease as she meandered from booth to booth in her sundress, but I was hyperalert, tense and jittery. I scanned the crowd, noticed every side eye, every second glance. I maintained an external calm, but I watched keenly, ran through scenarios in my head as men approached who looked like potential threats.

Whenever Asher glanced my way, like a bad detective I quickly pretended to be examining a painted wooden sign or a watercolor seascape. She stopped into a booth where a woman who looked to be about her age was selling homemade jewelry. The young woman was wearing a prairie dress that I thought might fit what I’d heard described on NPR as cottage core. Her booth seemed a safe space.

Just in case, I walked a little farther down the path and stepped to the side where I could still see her under the canopy. She and the other woman chatted. She hooked her long hair behind her ear with her fingers and reached out to examine a pair of earrings.

My family and I were spending our last morning at the North Carolina beach strolling through a folk-art fair. It was a beautiful area beside a bay with its own small piers. We had converged here a week earlier—brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins—for vacation.

Earlier in the week, my fear had spiked when we caught a ferry across the bay to a little village of shops and restaurants, and I lost track of her. Her older brother, Evan, told me she’d gone to find a restroom. I paced in the direction of the public restrooms, again trying to appear at ease but scanning the shoppers on the street, listening for voices raised in anger, feeling anger myself that this is what Asher had to live with every day, and anger at myself for being unable to keep her safe.

What is beyond debate: the preponderance of peer-reviewed research—according to the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a number of other medical organizations—indicates that gender affirming care for youth is medically necessary.

Just as the church put Galileo under house arrest for pointing out the Earth was not the center of the solar system, these evangelicals reject the clear findings of medical science because it contradicts their particular reading of ancient religious texts. Having rejected the best medical science, they attack vulnerable youth and their parents with a phalanx of anti-LGBTQ bills sweeping across the nation, bills like the “Youth Health Protection Act,” and the “Children Deserve Help Not Harm Act”—names that belie the bills’ measurable negative affect on these kids’ mental and emotional health.

One clever red herring they employ is to combine their attack on gender affirming care with sports bans. These are two separate issues and should be dealt with as such. There are numerous ways people are categorized for sporting competition. With young children it is simply age. With puberty, biological sex is added. Is that fair? Think of middle school boys competing against one another, some of whom have hit puberty and transformed physically into strong young men, while others the same age are pummeled in their little-boy bodies. It seems to me that with a little imagination, we could find a way to recategorize sports of all kinds in ways that are as fair as possible for everyone involved. That conversation should have nothing to do with the rights of trans youth and their parents to access the proper care.

We live in a mid-sized city in the South, one with an extremely high percentage of conservative white evangelicals. Target and Kroger parking lots proliferate with big-nosed bully trucks bearing snake license plates, assault-rifle stickers, and sometimes even full-sized flags flapping in back, indicating the driver’s approval of violence against humans that don’t fit into their John Wayne world. The atmosphere here feels ever more uncomfortable, and potentially dangerous, for Asher to come and visit—I don’t know, but I assume it feels that way to LGBTQ+ people in general.

As I drove her to the airport the day after our art-fair walk, she told of a man who had stared daggers at her while we were dining in the shopping village that week. He had made her nervous and frightened through the entire meal, but she’d kept her cool and I hadn’t even noticed. As I sat angry at myself for missing it entirely, she told me she endures everything from small discourtesies to degrading and demeaning comments, to situations that make her grasp her pepper spray, just trying to move through the world. This is her life.

My love for Asher manifests as a longing to stand between her and the bullies, to chase them away; however, for all but vacations and holidays, there are seven-hundred miles between us. All she wants is what all of us want: to love and be loved, to do meaningful work, to be herself, to live and thrive. To simply walk down the damn street without fear. I am her father and I have a primal, visceral drive to keep her safe—and I can’t keep her safe. What’s more, the assault on her is being funded and fueled by conservative evangelicals, the people among whom I was raised, so my fear is accompanied by a simmering rage. I imagine I am describing a feeling that parents in marginalized communities know all their lives. I’m not saying our situation, mine and Asher’s, is like theirs in all ways, but right now in this one way, they are very much the same: to love my child is to be afraid.

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: iStock