Last year, I wrote the story of my son, Rachel, coming out as trans. At the time he came out, I knew nothing about the transgender community, but I expected Rachel’s journey to include pronouncements to the general public that he was trans; pink, blue and white stickers and pins in his room and on his backpack; and a general acknowledgment from his classmates and teachers that he was trans because, obviously, he would tell them.
I thought wrong.
Rachel has short brown hair, big brown eyes and a sprinkle of freckles, and he wears athletic shorts, T-shirts and blue and white high-tops. At 9 years old, he has yet to hit puberty, so his only tell is his name, which we have found we can deal with by not saying anything or explain away with “We’re Jewish. It was his grandmother’s name.”
However, this still doesn’t satisfy some people because what they see doesn’t match what they hear, and we get a lot of “Ray?”
“No. Rachel.”
Then there is usually a frown before we can move on in the conversation. It is uncomfortable and comical at the same time to see people trying to figure out what is happening — it’s almost a “does not compute” moment. “See boy, hear girl name.”
I’ve vetted every activity or camp for Rachel since 2021 — part of the mama bear instinct that emerged when I learned the hard way that not every person or situation was kind to trans kids. Every organization claims to be LGBTQIA+ friendly; sometimes that’s just window dressing. Three years in, my mama bear instincts were tired, and I signed him up for a day camp without talking to the administration. As I sent him off the first day, I hoped that everything would go well. I hoped no one would ask about his name. “Please, be kind,” I thought as I watched him walk toward the smiling teenager in a bright yellow shirt who checked him into camp.
Rachel came home that day with some unexpected news: He had a trans counselor in art who talked about how he was getting top surgery Friday. The counselor had said how excited he was.
Rachel said that he had looked around the room and “decided that it was a safe place.”
“So, I raised my hand and said, ‘I’m trans, too!’”
As so often happens with parents, we react differently on the outside than we feel on the inside. I smiled and said, “That’s so great,” not wanting to make a big deal out of it because I could tell that he didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. But it was a huge deal: Rachel had never outed himself in a social situation.
Those who knew definitively that he was trans were people who knew him before he came out or whom I had told in an effort to keep him safe during my close examination of everything he did. Rachel had gone to great lengths to make sure that the kids at his school saw him as a boy, and knew him as a boy and only a boy. Because he was so passable, it wasn’t a huge ask.
So, while I continued to put together his after-camp snack, inside I was doing a happy dance.
When the camp week ended, our family went out to dinner. We walked around the neighborhood afterward, and there was a queer bookstore. By the register, the store sold pins — pride pins, rainbows, pins with sayings such as “Love Is Love,” and pins with the trans flag on them. I love a pin — especially a rainbow or pride pin — and I asked Rachel if I could get one.
“How about this one?” I said, picking up a rainbow.
Rachel shook his head. “This one,” he said. He picked a trans flag-colored pin in the shape of a heart, “and this one.” It was a pin that said “Love Is a Many-Gendered Thing.”
The small person in my head did the happy dance again. On the outside, I just smiled and said, “Sounds good.”
We found a place to put it on my cross bag, and Rachel adjusted the bag so that the trans pin was front and center.
“That looks nice,” he said.
The next week, he attended a ballet intensive at his studio, which concluded with a day of parent observation. He suddenly had some instructions on what I should wear to parent observation day.
“Please wear your jeans shorts, your white T-shirt, and make your hair wavy.”
“Is that all?” I found this new interest in what I looked like amusing, as if he were trying to get me to match a mom he had seen on TV and thought pretty.
“Well, can you wear your trans cross bag? And have the pin in front. But don’t make it a thing.”
I wore the cross bag with the pin in front. And I didn’t make it a thing. But this small action was enough to make me take a step back and examine what my journey as the parent of a trans child had looked like — what it was, what it wasn’t, how it was different than what I’d expected. As I reflected on these past three years, I came away with a million little moments that led to only one certainty: There is no wrong way to be trans.
