Chris has a friend, whom I know very well, who also identifies as a male. I have known this girl for many years and now I will begin to call him by his new, chosen name and will begin to watch and see as she, too, will begin to take testosterone and transform into who he believes he was meant to be.
People who know me well, know what a difficult time I had of coping, accepting and embracing the concept of my child being transgender, and I still have moments when I am sort of shocked by something, like when Courtney told me recently that Chris will likely be having top surgery relatively soon, or like when I see shirtless pictures of Chris on Instagram and I realize his breasts are nearly gone and he appears almost completely male. I transformed, in a way, along with Chris, as I am "shocked" sometimes, but I am no longer sad or fearful.
Recently, I ran across a fB page of a friend's daughter who has also come out in the past year as transgender and I caught myself inspecting each picture in the daughter's photo albums - searching, not for the changes she is going through, necessarily, but searching for happiness in her face. I know that this child's mother and father are having a very difficult time with the situation and I so wanted to find happiness in the child's face so that I would know that things would likely be okay for their family, the way things have turned out okay for Chris and our family. I found smiles in the girl's pictures, but I know better than anyone that sadness and fear can be hidden behind smiles, so I really did not find anything in those photos other than the image of another child trying to find her way in this world.
I sometimes think, "I wish, for those people who fear and demonize and ridicule and hate on transgender people, that they, for just one conversation, could meet my son, Chris. I wish, for just one day, that those people could live my life - a life with an amazing transgender child, a life surrounded now by so many amazing transgender people with their wants and needs and hopes and dreams ... then probably or maybe or hopefully those hate-filled people would change their minds and alter their ideas to the point that we all truly understood that this is not a thing to fear or blame or shy away from, but these are simply people who were once one way and struggling so hard at becoming another way - for their selves and for all of us."
If you put the soul of a girl inside of a boy or the soul of a boy inside of a girl, what sort of different and amazing person would that be? If you could mix genders and then that person evolve into someone no one else is - what sort of amazingly different sort of person would that be? This is sort of how I see transgender people now - a mixture of two defined individuals that evolve into the most unique and special sort of person. It's a metamorphosis - like a fuzzy caterpillar that climbs the branches into a tree, chooses a place to weave a cocoon for itself and then miraculously emerges one day into a beautiful butterfly. And then ... it happily flies away.
I'm very lucky. I never knew I'd know my life to be filled with days surrounded by so many unique and wonderful butterflies. I never knew I would be lucky enough to be among them ...
