Early this morning, March 31st I changed my
profile picture, complete with frame.
#TDOV I hash tagged. You see, I
am the mom of a beautiful and confident transgender child and in the society we
live in visibility is life. We’ve gotten
word this week that our government won’t count us, that our government won’t protect us, that our human rights are subject to whims of state legislatures,
and that money is more important than us.
Visibility, being seen, sharing stories is life for so many in a world
so hell bent on believing that transgender people don’t exist. So, in a small act of alliance I changed my
profile picture for my baby, my strong and feisty daughter.
Tomorrow morning, early, I’ll wake up and edit my frame
again because you see, April is Autism Awareness month and that same rainbow
baby is diagnosed PDD-NOS with moderate SPD.
All those fancy words mean that I have a high functioning kid who has
some intense sensory issues. Intense could be an understatement. Life with my kid
has been one surprising journey after another and has required a lot of
learning along the way.
It was Easter, about five years ago, and it was time to eat
but my then son was sitting at the back patio door opening and closing, opening
and closing, opening and closing. Weird,
sure but at first I didn’t think anything of it. What almost two-year-old doesn’t like messing
with doors? The second I took him away from that door, you’d have thought I
ripped an arm off and it did. Not. Stop. This meltdown lasted at least a half
hour and was the worst thing I’d ever seen.
That was when I knew it was autism but I convinced myself it was a
result of prematurity and didn’t seek a diagnosis for another two years. Besides, soon enough we had other issues to
contend with.
I will never remember the first time I believed that my son
would likely grow up to be gay but he was probably a little older than two. As
a person whose gender expression tends to be nonbinary and the only female in
the house I owned a handful of “girly” things. Despite having toys galore this
kid would find bags to wear over his shoulder, nasty black chunk heels,
camisoles turned into dresses and pillow case wigs. I was so worried about the
affinity for feminine things that I gave away a pair of red patent leather
flats that he had dug out of the closet. We couldn’t get a handle on it, and
then he learned to speak.
Having an autistic child who was already fighting an uphill
developmental battle due to being a 12-week preemie is a strange and bizarre
dance in and of itself. We didn’t get
words until almost 18 months and there wasn’t any solid pattern until two. When the speech came the words ‘girl’ and ‘she’
got dropped all over the place in choppy perfect diction. I do remember sitting in the speech therapist’s
office when she was working with him on pronouns and he kept saying “she” in
response to “You are a…”. She’d correct
and again he’d say she. The therapist
said, this is just common. In my head, I
retorted, ‘nothing about this is common.’ I knew. I didn’t know what I knew but
I just knew.
I spent the next two and a half years arguing, debating, demanding,
and disciplining my child for believing he was a girl because that’s what I was
taught would fix it. All the while in my skeptic brain knowing that it would
never work. You see having a transgender child who also has autism is
interesting. The best way to reach my child is to get down to her level, to
enter her world and I can’t say I was exactly willing. At five we hit a wall
and this kid had had enough. “I’m Rosie!
I’m a girl! I’m a SHE!” So many times a day for longer than ever
before. It was like a mantra and if we
fought it the resulting meltdown was just unbearable. So eventually we capitulated. I began to dig
into scripture, I began to dig into the internet certain there had to be an
answer somewhere. I watched videos of Jazz Jennings, I read interviews with Laverne Cox, I watched specials with the Lemay and the Whittington families, an
impassioned speech from Debi Jackson and it was like watching all the
struggles, all the difficulties we’d had kept in private being publicly
revealed, explained. It was a splash of relief.
We called the doctor, met with a specialist and allowed her to socially
transition. Let me tell you the progress that came after we weren’t worried
about the penis factor anymore, it was incredible. Allow a kid to be themselves and just watch
them blossom.
I have an autistic transgender daughter and she is my hero.
I couldn’t imagine living in her body and dealing with all the different
feelings and sensations and discomforts that she deals with and still manages
to be such a loving and considerate person. I can’t imagine being inherently
different from everyone else you meet but knowing that you are incredible and
letting the entire world just slough off your shoulders. She who would have
pink out days every day of the week but is also completely at home in sport
pants and black tee shirts, who lives in leggings and skirts, who is fiercely
protective of her little brother, who believes she has love powers, who gets
excited about dates, keys, and phones, who could tell you your phone model just
by sight, who is ADHD and temperamental but who is always quick with a sincere
apology after a meltdown. She is the
most wondrous thing I’ve ever made in my life.
My beautiful bundle of contradictions and anomalies. Being her mom is never easy, but I’m a better
human for it.
