My Mom Always Wanted a Boy…

My MOM ALWAYS WANTED A BOY

 

Alas, she didn’t live long enough to find out she had one… and that makes me sad…

Since neither she nor I had any insights into the term “transgender” during her final year of life (in 1998), she passed away under the impression that I was a lesbian (albeit a celibate one). Because I figured that’s what I must be if I was a girl who liked girls, so that’s what I had finally admitted to her two decades before. She came to terms with that, writing to me that her wish for me had always been simply to find someone to love who loved me back and to be happy.

Although I knew I wasn’t a girl (mentally) at all, my body was female (which pissed me off royally). There didn’t seem to be any other way to classify myself.

After she died is when I was exposed to the terms “intersex” and “transgender.”  I’ve recounted those times in my book Womb Man, so I won’t revisit them here, but the new knowledge was such an immense relief.  I had known I wasn’t a true lesbian. (True lesbians–that is, cisgender lesbians–love their own precious bodies and that wasn’t my reality at all.)

I bring this up because my honorary stepson Greg Barton in Australia sent me an image of me as a young boy that he has used a Face app to create. When I received it unexpectedly on Friday, I got lost in memories.

 

It was so very close to how I did look at that age that it was almost as if I time traveled back to those years and that age, and I thought immediately, “How happy Mom would have been, had she known she actually had a son.”

He came naked, as all babies do and, and unless he was born intersex (I still don’t know if I was) he looked (physically, “down under”) like a baby girl. But unbeknownst to anyone but himself, his brain was male and he would grow up believing he was a boy who would grow into a man, no matter how many times others referred to him as a girl, until puberty rudely interrupted to demand he wasn’t.

 

I remained quiet about my discomfort, of course, believing (without being told) that I was some kind of freak and that no one would love me if I confessed what I was thinking and feeling.

 

I knew I wasn’t like other girls. The things they talked about were so rarely in my wheelhouse that I felt estranged from them, yet strangely (later on) attracted to some of them romantically. (I wonder if cisgender guys feel this way about females, too. I bet a lot of them do! Male and female brains rarely appear to compute the same way.)

 

Anyway, this new image–in living color–makes me smile.  He would have been such a happy little boy, had he been able to name and claim it, as so many youngsters can and do now, and they’re usually believed by their parents (after consultations with children’s mental health counselor), no matter how hard it can be to wrap one’s brain around it and finally embrace what is indisputably true about their children’s realities.

 

I’m glad we’ve come this far in my lifetime. Up until now, generations of transgender individuals have been hiding in the shadows or passing themselves off as the gender they embrace with most people being none the wiser.

 

But knowledge is a good thing. It reduces fear and allows people to relax into love again.

 

Trans people who come out of the closet aren’t doing it to upset anyone. They’re doing it to disrupt and destroy their own internal upset-ness.

 

They’re saying, “This is who I am, who I’ve always been! Please believe me and accept me for who I am, not for who you’ve believed me to be. I’ve never been what you see with your eyes. And it’s always been my essence you’ve loved. That hasn’t changed. I just want to feel comfortable out in the open. I want to be free like you are.”

 

It really isn’t scary. I promise.

 

So, Mom, although I don’t believe in an afterlife (although I’ve had some experiences that make me wonder!), I do hope your essence survives and that you know who I am now and that you’re happy I’m happy now.

 

I’ve always been the son you wanted, and you always loved me anyway and mostly let me grow up my way (except for those damned curlers and the required dresses at school and church)–so you did right by me! I hope I made/make you proud!