my kid is nonbinary

it's not a trendy phase + pronouns aren't too hard

I’m the very proud parent of a genderfluid, queer teenager. I haven’t written details here about this huge piece of my life because teasing my own parenting experience out from my kid’s private and dynamic life is like playing a precarious game of Operation. ⚡️Bzzzt!⚡️ Too close to telling a story that’s theirs to tell and too reductive to try to accurately capture the ever-changing kaleidoscope of it all.

I’ll attempt it now because it’s Pride month, and I’m a queer mom to a 17-year-old who falls under the transgender umbrella. To yield more understanding and compassion, I’ll try to express at least a part of my experience for:

• other caregivers and loved ones of nonbinary and trans youth who may need this sort of mirroring, conversation, and visibility,

• caregivers who haven’t (yet?) experienced this with their child or child’s friends to have a window into it, and/or

• anyone who wants to have literacy around this topic

a brief definition of terms

It seems important to start with this short excerpt from my book, Midlife Emergence, to define terms for readers who may not yet know:

Sex, or assigned sex, is a label given at birth based on genitals, hormones, and chromosomes. Most people are assigned male or female, and if the anatomy doesn’t fit into either, they may be described as intersex.

Gender does not always align with assigned sex. Binary gender roles are social constructs around behaviors, thoughts, and characteristics that go along with being a girl or a boy, a woman or a man. Our gender identity is where we feel most aligned. If one’s gender feels aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth, they are said to be cisgender. People whose gender does not align with their assigned sex can fall along a spectrum that lives under the transgender umbrella, which includes both binary trans folks and nonbinary/gender expansive* folks.

Gender identity (cisgender, transgender, gender expansive*, etc.) is not the same as gender expression (feminine, androgynous, masculine, etc.), which is not the same as biological sex (female, intersex, male), which is not the same as sexual orientation (heterosexual, bisexual, queer, fluid, homosexual, etc.).

*As language is rapidly shifting around these constructs, I changed the word gender-nonconforming (which is printed in my static book) to gender expansive here. I did this because the word nonconforming implies that it exists outside of a norm, which, in turn, supports the idea that the binary is what’s normal. And thankfully, we’re waking up to the idea that it is so not.

To clarify a bit further: The transgender umbrella holds binary trans folks, which refers to those who may transition from identifying as one gender (likely the one aligning with the sex they were assigned at birth) to another gender. This umbrella also encompasses nonbinary trans people who may identify as all, some, or none of the genders. In the case of my kid specifically, they currently identify as genderfluid, so their gender identity is fluid in that it may feel different on different days. They are not necessarily aiming to pass as any one particular gender. They know they are not cisgender, and they do not want to be mistaken for or referred to as a cisgender person, even on days when their gender might align with their assigned sex.

a sobering reality

Our kid began to publicly identify as nonbinary in November 2021, a couple months before their 15th birthday. I suppose they’d “come out” as queer in their sexuality prior to that, but most GenZ kids don’t so much as “come out” as queer as they simply exist as they are — and I freaking love that for this generation! I say this with the absolute awareness that this is a regional privilege, acknowledging that kids in more rural, red/conservative, or religious parts of the country (and in various other countries) do not have the freedom to exist fully as themselves because of deep-rooted fear and ignorance from others that puts upon queer people the dangers of hatred, othering, bullying, violence, murder, being ostracized by their social and spiritual communities, and/or being disowned by their caregivers.

Their dad and I are not those disowning caregivers by any stretch. While there has been a learning curve these past few years as we’ve been discovering how best to honor their unique gender identity, we respect that they know themself better than we know them. Just as we do not choose our sexual orientation, we also do not choose our gender identity. Should each of us take the time to question and explore the origin of our own gender expressions, we might discover that some pieces are performances, roles, or costumes, rather than our true gender identities.

Like every other loving parent, we want our kid to be safe — and to stay alive. According to The Trevor Project, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit organization for LGBTQ+ young people (and where I’m donating a portion of June’s paid subscriptions), “41% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including roughly half of transgender and nonbinary youth.” Read that again. (If you click on that quote, you can find more information about this statistic and others.)

what it’s like to parent our nonbinary child

Ultimately, it’s not much different because they’re simply an adolescent human being moving through the world, writing essays for school, going to rehearsals for musicals, applying to colleges, and having sleepovers. One part that feels a bit different from my friends who parent cisgender kids is that there is an additional layer of exhaustion (for my teen and for us as parents) from the emotional labor involved in having to assert their identity unnecessarily to people who think it's their right to argue about someone else's identity. As I wrote in the epilogue of my book, for their ninth grade year, my kid attended a local private school where they were mistreated, misgendered, and disrespected by one powerful administrator because of their gender identity. This ultimately lead us to find a much safer high school where they could learn and thrive without enduring this unnecessary burden. Finding a college in a state and city that feels safe enough for our child is also a huge consideration, so there are several states they’ve ruled out of their college search, of course. Sadly, the continued macro and microaggressions are an unavoidable part of trans life, as of this moment in history. As parents, we’ve often found ourselves in the roles of advocates, educators, and allies at their schools, among some of our adult peers, and with our families of origin.

what’s the deal with pronouns?

As a 48-year-old, cisgender person socialized in a conventional context, I can definitely understand that it feels “inconvenient” and “too difficult” to now become conscious of pronouns and gendered language (e.g.; how “ladies + gentlemen” is not at all inclusive, or by adding words like nibling to your vocabulary). My genderfluid kid uses a variety of pronouns (like he, she, and they) and sometimes neopronouns (such as fae and xe), depending on which is most congruent to their gender orientation that day. Most days, we start by using they/them pronouns for our kid unless they ask us otherwise, but note that that’s just their specific desire. What constitutes respectful pronoun use is a unique barometer set by each person.

Before I was thrust into a mind-shifting journey of educating myself about being a parent of a trans child, I might have also said (or thought) some of the uninformed things about getting used to new pronouns that I commonly hear about “it’s too hard” or “needing grace” from the trans person. I fully get that it's slow for us to update our archaic, binary language. AND, for a second, imagine how hard it is for a genderfluid or trans person to feel inwardly who they actually are and then to have to assert their gender in a world that is not yet used to gender not being tied to assigned sex. Imagine getting misgendered over and over and having to either correct it or swallow it — and having to decide which of those to do in every given context. That takes far more energy than our getting used to new or changing pronouns. Here’s a helpful graphic about respectfully using pronouns - click on it to view it larger:

from Tai Draws

gender expansiveness is not a trendy, new fad

Transgender and nonbinary people have always existed. It’s just that now, in various parts of our western world and with the connectivity that the internet offers, people have more access to information and to supportive community, which is allowing more expansive thinking and exploration around various facets of culture and identity that are not mainstream. My kid has far more queer and/or transgender friends and peers than heterosexual and/or cisgender friends. I’m so thankful for the opportunity available now to (some) youth, in (some) areas of the country and world, not to have to conform to a status quo that squashes their true spirit. Trading authenticity for approval is never a good idea. I want to continue to raise our kid in the spirit of these wise words of Marianne Williamson: "Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you."

I have so very much I could say about the experience of parenting a beautiful and brilliant trans child, but I will end this here, for now, as just one facet of the colorful prism I celebrate during Pride month and on every single day of my life. I’ll leave you with some fun and inspiring “what i’m” items below, but first — enjoy this beautiful teaching from the extraordinary Alok Vaid-Menon. It has three frames, so click on it and swipe through to hear all 3:

alokvmenon

A post shared by @alokvmenon

• watching: Am I Okay? on HBO Max - This is a new, light, and quite basic sort of friend-romcom movie about a woman discovering her queerness at 32, starring Dakota Johnson and directed by Tig Notaro and her wife, Stephanie Allynne.

• still glowing from: seeing Sarah McLachlan’s 30th anniversary Fumbling Toward Ecstasy tour (30 years?! whuuut, my fellow GenX-ers!?!?) at the gorgeous Red Rocks Amphitheater

• deeply feeling: this powerful

  Andrea Gibson
  poem. Please watch:

• looking forward to: seeing Alok perform live in Denver at the end of this month. They are such an inspiring force, artist, activist, pioneer for the LGBTQIA+ community.

• listening to: a song that always pierces my heart around issues of gender:

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