Apologies for a mammoth post. I have been around FWR (under a different name) pre Jenni Murray/Spartacus, and I feel v emotional posting here today.
I totally understand why a parent might go down the line David Tennant took. I didn’t, and my (young autistic adult) child cut off all contact with me.
I couldn’t honestly say that I saw my child as a girl, which is what my child wanted, because I think girl = young female human and I didn’t know how to ‘see’ girlhood in any other way, unless I redefined girlhood as a set of stereotypes. I’ve spent a lifetime asserting that the full range of gender expression should be available to everyone, while also believing that sex matters while we live under patriarchy.
I told my child my acceptance of them was unwavering, and that I wanted to understand what it meant for them to be a trans girl and how I could support them in exploring their identity, but that wasn’t what my child wanted/needed to hear. I needed to literally say ‘I see you as a girl, and there is no material difference between you and my other daughter’, and I couldn’t, because the words ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ still have work to do. Because we need language to describe the class oppressed on the basis of their sex, not their gender.
I tried to make myself believe what my child wanted me to believe, but I couldn’t. I was (and remain) curious about their experience, and why being seen as a girl/young woman was so critical to their sense of self, and how I could support them to explore ways of getting comfortable in the body they live in. I could go quite a long way, but I could not lie.
My ex couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just say what our child wanted to hear, whether I believed it or not.
I used to think (naively) that estrangement only happened to shit parents. I wasn’t shit. I was shit sometimes, and I was amazing occasionally, but I was good enough, most of the time. Estrangement is just constantly shit.
I worry so much about how my child will be treated, and how unsafe they will feel (because of the most vulnerable/most unsafe narrative that’s peddled rather than because they’re actually any less safe than they were yesterday). My LinkedIn feed is full of people in uproar on behalf of their trans family members, and I understand why. I want my child to be treated with kindness and dignity. Obviously.
BUT
I am a lesbian. I am a feminist. I have fought my whole life to dismantle sex-based oppression and gender-based stereotyping. I have worked with vulnerable women who needed single-sex spaces. I was written off as a crazy conspiracist by so many people (not on MN) when I started raising the alarm about the implications of redefining ‘woman’ as an identity rather than a sex class.
Because of my family situation, I’ve had nothing left in me for a public fight, but I’m so relieved by the judgement, while also feeling sick because my child will feel attacked and beleaguered.
I feel like a casualty, not a winner, but I’m hugely grateful to everyone who has fought so hard for this outcome. Thank you 🙏🏻