When my son Leo first came out as transgender, one of the things I didn’t know that I needed was permission to grieve the child I thought I had. I was trying to model for others how to talk to and about Leo. How to use his new name and pronouns properly. How to talk… Continue reading When You Don’t Know Where To Go To Grieve
Several times a year, I ask my readers what their biggest struggle is with understanding or supporting transgender people. Then I open the conversation up to any other questions they might have. One reader recently asked if it was possible to tell if our children are gay (or lesbian or bisexual or transgender) before they… Continue reading Can You Tell Your Child is Gay Before They Come Out?
I didn’t expect to be still feeling grief at Christmas the year Leo told us he was transgender. By the time December rolled around, I had been living with that knowledge for three hundred and one days. During those three hundred and one days, I learned and lost. I understood the difference between gender and… Continue reading Grief at Christmas
Guest post by Leo Richardson It is my pleasure to introduce you to people whose lived experiences will help you to have a better understanding of what it is like to be transgender or the parent of someone who is. Each year during November 13-19 before Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20, people and… Continue reading Transgender Awareness: Strength in a Community
My oldest child, Ember, who is nonbinary and bisexual, decided last winter that they would use only gender-neutral pronouns and change their name. When they told me, we had a lot of conversations about it. Because I was trying to understand them better, I had a lot of questions. One of the questions I asked… Continue reading When Your Child is Ready to Come Out
Guest post by Andrew Trudeau It is my pleasure to introduce you to people whose lived experiences will help you to have a better understanding of what it is like to be transgender, or the parent of someone who is. I met Andrew Trudeau when he was in college, and now he is engaged to… Continue reading Guys and Dolls: A Coming Out Story
Raising Ryland is the tender story of the Whittington family’s four-year journey to teach their deaf child to speak, only to discover that what Ryland had wanted to communicate the most was that he was a boy. Whittington’s narrative takes us on a roller-coaster journey as they learn what they thought was a tomboy phase… Continue reading Review: Raising Ryland by Hillary Whittington
It plays like a movie reel in my head. One minute I’m on the third floor of our elementary school in the middle of a reading lesson with fourth graders. The next, I’m in the passenger seat of my husband’s speeding car, on the way to the High School. We’d already lost the time he… Continue reading When You Learn Your Child is Suicidal
Raising My Rainbow is a charming story of what it is like to raise a gender non-conforming child in a world that sees only male and female genders. Lori Duron’s youngest child takes an interest in Barbie’s at the age of two, and by the time he is three years old, his world revolves around… Continue reading Review: Raising My Rainbow by Lori Duron
For most of my oldest child’s life, I understood them to be gay. At one point in time, during their college years, they made a FaceBook post about an informal name change. In it, they also referenced gender-neutral pronouns. That summer, I was buried under mountains of college work. We were also preparing to send… Continue reading How to Listen Better To What Your Child is Saying
