Around the time of the first anniversary of Leo’s coming out as transgender, I sat in my therapist’s office. I had just seen her a few weeks earlier, before Christmas. She knew, however, I was going to need extra support as that day drew near. So she scheduled me to come in. As I stared… Continue reading There’s No Timeline on Your Emotions
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?
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
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
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
It wasn’t until I became the parent of a transgender child, and had to do the hard work of letting go of the expectations I held of who I thought they were, and what I thought their life would be like, that I realized I had expectations for them to begin with. It was an… Continue reading Letting Go of Who I Thought My Child Was
Recently, I participated in a workshop about sharing hard stories. I regularly write and share about when my youngest came out as transgender, so I thought it would be more of a learning experience than anything else. I mentioned that I wrote about being the parent of a transgender child, and learned that the focus… Continue reading Sharing Childhood Stories of Your Transgender Child
One of the first things I did as a newly pregnant mama was to think about the names I wanted to consider for my baby. I was pacing back and forth in the bathroom of my parent’s condo, waiting to see if the First Response test would show one line or two. When you are… Continue reading When You Struggle With Your Child’s Name
