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One weekend when my son, W, was nine, he became obsessed with making his own soccer cards. We bought supplies from the art store and cleared the kitchen table, and he began barking out orders: “Draw Messi, Mommy! OK, now draw Pelé!” As I drew the pictures, he churned out bios and stats and scrawled them on the back. He was like a machine, driven by who-knows-what. “Draw Erling Haaland!” he cried. I tried to keep up.
By Sunday evening, I was relieved to tuck him into bed. As I pictured the half-bottle of wine in the fridge, W looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m nonbinary.”
“Great,” I said. He seemed to expect something more. I reached deep inside my tired, middle-aged self and added, “That’s wonderful.”
“Mom! I said, ‘I’m nonbinary.’”
“OK. Thank you for sharing this with me. Now, I’ll see you in the morning.”
Only when I collapsed on the couch did the magnitude of his announcement hit me. I reconsidered that weekend’s manic energy. Had all of that actually been nervous energy? Had he resolved to share the news this weekend and only gotten up the nerve at the last possible moment?
I took a sip of wine and considered. This was likely going to require follow-up, not to mention research.
In the morning, I circled back to him, letting him tell me the news again and explain how he felt: that he wasn’t really male or female, that “he” and “him” didn’t fit anymore. W wanted to be “they/them.” While my first response had been surprise—I hadn’t seen a lot of signs this was coming—it also struck a chord. I found myself returning to memories of my own coming of age.
I’d grown up a plain, serious girl in big-hair Texas. I’d never really learned the ways of hair spray, and I’d disdained makeup. I hated shopping and bows, didn’t get flirting or small talk. Like W, I hadn’t really felt male or female, and puberty had come as a betrayal. I didn’t like how my new body made me vulnerable to ridicule and leers.
Worst of all, I was ambitious, and being female kept me from being taken seriously. When I asked the guidance counselor at school to edit an essay I’d written for a scholarship contest, he hugged me and said I was “so cute.” When I got into the small, liberal arts college I dreamed of attending, my dad said it was a waste of money because I was a girl. “You’re only going to get married,” he said.
So, I agreed to go to a state school, but I chose the most liberal one—the University of Texas at Austin—and there, I sought out the most “alternative” group I could find. If I had to go to the cheap school, I was going to rebel. I was going to be myself.
That’s how I ended up finding my people. My friends and I shopped at thrift stores and went to punk rock shows. We protested the Gulf War and read Rigoberta Menchú.
And we played with gender norms. In the wake of W’s revelation, it occurred to me that in those early years away from home, I’d dressed mostly in men’s clothes.
But since then, I’d reclaimed aspects of my femininity, and I found myself relishing the chance to share those parts of myself with W. I took them to buy silver nail polish and silver Chelsea boots to go with it. A hot pink cardigan followed, as well as a couple dresses. W joined the cheer squad. I bought us tickets to the ballet and treated us to an English tea at Alice’s Tea Cup.
I was interested to see what they kept from these experiments and what they discarded: Out went cheer squad (mean girls). In was Alice’s Tea Cup (great scones, trans servers). Out: manicures and ballet (boring). In: silver Chelsea boots (goes without saying).
At the same time, many of the old favorites, like soccer, nerf guns, and robots, remained “in.” While I’d felt peer pressure in college to reject traditionally feminine activities, my kid and their friends felt no problem incorporating everything they liked into their lives. Nothing was solely female or male. It all simply worked or didn’t work for them; they didn’t care what anyone else thought.
That’s not to say I never worried. During this time, other, darker memories from college surfaced as well: the friend who was beat up by a group of frat boys for having long hair; two others who were chased into a convenience store by adult men with baseball bats. Though my kid lived in New York City and former President Joe Biden was still in office, I knew that I couldn’t protect them from everything, that in much of the world, being different is dangerous.
I knew W worried about harassment, too, at least a little. The first time they wore a dress to school, in middle school, they took my hand on the morning walk and had me go with them all the way to the school gates, things we’d stopped doing that year. During the day, I fretted, thinking of them braving the school halls, but when I asked at pickup, “Did anyone say anything about the dress?” they only shrugged. “I got a couple compliments.”
During all of this, while I supported W from the sidelines, I was actually going through my own changes. My body was making it clear—with an array of unwanted symptoms—that I was going to grow old. I started observing older women more closely, to see what to expect. The answers alarmed me. That lovely dip between our rib cage and our hips filled out. Our shoulders seemed to expand, our breasts got larger and drooped. And facial hair! Don’t even get me started.
I went into full-blown planning mode. I could beat this, just as I’d beaten so many other things in life. I bought belts and dresses with waists, watched women on Instagram fill in wrinkles with expensive cover-up sticks. I even (horror!) dieted. I would just have to be hungrier in old age, that was clear.
It would suck—it all kinda sucked—but I’d do it. Now that my femininity was at risk, I was determined not to lose it.
And then, one evening about a month after Trump was inaugurated, I joined a meeting of the parents’ Pride group at W’s middle school. The group had been founded to support gay parents at the school and then enlarged to include parents like me with LGBTQ+ kids. At the beginning of the meeting, the group’s founders turned to us parents of trans kids, and gave us the floor to share what this month had been like for us. They let us talk and then offered advice on how to support our kids and how to maintain ties with conservative family members. A few even volunteered to mentor our kids.
At some point, I found myself looking around at this generous group of middle-aged people. The group ran the gamut: male and female; gay and straight; butch and femme; premenopausal, peri-, and post-. But they all seemed at ease with themselves and how they presented to the world. This is what you earn with decades of living, I thought.
How, then, could I let myself feel humiliated by losing my femininity, when at an earlier stage, I’d worked so hard to do just that? More importantly, if I could love my child in all their complexity—silver Chelsea boots and soccer jerseys, slammed doors and courageous walks to school—couldn’t I love myself in the same way? Couldn’t I choose to accept my body, whatever came next, and to present myself however I wanted?
I thought of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, Natasha Lyonne in her Russian Doll suit jackets, of Fran Lebowitz in her whole, uncompromising life. I could forge a new style, one that incorporated all sides of myself, that expressed the entirety of my life.
For about a minute and a half, I imagined it, exhilarated. But then I thought about shopping and trying on blazers—not to mention paying for them—and I felt exhausted. I could more easily picture moving to Wyoming, letting my face get weathered by the sun, adopting a uniform of jeans and T-shirts.
Of course, moving to Wyoming also seemed like a lot of work. Far more likely, I’d stay right here and keep dressing more or less the same—but I’d stop torturing myself about it.
And anyway, I thought, someone in the house was already building a pretty fabulous look. Soon enough, we’d be wearing the same size, and I was pretty sure I could rock a pair of silver Chelsea boots.
Ginny Wiehardt is an award-winning poet and essayist whose nonfiction has appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, Momentum Magazine and the Rumpus. Read more of her work at ginnywiehardt.com.
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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