Trans queerspawn and transpawn – Finding connections

This post is a part of Blogging for LGBT Families Day.  You can view links to all other participating blogs at today’s Mombian post.

When people find out that I have lesbian moms, the usual reaction is something along the lines of “Wow, that must be so wonderful.  I bet you didn’t have any problems coming out.” 

Growing up with lesbian moms, both queer community and dealing with heterosexism and homophobia have always been a part of my life.  Being ‘different’ was par for the course.  And with support from my queer family and queer community, things were always good.  But when I started to think about my gender and when I began to come out to myself as trans, I had to wonder if that ‘difference’ would be understood by my parents and my parents’ friends who I had always gotten my support from.

One night around the campfire at our annual multi queer-family camping trip I mentioned the local non-discrimination policy that had gender identity severed in order to make it easier to pass the queer part.  After a bit of conversation, one of the other lesbian moms around the circle admitted that she just didn’t know enough about transpeople in order to know how to support them.  While everyone else seemed to settle into a quiet consensus that they just didn’t know any transpeople and couldn’t do anything about the situation, I decided to stop talking about the subject for the night. 

A year later, at a similar camping trip, the fireside conversation took a very different turn.  Reading my copy of “Trans Liberation” I spotted my friend’s mom’s name.  Somewhat stunned, I asked people if the transwoman in my book was the same Sandy Stone that we were all chatting about.  That sparked a long conversation about trans issues, gender theory, and queer identity.  This time, I wasn’t the only one doing the teaching.  Having just discovered that my childhood friend was not only queerspawn but transpawn as well, we got to do the basic trans education piece together, along with the genderqueer friend of hers that had come on the camping trip as well.  A few months after that, I came out to my parents.

Coming out as trans I had to work to get the support from my community that I had taken for granted.  While all of my family friends were incredibly supportive, I found most of their support along the lines of my first fireside chat and less like the second.  I had to teach most of them what they needed to do in order to be supportive.  I had to teach them what transgender means, why an article in the newspaper was transphobic, why it’s so important to use the right pronouns.  Nowhere was this any clearer than with my parents.  From the moment I came out to them, they told me that they wanted to be supportive.  But it took over a year before they began to understand how to do that.

After my parents had spent almost a year “trying” to get my pronouns right, they finally got the opportunity to be out with me in public while I was passing – at my grandmother’s funeral.  I had to leave soon after the service, but as people were talking afterward, apparently several people asked about me.  The conversation went something like this. 

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.  She said some very nice things.”
“No, that was our son.”
“No, the one with the long hair and glasses.”
“Yes, our son.”
“No, the older one.”
“That was our son.”

Apparently, my parents were quite distraught about this and later berated me about how what I did was incredibly selfish and inappropriate – I shouldn’t have used my grandmother’s funeral to make a statement like that.  It was near traumatizing. 

After arguing, crying together, and a lot of good old fashioned lesbian-style processing of our emotions, we began to make some breakthroughs.  One of the things that was hardest for them was that they had always dealt with having their parenting scruitinized, and they couldn’t help but see the drama that I could potentially create.  One can imagine the headlines “Lesbians screw up kids gender,” or “Dykes turn boy into girl.”  And in fact, when there was a newspaper article on my birth, people actually wrote letters to the editor predicting something along those lines.

I had to deal with that same issue when I was coming out to myself as well.  With all the homophobes claiming that I’d be confused about my gender without a fatherly male role model, well, I didn’t want to prove them right.  It was when a trans friend responded that he had grown up with very homophobic parents and was still just as confused about his gender that I began to let it go.  My parents had to go through their own letting go process.  As a part of that, my mom Jennifer wrote an unfortunately titled article for the local paper analyzing and comparing her response to my coming out with her mom’s response to her coming out. 

Even now, another year and a half later, being trans in queer communities still leaves me feeling somewhat like an outsider.  I still go to all the queer activist events in town, but a good half the time I’m the only transperson there.  I’ve got my trans community, but in my non-trans queer community there’s still a pervasive ignorance of trans issues.  Even in queerspawn spaces, there’s a distinct lack of trans community.  

When I got involved with COLAGE, I began to find a few people with similar experiences.  I connected with another trans queerspawn.  I had long in depth conversations with a queer transpawn.  Between the two identity placements I found a commonality.  At least with the few I talked with, there was a strong desire for trans community within queerspawn community.  And a difficult time finding it.  But as we told each other our stories I couldn’t help but get the sense that that was going to change.  A few dedicated community builders came make a monumental difference.