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I Told the Internet My Kid Wasn’t Transitioning
A year later, they are. The most confident thing I ever wrote about my kids was wrong, and that’s the part I’m proudest of.
Last November, I wrote a post about my youngest. Lauren was fifteen then, agender, and I was so goddamn pleased with how well I understood it that I laid it out in short little lines like a creed:
Not repressed. Not confused. Not transitioning. Just absent.
Lauren’s sixteen now. Nonbinary, transmasc, they/he. Planning on testosterone and top surgery the minute the law and the doctors say they’re old enough. Which means one of those tidy little lines I published to strangers has aged like milk on a dashboard, and I’m the one who has to drink it.
I’m not embarrassed that I got it wrong. Kids figure themselves out in drafts, same as the rest of us. What embarrasses me is how sure I sounded. I wrote a whole run of those posts that month. Short lines, big white space, a moral at the bottom like a bow on a casserole dish. Every one of them reads now like a parent auditioning for the part of Good Parent. They’re not lies. They’re just too clean. And clean is its own kind of lie when you’re writing about something this messy.
