This came over the mojo wire Friday morning:
When a person transitions from male to female and is a parent, how is Father’s Day celebrated? WEKU’s Cheri Lawson talked with three transgender women who are also parents.You can listen and read all about it here.
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| Wearing Carolina Herrera |
Once a dad, always a dad. It's what that person was when the kids were conceived and what the kids called that person. As is nearly always pointed out, when "Dad" transitions, the entire family transitions. True that.
ReplyDeleteI'm speaking as a keen observer. Myself, I'm inexorably drawn to my female clothing but I am and always will be a man in a dress. But to my observations:
Having been a member of many TG/CD groups, and friends with TG people for 30-40 years I've seen the family interaction/turmoil of dealing with transition. Some just go crazily against it and the family blows up. In one of these situations, my friend stayed the course and lost her family. But eventually both adult children finally came around to acceptance. In that case they still called her "Dad" in private and referred to her as "Aunt" in public. Their mother wouldn't tolerate anyone else being "Mom".
Another family, a very tight unit, stayed together. They still called her "Dad" at home, saying something like "Mom1 and Mom2" just sounded silly. But outside the house they always said "We have two Moms".
I think the transitioning woman needs to let the kids have a "limited" veto power over family names. They need to understand the difference between public and private terminology. They need to show some empathy, and understand that transition is serious business and there's no going back. The kids are almost always older and "Dad", in whatever form she takes, is still their father and deserves respect. And they're old enough to understand about using female pronouns and names outside the house. Good kids will do the right thing because, like their parents, they want to protect the family.
One last story. I worked with a talented woman software developer some years back. It turns out she had lesbian relationships before she married her husband. Well, the husband turned out to be a real shit who hit her and the kids. At a high school reunion she reconnected with one of her old "girlfriends", who had also married a man -- but got out of the marriage amicably. They rekindled their love and my friend reported her husband to the police after the next beating. He went to jail and she got out of the marriage.
My friend got together with her friend, and they married -- in Canada. She took over the so-called masculine role and decided to seriously fill that role. She began transitioning to become a man. Given the ugly way the "sperm donor" treated the kids, they were happy and proud to call their former Mom, "Dad". It was a warm and loving family. I know he was going to have chest surgery, but he got a great gig with a Microsoft subsidiary and moved to Seattle. We lost contact at that point, mostly because he decided to leave all of his past behind. He was a supremely talented software developer, I can't imagine him not being wildly successful.