In a group of 140 parents of trans kids we have all sorts of people as you can imagine. We have medical professionals including several nurses and a couple doctors. Some are small business owners. We have IT security people that work for Fortune 50 companies, marketing professionals, sales people, blue-collar workers and stay at home parents. We have educators of all grade levels of local area schools including college professors and homeschoolers. We have heterosexual couples, same sex couples and single parents. There are various races such as Latino, African American, Pan-Americans and a bunch of varied Anglo (Caucasian) backgrounds, not to mention those who are bi-racial. And if you want to talk about religion or spiritual beliefs, those are just as varied as the political backgrounds of all of these people. The point of this is to say much like the rest of the USA, we are all very different, but we share at least one thing in common that has brought us together, our transgender children.
“People hiding behind a screen often say the most rude and unintelligent things because there is no fear of ever seeing these people face to face.”
When you are an activist, you try to stay current on as much information as possible. You tend to read a lot. While reading, you can get into the comments people leave on articles or videos about our families and children. Often this can be a very stressful situation and not all folks can handle the comments. People hiding behind a screen often say the most rude and unintelligent things because there is no fear of ever seeing these people face to face. Of course not all people have common courtesy and would actually still talk to another human the same way as they would address them in an online setting, rude and ignorantly, but that happens far less.
I have read that our kids have been forced into being transgender because we as parents longed for the opposite sex child or that this is Munchausen’s disease – where the parent is causing these things to happen to these children. People have said it is because there must not be a father present in the child’s life or that the parents splitting up caused them to be transgender. I have been married to my husband for almost 21 years and we have a trans son…. I also know of many others who have been married more years than I have and have a transgender child. We did not cause this, and these kids did not ask for the added stress and harm they get from being LGBT.
A person being transgender or gay has nothing to do with their family dynamics, or what religion they believe in, what ethnicity they are or what kind of vocation or profession or degree they hold. When people start to realize that we are all more alike than we are different, the world will be a better place; there would be less fear and hate.
