“Rainbow umbrella” is a cheesy photo choice, but the other result for “protection” was “barbed wire prison camp,” which sends a less-than-nurturing message. Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

I’ve run out of things to say about myself during therapy. This is not to say I don’t still need it. I now spend my sessions talking about one and only one thing: My kid, who is preparing to enter kindergarten. Specifically, I talk about my fear that I have fucked up my kid’s life forever by coming out.

If you were to ask me why I transitioned when I did, I’d probably tell you that I did it to be a better parent. I’d point to the studies that say kids do better when their parents are happy; I’d tell you that I had a mentally ill parent who drank to numb his pain, and that I vowed never to be too depressed or dysfunctional to take care of my own kids. At a certain point, I realized that transition was the only way to get my shit together. Maybe, if I were alone, I would have found a way to put it off, but I had a child who depended on me. I had to play it safe.

There is, of course, nothing “safe” about transition or queer families in 2022. Every day, I see or hear something that reminds me how unsafe it is: I read about the gay couple who had to shield their young children from an enraged man screaming “they stole you, they’re pedophiles;” the boy with two moms whose teachers called him “dirty.” I go online, where there’s a crowdsourced campaign to call child protective services on a non-binary colleague because they used the term “emotional labor” in regard to a tough conversation with their teenager. I go home to Ohio, where my very cisgender uncle — a public school teacher who’s been supportive of LGBTQ+ students — says that he finally figured out who’s been sending him all the death threats, but the guy works for the state, and has connections, so he doubts they’ll stop.

My daughter didn’t choose to grow up in this world. She can’t control who her parents are. She’ll be more supported at home if I’m not depressed and dysphoric, but by making myself healthier, I have also put her in the middle of a culture war. We are not city people. She will not know many other families like ours, and neither will her classmates. I can’t escape the feeling that I have created a human life and tossed it out into the world where people can bully her endlessly over things that were neither her decision nor her fault.

I try to focus outside myself, keep things in perspective. There are a lot of children suffering right now. Maybe it’s selfish to worry about my own family when Florida just banned social transition for children; maybe it’s melodramatic to obsess about my own parenting skills when there are plenty of parents clamoring for the right to abuse, isolate and “convert” their trans child.

Maybe. But maybe the only way to be a good parent is to constantly try to be a better one. Any civil liberty I exercise, or any space I take up in the world, is space I am trying to clear for my daughter and the rest of her generation. If I can successfully navigate my own life as a trans person, then I may create some path for a younger person to follow. I can show them they don’t have to be afraid of turning out like me.

They do have to be afraid, though. I can’t soften that. I am already teaching my daughter how to hide me. I’m asking her not to open conversations with her friends’ parents by telling them I got top surgery. I’m explaining that “he’s my Mom” is a confusing statement for most people. I tell myself that I am not teaching her to be ashamed of me, that there are trans people who don’t disclose their medical history to anyone, let alone encourage their kids to discuss it at recess. The jury is out on what I actually believe.

No matter what I do, the world is going to seep in around the edges. A few weeks ago, over dinner, my kid turned to me and said “Jude, when you were born, you were meant to be a girl.” The language and cadence were so unlike her that I thought she had to be repeating someone else. I told her that when I was born, I was a baby, and no-one knows what gender a baby is, because they can’t talk. I told her that people used to think you could tell right away, but now we know better. I told her that whoever told her that was probably a little old-fashioned, and that she should tell me if anyone bothered her about this again.

Everyone is going to bother her. That’s the point. That’s what this backlash is meant to do — make families like ours so fraught that no-one will want to be a queer parent, or even a remotely supportive parent, in the public eye. I make our home as safe as I can make it. I try to make the world better when I can. I know there is no such thing as perfect safety, or perfect parenting, for that matter. It still feels terrifying; getting this one tiny person safely through a huge, cruel world.