By Sim Butler, author of And the Dragons Do Come
When my almost seven-year-old child started articulating her transgender identity, she didn’t have the words to describe what she was feeling. She didn’t understand the concept of gender at that age, much less had ever heard of terms like gender dysphoria and transgender identity. For her though, something felt so unsettling and damaging inside her that she knew she had to find a way to tell us. For years, I believe she tried to make it clear. My wife and I had heard “when I grow up, I’m going to be a mommy” often, despite the fact that she was assigned male at birth. She wore dresses almost exclusively during play time, most topped with one of her collection of wigs from all the Disney princesses. But we missed the cues. Finally, just before her seventh birthday, she sat us down and tried to explain it as best she could. “I’m a girl in my heart,” she told us. I’ll never forget how she scrunched up her face, trying to find the right words. “I know I have a boy body but I’m a girl in my heart and a girl in my mind.”
Turns out, she wasn’t the only one who would spend time searching for the words to describe how that moment would change our family’s life. Here I am, ten years after our conversation, just getting together what it meant for our lives in Alabama, and it took me writing an entire book to do it. Navigating friendships and family members, our church community, school heartbreak and success, participation in youth sports, and amazing healthcare and then the criminalization of that healthcare by politicians in our home state, I chronicle as much as I could muster into a memoir titled And the Dragons Do Come: Raising a Transgender Kid in Rural America. In it, I go into the details about what I’ve learned, often through the error portion of trial and error, about advocating for our family in both tight, private spaces and enormous, public ones, everywhere from our kitchen table to the mini soccer field to the courthouse. But all those pages cannot sum up what I’ve learned better than her words did that day: my child is a girl in her heart.
Alabama was our home, but it was not an easy place to raise a trans kid. For every wonderful, supportive ally and community member, we encountered legions of detractors. We heard lots of weak reasoning from people desperate to justify being skeptical of transgender folks. Sometimes they couched their transphobia in religion, other times political ideology, but more often than not it was simply an articulation of their discomfort with the very idea that transgender people exist. People have asked me “couldn’t this just be a phase?”, “how can you let her make this choice?”, and “can a child understand concepts like this?”. I’ve had her school administrators tell me that refuting her transgender identity in the classroom is acceptable because the teacher doesn’t believe in transgender people. Private schools told us not to apply. Even in the best schools we could find, there were days when strangers would drive through the parking lot of her school to yell awful, cruel things at the children they suspected might be trans. But none of that skepticism, rejection, or harassment could change the fact that my child is a girl in her heart.
That day over ten years ago when she worked so hard to explain who she was, my wife and I knew she was coming out to us. For the first time in her life, my daughter was speaking in the present tense about her gender and its place in her sense of self, knowing it did not align with our assumptions. But when she told us who she was, it felt less like she was coming out and more like we were invited in. I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years as a parent, but I’m so lucky that I didn’t get that part wrong. She invited me to love her as she truly is, and that’s all any parent can wish for.
