In Search of Secrets

When our daughter first started talking, we began asking her what she wanted to be called. My spouse and I had decided that if she wanted to pick a name other than the one we gave her, that was her right.

At first, she experimented quite a bit, and as you might imagine there were some…questionable choices. It was embarrassing at times–I wrote “Car Racecar” on more than one official school form–but we trusted that as she learned and matured, those childish phases would pass. Sure enough, she eventually settled on a lovely, sensible name (one my spouse and I, by pure coincidence, had considered ourselves!) and she’s been happy with it ever since.

It’s unusual, I admit. It’s not a path I would recommend for every family. But I believe it was the right decision for us, and for her.

Every once in a while, we would also ask her what pronouns she wanted to be called. We’d frame the question in the same way we were phrasing questions about her name: did she want us to keep using the one we gave her when she was born, or did she want to be called something different? Just like with her name, there was a bit of experimentation at first, and just like with her name we trusted that if it were a phase or a mistake, she would grow out of it on her own. Long before she settled on a name, she was confident that yes, she really did want to be called “she,” “girl,” “daughter,” and so on. That was about five years ago.

It had been a while since we’d checked in on her decision, so I recently reminded her that she could always tell us if she ever changed her mind. She responded, sounding quite confused, “Why do you think I would change my mind?” Why, indeed. Her girlhood is as self-evident to her as the color of her hair.

Her birth certificate is marked with an “M.”

Many people would be outraged to hear this. They would say we are enabling a delusion or a mental illness. Our current President, in a proclamation issued for National Child Abuse Prevention Month, claimed that so-called gender ideology is “one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse” in the country. Gender extremists, he said, are telling children “the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body.”

Now, I could point out that under-eighteen rape victims outnumber trans kids nearly thirty to one, but that’s ultimately a quibble. All forms of abuse should be prevented, regardless of their prevalence. The real problem with this claim is the assumption that if my daughter is trans, it must be because I’m telling her she’s “trapped in the wrong body.”

Guess what? My daughter loves her body. She loves climbing and running and playing outdoors, she loves being strong, she loves being fast (the second-fastest girl in her class!) The only time she has expressed any distress over her biology was when she came home from school one day and told me she wished her voice were higher. When I asked her why, she said it was because a classmate had told her she “didn’t sound like a girl.”

So it’s true, there are people saying my daughter’s body is wrong–but it is not the people calling her by her chosen name and gender. It’s the people who would tell her that, because of her body, she doesn’t count as a “real” girl; that because she was born with a certain biology, her girlhood is fake, a delusion, a lie. When trans kids are told over and over again that their bodies are the reason their transness is rejected, is it any wonder so many of them end up feeling trapped? I can’t help but wonder: if more people believed, as my daughter still does, that a girl with a penis is perfectly unremarkable…would fewer trans people feel a need for surgeries and hormones? Would more of them be happy with their bodies, if we didn’t insist that one’s gender and biology “match?”

Someday soon, I know my daughter will ask me if she can play sports with her friends. It would be nice to know I’ll be able to tell her “yes”–but that’s not the question that really keeps me up at night. The real question is: will my daughter be allowed to be my daughter? When she tells people she is a girl, will she be heard and respected, or will she be harassed, ignored, bullied, and ridiculed? Or worse, will she be stolen away from the loving family she was born into under the pretense that using the “wrong” words to address her is abuse?

The President ended his proclamation by saying “my message to every American child is simple: you are perfect exactly the way God made you.” The part he didn’t say, of course, was “…unless you were made intersex, trans, queer, brown, neurodivergent, or just generally Different. Those kids need to try harder to be perfect, like the rest of us.”

Who’s telling kids they’re in the wrong bodies, again?