Raising a trans child is not child abuse...

Dear Constance…

It is hot, and sultry in the night.  I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and stumbled out to the lappy and I am sitting in the velvet thick wraps of heat and cool, dissipating, swelling, gaining strength and washing away.

I am thinking of the waves of years, like waves washed up onto the shores of my soul, and how those waves have all at once sculpted my edges and eroded my interface with the world…and yet left me untouched, in the deep hinterlands of identity and meaning.

I have always been drawn to the ocean, and its hungry sad roar, its insatiable throwing of itself onto the earth it loves, the constant assault on that mass which resists its efforts to billow over it, washing it down a hungry mouth and being unable to swallow such a juicy morsel…the high cliffs and stubborn trees, given shape and scope by winds and rains and time…and how time and the ocean are one and the same.

Always there.  Changing everything.  Changing nothing.

As I have worked to dig deeper and deeper into the roots and genesis of my origins, I have wondered…constantly…what would have happened if I had the chance to grow up in a time and place where being transgender was understood, accepted as something analogous to cleft palate or some other differently abled condition that we so easily and quickly address with modern medical understandings…could have been welcomed into that sphere that I was excluded from then, socialized and policed so heavily that even now, having walked out of that penitentiary of thought I find that I carry the prison bars within and they have managed to grow into the roots of my heart and entangle themselves there.

I am still in a cage, a horrorshow of entangled lies and terrible truths…lies regarding who I am…and truths silently standing in towering clarity of who I am not…what I am not, and what I always will be.  And I must keep walking forward.  The only thing that will keep me out of the penitentiary is forgetting what lies behind and pressing on towards the upward calling…

What ifs still linger though, and one of the greatest is what if my parents had truly known?  What if my classmates had truly known?  What if I had never been infected with the awful mentality that tells me I am ugly, and repulsive, and never shuts up even underneath smiles and during the recitation to myself ot the catechism of mental health?

If I could have had puberty blockers followed by the very hormones I am at long last taking which have brought me immeasurable inner peace and relief?

I will never know…but I see the efforts of people like my Hero, Kat over at Dandelion Fuzz, like so many (mostly) mothers and fathers who have grasped the simple basic truth that their child is a gift from God and needs only to be fed and watered, loved and nurtured to emerge as a unique and eternal embodiment of one facet of God’s heart…and I want to cry with relief that things are changing, and my prison is becoming like Alcatraz, shut down and decommissioned as inhumane and unprofitable.

And then I see the actions of wanna-be jailers, and listen to the wild and desperate cries of “gloom and doom, gloom and doom!”  They are now classifying the acceptance and active care of a trans-gender child as child abuse!

I guess to them the spankings I received were nothing more than loving efforts to keep me in line with who everyone else said I was?  The teasing I got just a jovial activity to “toughen me up and make a man outta me?”  The forever nights of turmoil workouts to empower me to have no emotions and feelings and end up with strong muscles to resist suicide and depression?  The guilt and shame that was thrown down on me from so-called people of God was merely the loving ministrations of “God’s Servants” to purify me and make me holy (read wholly oppressed and chained)?

No.

Constance, those things were child abuse!  I deal with the fallout to this day.

But I have posted this link to an article about them, about those like me, in hopes that you will know better what we have gone thru and what we face daily, and what is available to be our help…and also what we face from our accusers.

Stand in the gap?  Reach a hand, not of pity, but of support…and educate those you encounter whose minds are still chained to images of boogeymen and monsters.

In solemn longing,

Charissa