The Trans Agenda

The Trans Agenda

I sit in the back row. The room is every shade of beige, the chairs stained from a hundred butts in a hundred other hearings, senators from decades past and present listening with bored expressions as the public insists on railing their thoughts into a microphone, forever captured in the public record.

“I wanted a tattoo and changed my mind. Trans children don’t exist-this is propaganda brought on by social media and the liberal agenda and autism caused by vaccines…”

“Could you please stick to the topic, Miss?” a dull-voiced senator asks, and my shoulders ache.

This isn’t what I signed up for.

My child was born via emergency c-section. I cried out to the doctors as the anesthesia wore off on one side, the cut of the knife digging into my body as I felt the blade tear her from my body. Her birth was the single scariest, worst day of my life. A day I was promised to be the best; the most magical experience.

“Mom, I feel like Peyton. Like a boy trapped in a girl’s body.”

I suppose I should have seen it coming. She…he…had never felt comfortable in the world. There were pictures of him in a dress, a female with unhappiness dulling his eyes. He had been born miserable, angry, lashing out at a world that didn’t fit him.

It was slow, at first. That night, I took him to Target and we bought boy clothes. We cut his hair. He still went by his old name, until he tried on a few others and picked a new one. I chose his name when I was twelve years old, my favorite name in the world, and he hated it. It’s his dead name now. Sometimes I still miss it.

I didn’t sign up for this.

We took him to doctors, specialists, therapists. I sat terrified of puberty, wondering what to do. We always believed that a child should not make crucial medical decisions, that he could get care when he was eighteen. Now as puberty looms, the idea of a boy experiencing a period, developing breasts, would destroy him.

Will he kill himself if we don’t stop nature?

We see doctors. They ask me directly: Do you think he should get blockers?

Yes, I say. I can’t imagine him going though a female puberty now. He passes for male. He identifies as male. He has for two years. But the world tells me this is wrong, that he’ll change his mind.

He’s not changing his mind. What do I do? If he gets hormones at fourteen, he won’t be able to have children. But isn’t that all a female body is good for?

“Children are mutilating their bodies, when there are only two genders! This is absurd!”

I listen to the line of people queuing up to testify against treatment for trans youth. They’re protecting children.

So what am I doing?

He’s never looked happier. His eyes shine like they never did before. He’s scared they’ll take his rights way, that they’ll make it so he can’t be his true self. And I have my testimony written in my hand. I know what to say…I think.

But I can’t. I promised to protect him. When he was born, unable to breathe and sent to the NICU, I told him he would need to be brave to survive this world.

And now who needs more courage? Him or me?

They say that gender isn’t binary, and the new administration believes that trans simply means indoctrinated, but I never told him about this. He told me. He reached out and I held his hand, like so many others don’t get. I know what it means to be an outsider. I know that there are parents that won’t let their kids be around mine, because they think he is a freak, and his parents are monsters.

I just want him to be happy.

“We’ll take a forty-five minute recess,” the gray-haired senator says after four hours of testimony, and I stand, unable to take any more.

I hand my statement to the aid, and I walk out of the ancient building, a coward.

How can I fight against hatred? How can I stand up for him, when I already know how the vote is going to go?

Deep down, I hope he changes his mind. I want to be normal. I want to be accepted. I don’t want to be silenced when talk of boys and girls comes up, and I don’t fit into the conversation like I once did.

What if he’s raped in the boy’s bathroom someday? What happens when the bullying starts in earnest? When the cruelty of the world finds my ten-year-old son and steals the sparkle from his eye I finally found just from a simple purchase of boys clothing, a new name and a haircut? Why won’t they just let us be?

I cry on the drive home. I ask my mother over the speaker phone, “Why did this have to happen to us?”

And I drive home, traumatized by the realization that to them, I am a demon. I am the problem. But he told me. And I have his trust that I’ll keep him safe in a world that refuses to understand.

But sometimes I walk though the girls aisle of the clothing store and I grieve the life that I might have had. With two daughters that liked dresses and make up and jewelry, so that we wouldn’t be a target for being different, for being the Other. All I ever wanted was to belong, to fit in, and with a trans son, I know I never will, and neither will he.

But he’s happy, in spite of it all. And maybe I should be, too. Maybe these bigots that refuse to look outside their binary world can’t see past their limitations, but he can, and because of that, so can I.

We are not the villains. He is brave enough to be different and be happy in spite of social expectations, and so I endeavor to do the same.

This isn’t what I signed up for, but it’s damn well worth fighting for.

And I just enlisted.