Trans Fam II - When Mum Becomes Dad

We've seen the popular take now - brave, stoic and proud parents forge the way ahead for their trans children, with photogenic smiles and open hearts. They follow the beaten track of denial, conflict, bargaining, a creeping acceptance, epiphany, the conflict externalises and finally, the triumph.

The tale of the trans parent is less told, although it is growing. The trans parent has not only their own cross to bear, but that of their child. 

The message is that not being affirmative of gender identity is antagonistic. There's no way round it - it is hate-fuelled, ignorant and intolerant. Not accepting the parent as they see themselves is not just an act of hatred against them, but also their children.

Clearly, transition is often a painful process involving significant emotional toil, although personally I've no doubt that sometimes it involves a large portion of attention seeking and narcissism (see John Ozimek AKA 'Jane Fae' telling his child he was to transition the day before she sat her A Levels) 

Maybe it isn't always possible to put aching dysphoria aside. Maybe it is the best thing for some families. What I am interested in here is the media portrayal, what is shown and what is questioned.

When Mum Became Dad, on CBBC, follows Tilly, 12, a really lovely and very mature girl who's mum 'became dad' when she was seven. Tilly lives now with her mother as 'dad Jack' and a younger brother, Mal, 9. Dad Peter lives across road. 

In primary school Tilly experienced a lot of bullying. She has moved into secondary school now and is away from her best friend. The theme running through this is her fear of the reaction of her new friends, specifically as her birthday looms and she anticipates awkward questions when friends visit the house for her party.

In her quest for answers on how to address the upcoming party, Tilly arranges to meet Faith, who's mother also transitioned. How does she introduce dad Jack as in fact her mum, but who must still be called and recognised as a dad, a man?

Faith is 14, and again is very mature. She says 'my mum's not she any more and thats good cos he's happy'. She struggled with the loss of her mother figure, and continues to go to bereavement counselling to cope. Tilly also misses having a mother figure. Rather poignantly, Faith says that the question 'who do i call mum now?' hung over her. It is patently obvious this is a significant trauma, but one that is depicted as necessary and downplayed as a stepping stone to true acceptance. 

Changing the attitudes of other people is now the girls' collective endeavour. I can't say it felt very constructive, just a cause in which to funnel their pain, to cram the prescribed slogans into their heads and kill any dissenting thought.

Little brother Mal is struggling. In school we're told another child was 'mean' when discussing a character in a book, who's mum was taken away. 'Your mum left you too, didn't she?' is the offending sentence. This leaves Mal very upset, and it's clear he doesn't share that with 'dad Jack' until much later on, apparently when Jack is driving back from the meeting with Faith. 

It's pretty startling at this point just how unengaged Jack seems to be. Tilly is the one giving affection. From the monotone voice and the standard 'how did that make you feel?' crap counsellor questions from Jack, who offers to go and speak to the teacher to explain why this upset him so much (how is it possible the teachers of this little boy don't know?) to Tilly seen hugging and comforting Mal later on, what we see is Tilly as the mother figure, she is the solid ground Mal reaches for when in distress. She is endlessly giving and mediating between a world of harshness (I'm far from convinced the other child was deliberately 'mean' - it's simply a statement of fact, and it has distressed him deeply, five years after it happened) and the love for her family. Clearly we don't see it all, but this is the way it is presented.

In the house one day, Tilly asks Jack when she began to transition. Jack instantly calls back "I don't like the word transition" and explains it implies a beginning, when her trans-ness was there all along. It's a curiously evasive answer, and it strikes me Jack is glossing over an extremely significant time in Tilly's life, one which she presumably revisits and needs to structure and order, compose. It's the remains of a landmine that blew while she was likely still too young to differentiate between fantasy and reality, that she needs to retrace and remodel. It's her family terrain, and leaving it in rubble, telling her the firm ground she once stood on was never really as she remembers, seems unfair and cruel. Jack was always Jack, a gestational father, and the landmine never really happened - it was just the brave light of honesty which illuminated their lives. 

This was not a choice, not a metamorphosis, just an admission and dropping of pretence. One that leaves children in bereavement counselling.

They sit down and look through old photographs, and Jack claims she lived as a boy for over a year when about seven or eight. The photos show pretty typical gender neutral 70's and 80's fashion, nothing you would say is unusual for a child of the era. Later we hear Jack say that when she decided to transition (seems, despite pulling Tilly up on the word before, she doesn't have a better word for it) she reached out to her sister and mum and asked that they be there for Tilly when she needs a female role model. 

They go to see Jo, Jack's sister. It seems she lives a long drive away. Jo struggles with saying she has two brothers now, when it was always a brother and a sister. She struggles with calling Jack 'Jack'. Tilly asks Jo if she ever expected Jack to transition. Jo said no, there was never anything that made her suspect her sister might be trans. It seems in stark contrast to the story of Jack living as Jim in childhood, for a whole year, but this is fluffy-feels tv and confronting an inconsistent narrative isn't on the agenda.

I wonder if Jack nominating out this maternal / female elder role to her mum and sister is good forethought, an example of thinking of Tilly's needs, or just abdication of a role that's not transferable, that can't be assigned to a new keeper. What are female role models? Someone who nurtures, someone who can guide a girl through puberty, periods, prom? I don't know why Jack is incapable of that, really. We keep hearing that it isn't that the person Jack was before is gone, but simply 'he is a happier version now'. 

We're up early, off to visit Nat, a boy who's mother transitioned, too. This is largely about how Mal can be counselled through what's been a really distressing time for him. Nat is, again, a really mature, compassionate and sensitive kid. We never see more than a glimpse of the dads of Faith and Nat, it's the kids and their world which I suppose is deemed appropriate for the audience. It doesn't help with the feeling that they are all on their own though.

Nat says his new 'dad' made him feel comfortable. He doesn't appear as fragile as the others. His advice again seems to reinforce the mother-status Tilly holds. He says she needs to be a rock for Mal, and he has some good advice about how the kids who say the 'wrong' things are doing so to be mean. They don't get it. Nat says if this happens again, to call him. It’s bitter-sweet stuff. I think this is the elephant in the room, how do children have the capacity to process such complex, painful, confusing changes? Surely, surely this isn't 'good because he's happy now' but actually a serious trauma, a huge change that leaves these kids in desperate uncertainty over who they are, who their family is, and what else might change?

Maybe the transition of a parent is inevitable sometimes and it really is better to be done and get the angst of living as your born sex over. It just isn't obvious to me that the parents fully appreciate it, or that anyone does. It seems to be distilled into a clash of us and them, good people and transphobes. Everything would be so much easier if others would see people as they do, as we should. Of course having to traverse this seismic shift and then suffering bullying is horrific, and I can't overstate that. Of course the bullying is deeply hurtful and damaging and wrong, it's intolerable. It just isn't necessarily at play when one nine year old says to another that 'your mum left you too, didn't she?' That seems more like a clumsy, unwanted reminder of truth. That it distressed Mal so deeply, five years later, is heartbreaking.

One of Nat's words of wisdom was to remind Tilly and Mal that they might avoid the truth at times but they must never lie. His sister did - she told her school friends that her mum was away. This went on for a long time, until it became agonising, stressful and unsustainable. 'You have to come to terms' with what's happened, he says. I find it all very painful to watch.

Tilly and Nat decide to do a talk at Mal's school to help with his year's understanding of trans issues. Tilly is excitedly organising for it and asks Jack if she can share some photographs in her presentation to help her little brother. Jack's not ok with that. It just seems somewhat staggering to me that Jack is there with these boundaries when Tilly is so determined to make life easier for her brother, for Jack's son. He won't be present, the audience are nine years old, both kids have felt victimised in school and are scared and even with this act of optimistic, proactive bravery, Jack has her guard up and is unwilling to give Tilly what she feels will help. At the presentation, Nat explains that when someone transitions they only change on the outside, not inside. They are still the same person. This isn't true though, is it? What has changed for these kids - their mother's looks, clothes and name? 

It's much more than that for these children. They lose the one they call mum; their lives are irrevocably changed; there are taboo words and times and photos; they have to smooth the path ahead for siblings and themselves and deal with a parent who is in the middle of an artificial metamorphosis. It's not just appearance for these kids, and god bless them they all seem entirely motivated by aiding others. Like little rainbow warriors. 

After Nat, Tilly explains she felt wobbly, she needed reassurance after the news her mum was transitioning. Metaphors of landmines and earthquakes fill my head. Nat was just seven - the same age as Tilly was - when his 'mum became dad'. He explains how being disrespectful about the trans parent hurts them. Use preferred pronouns, it's about being kind and respectful. 

Jack seems to me to have abdicated roles and identity of a mother while those children were still very small. I find it difficult to imagine Jack as her previous self without picturing a woman desperate for escape, for new boundaries to erect which forbid certain demands, that reinvents her body as a distinct from the children she bore, that re-asserts her will. It feels closer to a kind of abandonment than resurrection to me

The children are quite possibly a rebuke to everything I've said here, as they are all kind, caring, mature and smart. I hope it's that they've been so well supported they return it, that their needs are well met, that they display the wish to help others because they themselves are propped up in times of despair. It feels a little like they were betrayed, to me. That one desperate search to be something else, when their children were so young they saw themselves as an inseparable being from their mums, has wreaked terrible harm. 

These precocious, empathetic, sweet little allies are somehow fully 'the child of the trans dad'. Where is the anger? It isn't spoken of and I have no idea how they will eventually manifest this. It's a fundamental part of grief, and an important, ego-saving, life-defending response to being hurt. We never see this. It is entirely about moving forward with brave slogans and new concepts and righting the world. It seems a million miles away from child-centred.