Creating Safe Spaces for Trans Kids
Episode 63: Creating Safe Spaces for Trans Kids with Ben Greene @psuedo.bro
Ben Green, a transgender advocate and author, joins the podcast this week to discuss the important topic of transgender inclusion and support for trans kids! Ben encourages a joy-centered approach to supporting trans kids in your own life and the broader community, and celebrates the resilience and strength of the trans community.
Inside this episode:
Hear Ben’s personal experience of coming out at a young age and the challenges he faced.
The importance of creating safe spaces for trans kids to come out and be themselves.
How politics can impact the trans community and the need for understanding support, and protective legislation
Why representation and normalizing LGBTQ+ identities in media and literature is so valuable.
Ben provides tips for parents on how to talk to their kids about gender identity and how to advocate for their trans children in schools.
And so much more!
Mentioned in this episode:
Ben’s Book: My Child is Trans- Now What? A Joy Centered Approach to Support
Ben’s website: https://www.bgtranstalks.com/
Ben’s instagram: @psuedo.bro
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate 5⭐️ and write us a review! ⬇️
✨For sleep support and resources, visit heysleepybaby.com and follow @heysleepybaby on Instagram! 😴☁️🤎✨
Rachael is a mom of 3, founder of Hey, Sleepy Baby, and the host of this podcast.
Listen to the full episode
-
Welcome to No One Told Us, the podcast that tells the truth about parenting and
talks about all the stuff you wish you knew before having kids. I'm your host,
Rachael, and today I'm joined by Ben Greene. Ben is a transgender advocate and
educator who has spoken internationally on topics surrounding transgender inclusion.
After coming out at 15 in a small town, Ben has devoted his career to spreading empathy, education and storytelling around the trans experience.
He's also the author of the book My Child is Trans Now What, a joy -centered approach to support. He's passionate about educating others from a place of compassion no matter where they're starting from. I'm so, so happy to have you on the podcast, Ben. This is such an
important topic to me and to many in my community. And it's also something that a lot of people just don't really know that much about but it's more important than ever I would say especially in our current political climate to like you said have compassion and curiosity for the trans experience especially when it comes to kids. So thank you so much for joining.
Yeah absolutely thank you so much for having me. I am really really excited to be here.
Yeah we're gonna talk a little bit about the book and about your personal experience and then we'll also dive in to some more actionable things that parents can kind of take away because I know it's something that lots of us think about, right? I mean, I have three little kids
myself and I'm, you know, very aware that at any time one of them could come to me and talk about the feelings that they might be having or I just think it's so important to just be aware and be ready as a parent.
So I would love to hear your tips for talking to our kids and making sure that we create homes that are safe spaces for them to feel like they can come out at any point in time. So we will talk about that, but first I'd love to just hear your personal experience. I know you said you came out at 15 and I would love to hear a little bit about that and how that kind of shaped your experience and led you to the inspiration behind your book.
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I came out about 10 years ago now at a time and a place where transgender was not really a word anyone was using. And so I had no idea how people were gonna respond. And I was actually, I came out as bisexual first. And I knew that would be okay because I had seen the people around me react to LGB people, right? My family watched Modern Family together and there were a couple of, you know, lesbian students in the school. Like I knew that LGB people were okay, and so I came out and in general it was a very safe You know response that people had it from Connecticut and so everybody was like yeah We're cool. We know what that means like we're with it.
When I started to experience a lot of really intense gender dysphoria Especially as puberty came on but even before them I had I had known something wasn't right I just hadn't known how to talk about it I didn't have any of the tools to explain my feelings the same way I did have, you know, tools to talk about, "I have a crush on a girl and not just a crush on a boy. I had the language to understand that. I didn't have the language to understand my gender dysphoria." And once I realized I was trans, which was a very... I saw a Facebook post that said, "Hey, I'm coming out as trans. Here's what that means."
And so many things just crashed down on top of me and all made sense at once and so I said all right even if I know this fact about myself now I have no idea how the people around me are gonna feel because I've never seen them react to that and this is you know a key takeaway from this conversation today is that queer and LGBTQ + young people can't afford to guess wrong. I didn't have any evidence either way and I couldn't afford to guess wrong
and so I didn't come out for the first, you know, eight or nine months of my transition. It was just me and my two friends. And they were the only people that knew that I barely made it through that year. It was really challenging.
And when I finally came out, you know, generally people were kind, even if they didn't get it,
my parents, you know, they said, we love you. We don't understand exactly what this means, but we'll figure it out together. We love you and we're here with you. And that was so meaningful. But there were also a lot of people who said, you know, we have no We have no idea what that means, so that's on you. You gotta help us know what to do. And so I was building all my support systems as I realized I needed them. I was teaching our health classes and writing our policy and training our guidance staff, taking on all these really adult responsibilities.
And it was exhausting. And so I wrote this book because I want to be the person that I needed when I was younger, be the adult that comes in and all right, here's how we're going to do this. Here's the policy we want to have so that kids get to just be kids. You know, they don't have to be well -spoken and patient and advocates and policy experts. They can be 14. They can be stubborn and curious and anything that a kid should get to be. So I wrote this book so that parents get to be a part of building the support systems and not just saying, all right, you know, you figure out what you need and you let me know and, you know, That's fine.
That's amazing that you were able to be so conscientious as a 14, 15 -year -old kid, like getting
all of the adults to get it together with the supports that we really should already have in place, right? Did you mention that you were from Connecticut?
Yes, I am. Where?
Because I'm from Middletown.
Oh, no kidding. I'm from Weston. Oh, okay. That's so funny. Yeah, and Connecticut's a funny place because it's like, I think a lot of people assume that it's maybe very liberal, but it can also be very conservative depending on where you are. It's kind of a mixed bag, right? So yeah,
that's an interesting place to come out, especially 10 years ago, I would imagine.
You mentioned also gender dysphoria. Can you expand a little bit more about on what that means? 'Cause I think a lot of the transphobic rhetoric that is so prevalent in our country right now, I think really just comes from a lack of understanding. And so I would love for you to just go into a little more detail about what gender dysphoria means. And like you mentioned, the difference is between being gay or being bi and being trans, because they think a lot of people also confuse all of those things or kind of lump them all together.
Yeah, absolutely. What an amazing question. You know, I think in order to understand
gender dysphoria, we want to understand gender. And so to all our listeners here, I offer you a brief exercise, which is take a second and think about yourself and your body and your sense of who you are. Imagine that you were in some kind of accident and you lost a significant portion of your body. You lost all of your limbs. Are you still a woman or a man or the identity that you have? Most Well, yeah, absolutely, there are plenty of, you know, paraplegic men and women and people who, you know, have lost limbs and are still their identity.
Okay, imagine that now something has happened and you have just your head on kind of a robot body. You have your total consciousness, your personality, are these still the same person?
Yeah, absolutely. If you don't have those body parts though, if you don't have those
genitals or those reproductive organs or necessarily those chromosomes, are you still
that identity? What part of you is male or female, if it's not actually about those body parts? What you are feeling, what you have identified there, is your gender identity. Most people aren't aware that it's there because it fits so comfortably in line with their biological sex, but it is that internal perception, that belief of "I know who I am." So gender dysphoria is when that gender identity, that internal knowledge of who you are is not the same as what is on the outside, as that sex that you were assigned at birth.
So for me, my sex assigned at birth was female, but my gender identity is male. And that was really challenging. Now, for different people, this might show up in different parts of their body in different ways. I know for me, it was really challenging. The first way it showed up was just that I would stand in front of the mirror in early days of puberty for hours at a time
sometimes, and just have no sense of recognition. I had no, it felt like there was somebody else behind my eyes. It was honestly terrifying.
I've now learned the term is dissociating. I was just totally outside of my body. I also had a lot of dysphoria about my chest, which meant that I would not, you know, I wouldn't wear a t -shirt, so I wouldn't exercise. I didn't want to participate in, you know, the athletics that I loved. I could not go swimming. I could not go to the beach. I would shower with the lights off and most tragically I wouldn't hug people face on. I'm like one of the most huggy kind of person that you could ever meet but for years I wouldn't give anybody a hug because I hated the way it felt on my chest. I was missing out on my life because of gender dysphoria.
So different people will experience that in different ways and then sexual orientation is a whole different ballgame. That's about your relationships, your attractions, or your lack thereof. Someone might be asexual or aromantic. The easiest way to remember the difference is that your sexual orientation is about your relationships to others, and your gender is about your relationship to yourself. I hope that quick kind of intro summary
helps with some language.
That helps and it makes it super clear and I'm sure you dive in more to those nuances in the book. And speaking of the book, how did you kind of decide that you wanted to write this book and to like open yourself up to, you know, potential critiques or criticisms or people denying your existence? And, you know, I would imagine that it was a pretty scary topic to
tackle.
Yeah, you know, I actually came up with the idea for the book in 2018. So it has been a long time coming. about six years of work went into putting this together. And I knew that I wanted to write a book about supporting transgender people. I wanted to write a book for allies. And I'm a full -time public speaker. And so I'm also active on social media. So I'm very used to the criticism and the hate. And that comes with the territory of being transgender and existing in the public eye. And I've gotten pretty good at kind of handling that. But in 2021 I started to get more involved with PFLAG chapters.
I set out on a mission to do a free speaking event for every PFLAG chapter in the country. So far I've spoken for about 85 and there was a time where literally every week I was on a different parent support group. And I found that so many of them were asking the same
questions, were sharing the same fears, and were sharing the same frustrations with the resources that were out there. they weren't feeling like the resources they were finding, they were either out of date, or they were, you know, really grief -focused.
This must be so hard for you, phrasing a child's transition as something that has been done to them, you know, either really grief -focused or were borderline like, "Hey, why aren't you with it by now kind of coming in with a lot of anger or judgment?" Very few of the books out there were written by trans people. A lot of them were written by parents or people who were that one step removed. And so I knew that I had been working on this allyship book and I said, I think I need to pivot and specifically write this book for parents 'cause that's where, you know, as trans youth continue to become the major political battleground, you know, I live in
Missouri now, so I am very involved in politics and I recognize this is the area where I might be able to do the most good.
That's amazing. I'm so glad also that you brought politics because it's very pertinent right now. We're going to take a quick break and come right back and I'm going to ask you about that.
Okay, so we're back with Ben Green and right before the break you mentioned that
you're now living in Missouri, which has got to be wild. And you know, we're at this like very kind of scary moment in time for lots of different reasons with the political landscape here in the US and this is not a Political podcast, but as I remind parents all the time, parenting is Political and the choices that we make with who we vote into office affect all of us and affect all of our kids. So we all do have to care about it. We don't get to just opt out. I Would kind of love for you to just talk a little bit and you know, this would be a whole 20 ,000 part episode, but just like very briefly, how do politics interact with the lived experience of trans people, in particular trans kids?
Yeah, absolutely. So I know I'll speak for myself and I'll share, you know, what I think on behalf of trans kids, I have been made political against my will. I don't want to be political. A lot of times I go to speak at companies and they say, well, you know, we actually, you know, we don't want to have a trans speaker because we don't want to get political. The second I walk into a room, I am political against my will and trans kids even more so. They just want to play with their friends.
They just want to go to school and go to the bathroom and maybe God forbid play soccer. They just, they want to be kids. They don't want to be, you know, debating. They don't want to be going to testify in a state, you know, courthouse. They don't want to do any of that. They want to be kids. So it really is tremendously impacting us. We're having an internal refugee crisis across the United States with hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ people and their families looking to move, you know, in Missouri, when our gender from a care ban passed last summer and went into effect almost every weekend is a party to help somebody move out of
their house and move to one of the 12 refugee states.
My friends are leaving because they're not safe and that breaks my heart. And there are lots of families who can't afford to leave, who can't get a job change or can't change their certification or who shouldn't have to leave, who don't want to leave because they've built their homes and their communities here. So it's really, really hard on these kids and it creates a vision for parents when they have a kid come out.
The first thought isn't, how can I give my kid love? It's, "Oh no, like what about all these bills? "What's wrong with my child?" Like it both creates a lot of fear and a lot of fear that causes parents to say I don't really want you to be trans because I don't want you to suffer. And it creates a lot of misinformation which that's the goal of the bills. It was never about fairness in women's sports. It was never about protecting girls. It was about building anger towards the community, building a belief that this is a people who are, you know, groomers and cheaters and sex offenders and just all these horrible things that when we propose these bills and we
debate them publicly, we, you know, give them validation.
We say, okay, we agree there's a problem and we disagree on the solution. In Missouri, we had eight anti -trans sports bills and we had five trans athletes across the entire state. That's more than one bill per child. But we debate this issue as if it's really present, as if there are trans kids coming and winning every medal. But it was never about that. It was about building anger. So now you also have kids coming out. You know, somebody that I know is a tutor for a kid who had come out to them as soon as they got hired. And the kid was like, yeah, like, wow, it's so meaningful to me.
They built the whole relationship. And the mom loved my friend was using their pronouns was super affirming and kind. And when the kid came out to the mom, the mom has spent, you know, years at this point hearing about how trans people are groomers. And so she went in on my friend, how could you do this to my child? I can't believe you pressured them. And so it's creating this culture of, you know, in 2015, I said, I can't afford to guess wrong because I don't have any data points either way. When you're sitting and the world is screaming, you know, I don't want you to be transgender. that feels even scarier to come out, which is why
it's even more important for parents to be proactive in making sure their kids know, hey, I would love you, I would support you.
Anyway, if you're trans, if you're queer, if you're whatever, I'm here, I love you, I see you. Because kids are trying to do that mental math and if you're not saying something positive, they can't afford to guess wrong.
That's so true. And especially when we know the horrifying stats about suicide rates for trans kids and young people and you're right we just we can't afford to stay neutral on it in my opinion so the other thing that's frustrating about what you were saying while you were talking I was just getting so riled up because it's true it's like these bills that are introduced really are not helping anyone they're not providing anything useful to any member of society they're just used to fuel hate and also of fuel misunderstanding. I think one of the big
things that I see in the political discussions around it is there's just so much misunderstanding.
People don't understand. No one would choose this. Like you're not choosing to be transgender in any way, like I'm not choosing to be female and female presenting and female identifying. Like it's just, I don't know. I don't know where, that's why I'm so glad that your book exists, to start getting some of that understanding out there and that real information because I think so many people just don't understand and they think that just because their child says something once they must have been groomed or that they must have like these horrible influences or it's just so crazy.
Even the things that I'm served on like Instagram and TikTok, sometimes I'm just like, how do people really think this way. So do you have any ideas for parents who are navigating some of that misinformation online?
I always love to remind people like, you think someone could make your child transgender? Have you tried to make your child clean their room? It's really hard to make kids do stuff. You couldn't make them be gay.
Especially something that's going to make their life categorically more difficult. Like who would choose that? It's just it doesn't make any sense. Thank you for shedding some light on how those policies can really be so detrimental and so hurtful. When we come back from this
next quick break, we're gonna dive into the parenting part of things because parents really need to understand, they really need to create safe spaces. I think most of us really want to do these things for our kids and sometimes we're just not sure how to start or we're kind of scared to have those conversations. So we're going to take a quick break and we'll come right back.
Okay so we're back with Ben Greene and I'd love to kind of dive into the parenting part of this discussion since that's what your book is all about is empowering parents to have these conversations to be open with their kids and to be advocates and allies for the trans community, whether or not they end up having a child that is trans or not. I think it's so important for all of us to model inclusion and to model compassion, even if our children are not trans, we're going to encounter people that are. So how do we have those discussions, right?
So I think one thing that parents are wondering about or are confused about maybe is when does this start? Like how early might you see these signs? And how do you know the difference between a child who's like pretending, oh, I want to pretend that I'm a princess. I
want to pretend that I'm a boy. I want to pretend that I'm a cat. Like kids do that stuff all the time and it doesn't necessarily mean anything that deep. But sometimes it does. And sometimes those are those first little signs. So I think that's maybe what I'd love for you to start with is like, how early do you really know and when do you take it seriously?
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, a lot of parents bring up that stress, whether it is talking about little kids or teenagers of like, how do you know when it's a phase? Kids go through lots
of phases and play lots of pretend. And identity is different. And the ways kids talk about identity is different. So the earliest age scientifically that we found that kids can begin to conceptualize the idea of a gender identity is the age of three. And people get really surprised the three they said three, you know How is a kid old enough to know that they're transgender and I respond I say if that's the case How are they old enough to know that they're cisgender?
The only difference is that one of those identities we want them to be with air quotes and one of them We do not want them to be with air quotes. So, you know giving people that context
There are a number of diagnostic criteria that we use when determining, you know, what what is our kid telling us. And for trans kids in particular, the diagnostic criteria are consistent, insistent, and persistent.
So consistent. Are they regularly saying, "Mom, I'm a boy." Or is it, "Mom, I'm a boy. Mom, I'm a firetruck. Mom, I like, are they exploring or are they every day saying, "Mom, I wish I had been born a girl." Something is not right with my body. Are they insistent? Is it firm? Are they having tantrums when they have to wear gender -specific clothes or go into the bathroom? Is it something that they are bringing up to you regularly? And remember, if you shut it down, sometimes kids stop bringing it up because they stop feeling safe to do so, not because they stop feeling that way. But are they insistent in bringing it up?
And are they persistent? Does that last over time that they are always saying, "Mom, when do I get to be a boy? When am I supposed to grow this body part that you have that I don't have yet? When am I, you know, when is my body going to change this way? When do I get to cut my hair? You know, whatever it is, is that coming up regularly?
Now, the other thing I'll share is there's a lot of stress about what if we get it wrong? What if I support my kid and it was a phase before puberty, there's nothing permanent that is happening. The worst case scenario is that your kid learns that you would love them no matter what? If they say, okay, I want to go buy a different name for a couple of weeks and you call them that name and they say, okay, I'm ready to go back to my other name. You've sent an unequivocal message of love to that kid.
If they are trans, they know that you're on their side. If they're not trans, they know that you're on their side, but there are no surgeries happening before puberty. There are no medical transitionings happening before puberty. Puberty blockers are not very common. So some kids will go on puberty blockers, but there aren't major permanent conversations we're having at all with kids that age. It's just love. That's the only tool in our toolbox for kids that age is education and support and kindness and playing with them and coming into that world with them.
So there's a lot of fear around that, but you know, giving them that love when they say, "Mama, you know, I'd like to be a boy. Give them space to say, Okay, tell me more about
that. Tell me more about why. How are you feeling? Not every kid who says I want to be a boy while we play this game is doing it because they're transgender. But make space for that conversation and help them Know what words to use to have that conversation.
I love that and I love that you addressed the medical piece too because I think that's another huge source of misinformation that I see. People are in like this moral panic that we're drugging kids in kindergarten or like putting them in forced surgeries when they're seven years old. Like it's just all this stuff that is so unhinged and so Untrue and people just don't understand the process that like there's therapy. There's so much that would come before Making those huge decisions like those things are not done lightly….
It’s actually really hard to get surgery even as an adult.
Right exactly. It's not that easy. It's so wild that people act like it's happening all the time. It's really not. So then the school piece, so maybe your child is now school age and maybe they're
having these discussions and they have been for a while. They're persistent, like you say, and consistent. How would you go about addressing the school and kind of letting the school know or making sure that the school is going to be a safe place?
Yeah, so there are a couple of big things and these are talked about quite Extensively in the book because this is very present on a lot of families minds. The first thing is to make sure that you're talking to your kid and that they are leading the way with what they want to do. Your kid might not want to tell all of their peers yet Or they might say I really want to come back to school in the fall with my new long hair and for everyone to call me Jessica, you know Talk to your kid and let them lead the way on, all right, who do you want us to come out
to, and what things are you worried about?
Are there specific people who have said things or, you know, what do you want to make sure? What do you need? And then advocating for those things with the school specifically. In terms of how we're creating that safe environment, the first thing we want to do if we are outside of the school is find our champions. This goes for school, this goes for college, this
goes for workplace, anywhere anywhere you are, where you're trying to build a supportive environment, figure out who else is on your team.
Because it might be easy to say, I'm the first person to ever do this. I don't have anybody else in my corner, you know, connecting to those resources and saying, all right, there's an
LGBT student group in the high school. Let me reach out, even if we're not in the high school, it's a small school system. Let me reach out to the teacher that leads that and ask if they know who at the elementary school might be an affirming resource for my kid. Let me reach out to the principal and say, "Hey, here's the position we're in. Do you feel prepared to support my child?"
So finding your champions and asking for their support. When I was coming out, there were a couple of teachers who had a little bit of a hard time with using the right pronouns for me at first, and they weren't really hearing it from me. And so I reached out to their peers, teachers that I knew were my champions, and I said, "Hey, would you be willing to talk to this teacher for And sure enough, they were able to, you know, Sarah and I heard it from my peer now, or I heard it from my boss now, and now I'm ready to show up. So finding your champions, talking to your kid about what needs they have and advocating for those needs, making sure we're providing education.
A lot of people have not been exposed to this before. They don't know what they're supposed to do. So coming in with, hey, you know, you know, I had one family that I was coaching through their journey and they said, the school doesn't really know what to do. We're gonna come out, we're gonna help our kid come out and then we're gonna bring you in to do a training for the staff or we're gonna recommend your book or a different resource, it doesn't have to be me, but offering those resources, 'cause a lot of people are not hateful. It can be really easy to feel like everybody is hateful.
Most people are just confused and they don't know where to start, they don't know what to ask. So having those resources that people know they can say, all right, this is the first trans person I've ever met. It's not that I'm unkind, it's that I don't know how to handle it. So what resources, how are we setting people up for success?
And knowing your rights is the last big one, reaching out to your local LGBT organizations on a state level or on an even local or more local level to find out, hey, what rights does my child have at school and how can I make sure those aren't being violated? 'Cause a lot at times schools don't know what they are legally required to do to protect your kid and to build a
safe space for them.
That's so true and I'm sure that that varies from state to state in different communities so that's really important to make sure that you know the rights in your own area right and like you mentioned it's so important for not just the parents of the trans child but for the school community and the parent community to kind of know how to embrace that family and how to talk to their kids about it.
Do you have any advice for, you know, maybe someone listening has a child in their kids class that has come out or who is exploring? How do you talk to your kids about one of their peers in a way that makes sense to a little kid but is also, you know, supportive and respectful?
The biggest thing is that, you know, people share a lot of fear around how are kids going to understand this? It's so complicated for adults. I can't imagine a trial trying to understand it. It's actually very easy for kids to understand. Kids get it. Trans and queer identities.
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, they're fine.
So the biggest thing I say, and this honestly is a resource in a number of ways, normalizing representation of LGBTQ identities in the stories that your family consumes, whether that is in the books that you read together, in the movies you watch, the TV shows, or you know the Broadway shows you go to, however you like to see stories. Normalizing, seeing stories that prominently feature LGBTQ characters, and then having discussions about those stories, it doesn't have to be big, but just saying, "Wow, wasn't it so cute when those characters got
married at the end of the movie?" Or, "Wow, it must have been really hard for that person that nobody was using the right pronouns for her while she was at school. But having those representation does two things.
One, if your kid is questioning their identity, it gives them language to understand what's possible and it gives them knowledge that you are a safe person because they've seen you react to the diversity of identities and they know you're cool with it.
And two, if they're not LGBTQ + they learn that it's normal for someone to be LGBTQ + and you're raising a stellar ally who has a kid come out in their class and says yeah I just read a book last week about how hard it can be when people don't accept you like why don't you come over and play with us you're either raising an ally or a kid who feels safe talking to you and that is a win -win scenario that representation is never going to make someone trans gay bisexual whatever it is it's just going to make them have the safety and the knowledge to share that. Or it's gonna make them an ally.
I love that. I just got chills when you were talking about that and when you said it's a win -win and it's so true. Like talking about this stuff, I think people are scared to do it 'cause they don't wanna mess it up. It feels like such a big thing to talk about but you're right, it's a win -win and to kids. Like I've talked to my kids about this a million times. We live in San Francisco so
they're exposed to everything which is great but you But we do have those explicit conversations too where we talk about people marrying whoever they want, loving whoever they want, some people are girls, some people are boys, some people don't really feel like either one. It's just they get it and they're just like, "Oh, okay."
And they're off to whatever they were doing before. It's really not that deep to them at all, which is so refreshing. I wish adults could be that way too. But I think to adults, and I think maybe we can start to wrap up here, but this is something I really wanted to address too, because I think for adults, it does feel really big.
And for parents, it does feel really big. And there is maybe that process of grieving, the child that you gave birth to and the child that you raised in a certain way with a certain name, with all of these ideas about who they would be to act like it's no big deal, is also not Affirming to that parent right because it is like a loss to them. Do you talk about this too in the book? I think you called it the grief of expectations. Can you expand a little bit on that?
Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to expand on that and also to talk just briefly about the overall joy center of You know the grief of expectations a lot of parents say it feels like you know I've lost my child or I lost a daughter. But I gained a son, that became a very common way to talk about trans identities. Now, that was actually one of the biggest reasons that drove me to write my book, 'cause so many books out there centered that grief, really said this journey is about that grief.
As a trans kid, whose family went through that grieving process, you know, I felt like I've known who I am the whole time, I am finally ready to share that. I had come to this realization that, you know, Ben as a trans person is the same person, the same human that I was when I was a girl. I'm just happier. I'm just more comfortable. I was so excited. And I came out to my family and they told me that it felt like I killed someone. That is heartbreaking for a child because that's what grief, that grief that you're saying, I lost a child is saying, I don't know who you are.
And for the kids who are coming out, we know we've been that person the whole time. It is gut -wrenching. Now, I am never ever going to tell you how to feel. That is not appropriate, that is not possible. No one is in control of how they feel. What you're in control of is how you respond to your thoughts, how you think about them, how you talk about them.
So find places to process that aren't your kid. I'm not mad at my parents for going through those feelings, I am frustrated that they chose to share them with me because that really, you know, I wasn't the right audience. I didn't know how to process that or how to support them. And, you know, think, sit and think for a minute about what am I actually losing? Do I know for sure that it is gone? Do I know for sure that I had it?
And shifting to think about what am I gaining, right? My parents We're losing their little girl. And we're afraid that we were gonna have a less close relationship or all these different things. And we've actually gotten much closer, including me and my mom, have a much closer mother -son relationship than we ever had as a mother -daughter relationship because I have seen the ways she has chosen to show up for me as a real champion for me in my life.
So really, you know,, we grieve expectations of I know exactly what your life is going to look like because you were born my son. I know what my role will be in your college. I know what my role will be in your wedding. I know what your family will look like. Do you know for sure that he was going to have, you know, two and a half kids and a traditional wedding and the whole like classic American life?
No, we're grieving our expectations, which is allowed. It's understandable. Things are going to be different. I can't promise what I can't promise how things are going to change as they often do. I also went to college and said, hey, I think I might want to be a theater major and my parents had to grieve that. You know, there are all these different ways that our kids defy us. And I think in general, this speaks to the subtitle of my book and the center of my work, which is the joy centered approach to support.
It can be so easy when someone comes out to feel like this is a bad thing. This is a worst case scenario. I love you because I know that you wouldn't choose to be this way and that this is really horrible and it makes it really hard to support our kids when what's driving us is suicide statistics and anxiety and depression. We've got a very clear picture of what we're running away from but that makes it really hard when we talk about things like regret because all we know is running.
There are lots of regrets that we encourage our loved ones to risk all the time. Driving is super dangerous. Most people don't use their college major. 35 % of first marriages end in divorce. There are so many regrets we risk because we understand what we stand to gain. And so I take a joy -centered approach in my work to say, hey, your kid's coming out. It's not just
about what you're losing. It's not just about what's going to go wrong. There are millions of transgender people out there, adults, parents, grandparents. I am married. I am happy. I have a community. I have people who love me. I know trans astronauts, trans people in every state in this country and every faith tradition in every career.
There are trans people everywhere, living beautiful, happy, fulfilling lives. And that never comes up in our conversations around supporting trans kids. It's about the problems that come up and the bullying and the dysphoria. I love being trans. I love that I've gotten to build myself from the ground up. I love the communities that I've built and the strength and intentionality that I've learned. I love the man that I have built myself into.
And it is so important to remember that this journey is not just about what we're losing. It is also about what we're and what we're gaining so that that joy center remembering to celebrate and have fun and let our kids be kids and be playful and be creative is crucial
to you know having a meaningful supportive presence.
Oh my gosh I love that so much thank you for reframing it that way for us because I think as parents we always just want the best for our kids and our minds do tend to go to like the worst case scenarios and the scary things I don't know why that happens but it does. So I think that reminder to look at the joy and look at the positives is so needed and so left out of the conversation too often. So thank you so much for being here.
Can you share a little bit more about where people can connect with you and where they can find your book?
Yeah, absolutely. My book is available anywhere you buy your books. Ideally at an independent bookstore because they do a whole lot of great work for all of our communities. But also you can get it on Amazon, you can get it at a library. Hopefully there'll be an audio book out there eventually, especially for parents. I feel like those are great. So my book is available hopefully anywhere. You can connect with me online. You can find my website,
bgtranstalks .com. My email is the same. And my social media is sudo .bro, P -S -E -U -D dot b -r -o because I do like I'm your trans older brother. It's cute. I think it's funny It's a lot of validations and affirmations and encouragement for trans folks and their families. Please feel free to reach out. However, I can support you and thank you for listening.
Awesome, I will link all of that in the show notes. Thank you so so much for joining. Have a great rest of your day
Thanks so much for having me
