In September of this school year, our youngest child (then) Hunter, seemed out of sorts. As parents, we saw anxious and depressed behaviour. As an autistic ADHD child, we thought maybe it was something Hunter didn’t know how to express verbally. I talked to our youngest multiple times, especially when they became so closed-off that I started to worry about suicide.
About a month later, Hunter called a family meeting and was very nervous. Before it began I speculated that it may be about moods, bullying, wanting to change schools….I had a lot of guesses but no real idea. When our youngest announced to Josh, Izzy and I that they felt they were born the wrong gender, it was a relief! Josh and I had suspected for awhile and we were so glad it wasn’t drugs or suicidal ideation which, to us, is a more abstract problem to tackle. Our family asked if Hunter wanted to change their pronouns to she/her at home and school and the answer was yes. The answer to changing their name was also a yes. Other than that, our kid wanted to take it slowly and decide on the best path day-by-day.
A lot of people think being transgender is the same as being a transvestite, but this is wrong. Do your research. It’s a hard subject to boil down to a convenient & casual blog paragraph. Hunter was not announcing they wanted to dress or appear as female, but felt they ARE female and that the gender their biology has assigned to them is wrong. (So to speak and in a nutshell). That is a huge generalization of the full understanding, so, like I said, it’s worth doing a bit of research from reputable websites and sources. (A good source for this topic, in Calgary, AB, Canada, is Skipping Stone, a nonprofit organization that has an office downtown).
We went through a few names for our kid formally known as Hunter but she finally picked Bonnie. She liked the name and it also honoured her largely Scottish background, since Josh and I both have Scottish ancestry on our side of the family. We lived with the name Bonnie for months, to see if it fit and now it feels like it has always been her name. In fact, I’m in the process of finalizing it as her legal name!
I know this is a shock to most people we know, and I understand the settling in period, but to Josh and I we are just so happy that Bonnie told us. Josh and I always suspected something was off when our youngest went by Hunter. Hunter was afraid of boy puberty and said he was going to go through “mom’s type” of puberty. And intangible things. And just a sense in school that when Hunter’s class was separated into girl and boy groups for activities he longed to be in the girl group and looked like a square peg being painfully shoved into a round hole. When I volunteered in his class I could see it and sense that something was off. There are innumerable examples of what set our Spidey-senses tingling, but I won’t go on and on.
If Hunter, in those last few months before the announcement, was a huge dark worrying cloud, Bonnie is the sunshine. Oh sure, there are still cloudy days (hello! she’s a teenager), but ,for the most part, a weight seems to have been lifted off of her shoulders and Bonnie seems more herself and happier. That’s what parents want for their kids, for them to be happy.
And it isn’t as if who my youngest is has fundamentally changed- Bonnie is still the dry-humour smart-aleck who collects nutcrackers and loves history and plays videogames. But now they can do all that while being their true self and feeling accepted at home.
