Parents: How To Tell Your LGBTQ+ Kid That You Love Them

In 1980, 35 years before I transitioned, I found out that my father was prepared to love me unconditionally.

Photo by C Technical from Pexels

One of my friends made a post a few days ago on Facebook, regarding an LGBT-phobic tweet recently made by a celebrity. This tweet reminded my friend of an ugly memory from their college days. To place their post in context, my friend is amab (assigned male at birth), but they have identified as transgender, and sometimes gender-fluid, since childhood. The post begins:

“When I was in my first year of graduate school*, I passed by a group of guys standing around and talking. One guy asked the group, “Would you rather have a son who’s gay… or a daughter who’s a slut?” All the guys laughed in disgust. I heard comments like ‘Damn. No way!’, ‘How the f*** would I decide?’, and ‘f*** no to both! That’s gross!’ It was a very disappointing moment, and I was reminded of that disgusting conversation today, when I read a very homophobic tweet. But, I’m interested in how you would answer that question.”

(* this incident would have occurred in about 2010).

I replied to my friend’s Facebook post with my own tale, a personal experience of having my orientation questioned once, in May 1980, by my father. Before I dive in to a description of this conversation with my Dad, let me briefly describe myself, as I might have seemed to a casual acquaintance that year. I was 24, living in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a temporary job assignment with Duke Power Company as a draftsman on the McGuire Nuclear power station project. I was born in 1956 in Los Angeles County in Southern California, and lived there until age 7, then my family moved to San Francisco in the summer of 1964. I barely remember my early childhood in Los Angeles, and have always thought of “The City,” as native San Franciscans call it, as my home town.

November 21, 2007. The author and wife Lynn on a day trip to San Francisco. Location is the Hyde Street Pier Maritime Museum. The old Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, which had housed Al Capone after his conviction on tax evasion charges in the 1930's, and which was closed in 1963, is visible in the background. My middle name, Marie, was Lynn’s middle name, and I adopted it in her memory. Photo by author.

I was about as withdrawn and socially awkward as a teenager could possibly be, and I had been living with depression and social anxiety for so long by then — since early childhood — that I could no longer remember a time when my life had been “different” in some way… perhaps more fun? less lonely? with real friends? Engaged with (and unafraid of) people?

By the time I was in Junior High School, I had walled myself off from everybody except my father, and the reason will be pretty familiar to anyone who is transgender and born before the 1980’s: Fear. Specifically, fear of getting caught and outed as a cross-dresser, or, as it was known then, a transvestite (God, how I hate that word!) I kept my shields up all the time, and drove away everybody that tried to strike up even a casual conversation with me.

I was desperately afraid of people, but at the same time, desperate for human contact. The pressure this placed on me found an outlet in scouting, which I was active in from age 11 to 17. I only found one close friend from my participation in the program, and we drifted apart when we ended up in different high schools; I last heard from him in the summer of 1971 at age 15.

My Dad had retired in 1980 shortly after my Mom died, and he could start collecting Social Security. In the late spring of 1980, he decided to hit the road for the whole summer and make a cross-country trip to visit me, his three brothers, and his sister, who were living in various places from the midwest to the east coast.

In mid-May, Dad left his small coastal community of Half Moon Bay, California, and made it to my place a week later, a couple of days before Memorial Day weekend. He planned to stay with me for a week. On the last night of his visit, as we were getting ready for bed, he asked me to sit with him for a few minutes, to talk about something important.

December 27, 1980, my Mom’s birthday. It is 7 months after my visit with Dad and the conversation that is the subject of this blog. My Dad and my Gramma Ann, (Dad’s mother-in-law) in front of Gramma’s mobile home, in Bell Gardens, California. This photo may look like a happy Christmas family reunion, but it is actually for the memorial service for my Mom, who had died 14 months previously, and her Dad, Gramma Ann’s husband, who had passed away a week or so earlier. The unicorn plush toy that Gramma is holding was a gift to my cousin Andrea, who was Gramma’s granddaughter. As I prepared to transition in 2016, I adopted Gramma’s first name, Ann, as part of my own name, Laura-Ann. So now you know what my namesake looked like. Gramma passed away about 4 years after this photo was taken, aged 94.

This, more or less, is the conversation, as close as I can remember it after 40 years:

“Son, I’ve been wondering for a long time about your well-being. It’s been three years since you moved away, and we haven’t seen you but once for Christmas [1978]. As you grew out of childhood, you seemed to become ever more withdrawn. You hardly ever brought friends home, and never talked to us about anyone you might have been dating, or even having a close friendship with. Outside of the Scouts, as far as I could tell, you didn’t have a social life at all, just that and your school work. You are in your mid-twenties now, and as far as I know, you’ve never even dated a girl, let alone slept with one.”

Here, Dad hesitated for a long time, apparently trying to decide what he wanted to say next.

Me and my Dad, sometime in the spring or summer of 1977. I look at these old photos, and I still can’t believe how much taller I am than he is. This photo is from one of the last rolls of film I shot in San Francisco before I moved to North Carolina at the end of October 1977, and it is the last photo I ever took of me and my Dad together while I still lived with my parents. This was our living room at the John Muir Apartments, the last place I ever lived that was actually in San Francisco. Later on, from November 1980 to November 1982, I lived at another apartment complex about 3 miles south of the John Muir, in Daly City. By then, housing costs in San Francisco itself were completely out of reach — the studio I got in Daly City I could just barely afford at $450/month — 3 times what I had been paying for a 2 bedroom townhouse in Charlotte, N.C. just the previous year (1979). After the recession of 1982–1983, I had to abandon the San Francisco Bay Area and ended up in Sacramento, California, where I have lived ever since. The conversation that is the main subject of this blog took place in May 1980, about 3 years after I shot this photo, so you can picture me and my Dad still looking pretty much like this.

I had, in fact, dated a girl for a few weeks, and slept with her once — my first more-or-less happy sexual experience with another person — the year before this visit from my Dad, but I wasn’t even remotely ready for a relationship, financially or emotionally. She broke it off, nicely, a couple of months later.

I was more or less relieved at this development; I was working 60 hour weeks and barely had time to take care of myself, let alone maintain and nurture a relationship with a woman — relationships were Terra Incognita to me, and I’ve never been very good at learning new things by the seat of my pants. I need a well-laid-out user manual, with a full table of contents and index, and as we all know, there “ain’t no such thing” as a user manual when it comes to learning the infinitely complex landscape of human relationships.

I was also constantly struggling with the inner conflict of keeping my cross-dressing a secret, and wanting to open up to her and have a true and honest relationship. You might say that I was dying to ask her if I could try on some of her clothes — but this was 1980, and there was no way that I could think of, to even begin a conversation about my gender issues with a girl I had known for only a couple of weeks.

This “relationship” — if you even want to call it that — was so brief, and ended so abruptly, that I had never bothered to mention it to my parents. This was still the era of land-lines, and phoning California from North Carolina cost something like 50¢ per minute; cell phones with “free” long-distance phone calling were still a couple of decades in the future, so I didn’t phone home very often. And of course there was no internet or email yet — that was still at least 10 years away.

So, back to the bedtime conversation with my Dad. He finally made up his mind about how he wanted to proceed, and he continued this way:

“Son, if it isn’t too personal… I don’t want to make you feel bad, or afraid that I will be angry or judgmental, and I want you to know that I will love you no matter how you answer.” I nodded and told him I was okay with him asking me anything. Dad took a deep breath, and said, “Son, are you not dating girls because you are gay?”

So there it was. The 500 pound gorilla in the room, or at least that was probably how my Dad thought I saw it.

I want to emphasize here, that I trusted and loved my father absolutely, and he delivered this question in the kindest, gentlest manner and tone of voice that you could ever hope for, considering the gravity of the question. Things are a little easier and more accepting now for the LGBT community, than how I remember America in the 1980s, but the sad fact is, gay men have been almost universally reviled by the straight community, in most of the United States, for most of my lifetime. It is only in the last 10 years or so that I have perceived a lightening of cis-gender people’s attitudes about LGBT people.

And is it really that much better for queer people even now, in 2021? Four years of nearly constant attacks on us by the former Administration — especially against transgender people — and the fact that 75 million voters last November 3rd thought it would be a good idea to allow 4 more years of it, really gives me pause to wonder, just how safe are we?

Is it really any better for queer people in this country now, than it was in the 1950s? Homophobia was rampant in my youth, even in San Francisco outside of the Polk and Castro Street “gay colonies,” and this enmity would continue to plague LGBT people with employment and housing discrimination for at least 20 more years, before any acceptance of queer people became evident in society, and even then, only in a few big cities.

I don’t know what I was expecting my Dad to ask, in that moment of hesitation before he said the words “are you gay?” I certainly wasn’t expecting that particular question, because I had never thought of myself as gay, so it took me a long time, 3 minutes maybe, to come up with a coherent answer.

The fact is, I didn’t know who or what I was: human relationships were a mystery to me, and I was scared to death of people in general, everyone except my Dad, as a matter of fact, and I told him so.

My response was this, more or less:

“Dad, I don’t know. I think I like girls, and I certainly feel more comfortable around them. I’ve become afraid of men in general — their aggression, their irritability, their competitiveness, the threatening vibe I get from so many of them. I have occasionally wondered what it would be like to sleep with a man, or to perhaps just have a close male friend, but I think I’d rather partner with a woman. Maybe I’m bisexual, but I don’t know enough about human beings, or myself, to know anything about this stuff for sure.”

What I didn’t have the words, or the courage, to tell my Dad, either then or at any later time up to his death in April 1997, was that I had been an intermittent and deeply closeted cross-dresser, ever since I was about 8 years old.

For 50 years I struggled with these feelings, alone, only relieved of depression, loneliness, and what I much later came to understand was gender dysphoria, during the 28 years of my marriage to Lynn.

When I was a kid, there was no one I could talk to about my gender issues: no therapists, no school counselors, no doctors or nurses, and most certainly not my parents or my older brother, who was rabidly homophobic in his twenties, and who has only become a little more tolerant and accepting since then.

The society all around me had somehow — without explicitly stating it — made it clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that if anyone ever found out I had “gender issues,” or that I liked to play dress-up in women’s clothes, and to wear lipstick and nail polish, that the sky would fall on me.

This was the fear that most closeted trans people lived with for decades: that we would lose our jobs, our families, and maybe even our lives, “if anyone found out,” or “if we got caught.” And I never figured out what any of this, and in particular my compulsion to cross-dress, actually meant, until January 9th 2016, when I joined the River City Gems, and finally met other trans women at a casual dinner party. I literally did not know, at least not with certainty, that I was a transgender woman, until the night of that Gems event.

November 19, 2015. The first two photos ever taken of Laura-Ann. These two images mark a milestone of sorts: they document the first time that I put together a more-or-less complete female presentation of myself. I had been accumulating clothing, makeup, shoes, and wigs, piecemeal over the previous 22 months, adding to the jewelry and earrings I inherited from my wife Lynn when she passed away in November 2013. The bra and breast forms I am wearing in these photos were awful; I had only acquired them in July, about 12 weeks before these photos were shot, and they were a “shot in the dark”, purchased on-line. The bra was too small, the forms too big, and it would be another 6 months before I found a bra that I really liked. Ironically, I hardly ever wear a bra now, and haven’t worn breast forms since 2018: I decided that they actually make me feel worse about myself instead of better. They are external, not a part of me, and I realized that they were somehow a denial of who I am as a transgender woman. If I can’t grow breasts myself that are proportional to my overall body size, that is not due to a fault of my character, and hiding the fact that I am flat-chested by loading a bra with size 14 breast forms isn’t the right answer, at least not for me. This is the outfit that I wore 7 weeks later to the first River City Gems social event that I attended. The eyeglasses I am wearing in this photo are special: they were Lynn’s, and I had them re-lensed with my prescription. I still occasionally wear them, but they are delicate, and I am rough on eyeglasses, with a tendency to drop and break them, so they are now worn only on special occasions.

So what, really, could I have said to my father on that night in May 1980? I didn’t know that I was a latent transgender woman then, and even if I had, what difference would it have made? In 1980, “transvestites” were looked upon as mentally ill, at best, or as perverts and probable child molesters at worst.

I didn’t know that the WPATH Standards of Care — the “bible” for transgender mental health care professionals — had been published 8 years earlier in 1972, and that if I had only somehow fallen under the care of a therapist who had read and accepted that document, I might have been able to begin transition (or at least begin to figure out who I really am) when I was only 16 years old instead of 59.

I had no words to tell my Dad why I was so afraid of people, but I knew, deep down, why: I was scared to death that if I got too close to anyone, they would sense Laura, or even see her peering out of my eyes, and all hell would break loose. For I had known since I was 5 years old that I was a girl, and that my name was supposed to be Laura, but I had pretty deeply buried that crazy idea and didn’t let it see the light of day until I joined the Gems.

My family, c. 1994. My Dad on the left, daughter Shanna, me in the rumpled grey suit, and my wife Lynn on the right. I wish I could have told both my Dad and Lynn about who I really was. Dad passed in April 1997, and Lynn in November 2013. In May of 2016, about a month before my final gender crisis and decision to transition, I came out as transgender to Shanna, and she has been 100% accepting and supportive of me as a transgender parent. Photo by author.

One of the greatest regrets of my life is that I never got to tell my Dad about Laura-Ann. To let him know that I was actually his daughter. I wish he could know that his child — the sad, troubled, lonely, frightened young man that I was in 1980 — would eventually find a joy and happiness that would nearly erase those decades of fear and depression.

My Dad was openly bi; he made no secret of it, and I wish I could send you, gentle reader, something like an “emotion memory pill” that you could swallow, and experience for yourself, if only for a few moments, the love and compassion in that man as he sat by me on the bed that night, 40 years ago, and asked me, “Son, are you gay? It’s okay with me if you are, I love you and I just want you to be happy.”

And as it turned out, I guess I am, in fact, gay. Trans-Lesbian would actually be more accurate, I suppose. Or maybe even bi, or pansexual. I don’t really know, even now, because the reality of my relationship with my life-partner Pauline, who is also a transgender woman, is that the love and affection I feel for her doesn’t feel any different than the love I felt for Lynn during the 28 years I was married to her.

Could it be that love is fundamentally independent of gender? That heterosexual/homosexual/gay/lesbian/queer, or whatever label you want to stick onto a pair of human beings who care for each other, is irrelevant to the overall purpose of life on this sweet Earth?

If you are a parent with a child who occupies a space somewhere along the spectrum of the LGBTQ+ universe, please know this and take it to heart: being gender-creative or transgender, and/or having a sexual orientation that is other than hetero, has nothing to do with the fundamental worthiness of a human being to be treasured, loved, embraced, included, and valued, as a human being.

I have come to know a fair number of people who are not cisgender, and many who do not fit the established view of what is considered “hetero-normative” in their intimate relationships. I daresay every American alive today has gone to school with, or been part of a work group with someone who self-identified as LGBTQ in one way or another.

Whether you knew about their status or not, did the fact that they were queer or trans have any effect on their abilities to do their jobs, to be good students, to help you with your own job, to be friendly people that you maybe enjoyed sharing a lunch break or an after-work social evening with?

Be honest here, and try to ignore any LGBT prejudice you might harbor: if a co-worker of yours was good at their job, always willing to pitch in and work overtime to help the team get the job done, to share their knowledge and mentor new employees or tutor students that needed help, does it really matter if that person is queer, or transgender? Should it matter, and if so, why?

Photo by fauxels from Pexels

So, look at your own kiddo, who we will say for purposes of this thought experiment is your son, named Thomas, and now imagine, if you can, what you would say or do if that child came to you on some random Saturday morning while you’re sipping coffee and reading the weekend papers, or looking at some work report that you brought home (and need to have ready for a staff meeting at 10:00am on Monday). Tommy seems distressed, you can see that his face is blotchy and his eyes are red, as he asks you to listen for a couple of minutes to something important that he needs to tell you.

He stands there, or maybe sits next to you on the sofa, fidgeting and breathing abnormally deep, fast, and almost with a shudder to his breathing rhythm, and his hands are visibly shaking. After several false starts, where he can’t seem to verbalize what’s on his mind (I really, really hope that you are just sitting quietly and not acting impatient or pumping him), he finally blurts out, almost visibly in agony:

“Dad, I can’t stand to wear my hair in a crew cut any more. I don’t want to be in Boy Scouts. It’s just wrong! I hate this flannel shirt and blue jeans, they’re wrong, too! The other kids at school are harassing me practically every day and calling me a sissy and a fag, and I’m afraid someone’s going to beat me up on the way home from school one of these days before summer vacation starts.”

He then doubles over and seems almost ready to vomit, and he’s now shaking all over, but he continues,

“Dad, it’s killing me to pretend that I’m a boy. I can’t do it anymore. I’m not a boy and I never have been, as far back as I can remember, but I have been so afraid to say anything to you or Mom. I’m a girl, and I know somehow that my name was supposed to be Tiffany.”

And your child, now 12 or 13, who is possibly, probably, a transgender girl, and who is beginning to be wracked by exposure to testosterone, breaks down completely, buries her face in her hands, and starts sobbing uncontrollably.

If your reaction is anything other than: I would take my child into my arms, tell her “Tiffany, I love you no matter what, and no matter where your life’s journey takes you,” then I would question your right to call yourself “a parent” at all, or even “a human being.”

You have been honored with the very rare opportunity to witness, for a second time, the “birth” of your own child. Don’t do something stupid here and ruin this moment; you should cherish the memory of this day in your child’s life for the rest of your own life.

This child, who has been suffering in silence for years — gender dysphoria really sucks, take it from me — has honored you with a revelation, an epiphany, that will shape the rest of her life along a much happier path. Your daughter has just revealed to you something really incredible: after a lifetime of being unsure of her identity, of having a perception of herself that neither feels nor looks “right,” her sense of self has finally come into clear focus. The colors aren’t blurry or muddy anymore. The shape of herself feels correct and relaxed, instead of distorted and twisted.

She knows exactly who she is, finally, and in a way that is much sharper and clearer than how most people “know” themselves, a “knowing” that is more-or-less simply taking themselves for granted, as it were.

Tommy is finally certain that “Tiffany,” or maybe “Christina,” or perhaps “Allison” — whatever girl name she has been whispering to herself in the silence of her bedroom at midnight — is a real person, and not some weird figment of her imagination. Your job now is no different than it’s always been as a parent: to be 100% supportive of your child, period.

Instead of baseball practice, maybe you will be driving her to piano lessons. Along with her primary care physician, you will need to find her a gender therapist, and drive her to therapy appointments. And some day in the not-too-distant future, you might be giving her hand a last squeeze, and her cheek a last kiss, as she is wheeled on a gurney into an operating room for gender confirmation surgery. In that moment, you better be prepared to simply love her, ultimately, unconditionally, with every atom of your being, no matter what and for all time, for GCS is major surgery, and there is a small but non-zero possibility that this may be the last time you will ever see her alive, and hear her voice whisper, “I love you, Dad, thanks for being with me today.”

If you can’t do that, you may find yourself someday old and alone, with no access to her or her children — your grandkids — and is that a price you want to pay for your self-imposed “inability” to wrap your head around the idea of transgender identity?

I want to conclude here with a footnote about HIV-AIDS, a disease that was openly being called “The Gay Plague” in my youth, and which any number of religious folks were declaring to be God’s punishment on homosexuals for their “sinful lifestyle.” It is estimated to have killed 32.7 million people worldwide since the 1970s.

In 1980, this mystery plague, that had been killing gay men and IV drug users in ever-increasing numbers in major cities across the US since the mid-1970’s (predominantly New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles), was still un-named; in 1981, it was determined to likely be a viral disease of the human autoimmune system, and it was named “AIDS”, for “auto-immune deficiency syndrome.”

In 1983, the human immunodeficiency virus HIV-1 was isolated and identified as the causative agent, but treatments were still 15 years or more in the future, and the epidemic continued to explode. In 1995, the deadliest year for AIDS in the United States, it claimed 47,000 lives; for the rest of the 1990’s, the death rate slowly declined as anti-retroviral drugs were developed to treat HIV infection.

By 1995, young gay men probably felt like they had been handed a death sentence as they grew toward adulthood, and became aware of being gay. Public reaction to the knowledge that gay men, prostitutes, and IV drug users comprised most of the known cases in the early 1980’s was harsh: throughout the 1980’s, 1990’s, and into the early 2000’s, violence against the LGBTQ community has been an ever-present threat.

Image by Matthew Shepard Foundation, annotation by author.

Historical note: Genetic analysis of HIV-1 and tracing of case reports of the various secondary complications that are associated with AIDS, has led medical experts to conclude that the virus probably first jumped the species barrier from other primates to humans in 1920, in Kinshasa, then the capitol of the Belgian Congo (later Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko, and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). So it’s possible that HIV-AIDS has been with us for about a century, but was never widespread enough to become noticeable until the 1970s.