DONALD COLLINS
I have a tattoo of a robin on my left bicep, my first. Tattoos became a part of my ever evolving vision of self sometime during my junior year of college. When I was working a paid internship in New York and had extra cash on hand, I found a reputable artist and started decorating.
I prepare to tell my mother about this tattoo as we depart from a local coffee shop. So many long, difficult talks between my mother and me have taken place in a car. I remember her visiting me at boarding school, taking me for a muchneeded lunch and a drive. We would park somewhere and talk. She would ask ques- tions with the kind of frustration that comes from knowing that someone is unhappy and not knowing how to help that person. I would desperately try to impart any understanding of the unhappiness I had no name for. Then, with something short of relief, she would return home and I, to school.
Today we are both in good spirits, and I am hesitant to stir up any trouble. But the opportune moment lingers and luckily, I’ve paved my own way.
These hundred difficult talks of ours, some harder than others, make my admission near casual.
“I got a tattoo in New York,” I tell her. “I thought about it for a long time, and I’m very happy with it. I just didn’t want to surprise you.”
I show her the tattoo, and she is surprised, but polite. “It’s very well done,” she remarks. After getting the tattoo, I found out the robin is the state bird of Connecticut — site of my coming out, my boarding school years, and my family’s current home. I chose it because robins are, mythically, the bird of springtime, of new beginnings.
Being trans, or my way of being trans, involves a lot of starting over. I filled out hours of paperwork to create this person. I celebrate new birthdays and anniversaries for myself. I have a new name, a new body, and a new will to enjoy life. Opportunities and friendships ripen around the arrival of this new person. He is welcome in this long-hibernating world of his own making.
I wear my robin like a badge and bring my own spring with me.
I had just started boarding high school at Loomis Chaffee when I intuited a severe misalignment between my physical and mental gender orientation.
My first two years of Loomis went by in a melancholy blur. I enjoyed my coursework, met a few close friends, but otherwise deteriorated quickly, slipping into intense periods of depression.
In eighth grade I had participated in hyperfeminine presentation, complete with long hair, rings, scarves, and tailored clothing, believing it would help me fit in more and banking that I would adapt to it with time.
My “girl” clothes caused me great discomfort, but everything was easier when I wore them. People didn’t correct my behaviour or appearance. I didn’t stand out. But by the end of my freshman year, I packed everything away, feeling suffocated. Within months of being at Loomis, I cut my hair sloppily short and took to wearing oversized thrift-store men’s clothing. I became less and less recognizable to my mother. My dad wondered if I was gay. Friends struggled to interpret my behaviour. I was talkative, cheerful — then suddenly morose, beyond reach.
I had weekly sessions with Kendall, an agreeable, grounded therapist, for over two years. She was the first adult I expressed my gender dissonance to.
“Sometimes,” I told her, “I feel like my life would have been so much better if I were a boy.”
After my “coming out” session with Kendall I took the time to lie quietly in my room and explore the shocking (at the time) words I had spoken.
During our next appointment I got specific: “I think I’m transgender.”
On a winter weekend home from school my senior year, I very emotionally told my mother these exact words in our kitchen. I noticed a blank expression in her eyes. I should have known in that moment that the word did not make contact with her. She didn’t understand. She reassured me that things were going to be OK and thanked me for telling her. Emboldened by this response, I began to elaborate on my plans (whoops!). I was changing my name and pronouns at school and would begin living “as a man” full time immediately. Then I saw the word connect, and the mood changed. “What?” she said, incredulous. By the end of the evening we were both exhausted from crying and arguing.
She asked me not to come out at school, to put it off, to give us some time to think all this through. I’ve never been one to disobey my mom or my family, but her request was directly at odds with my sense of well-being.
“Don’t do this,” my mother said.
I came out at the Christmas party of my (almost) all-girls dorm a week later.
“We have a short announcement before the party ends,” my dorm parent Mrs. A. shouted into the giggling crowd. Everyone quieted, and she gestured for me to speak.
“I have something important I want to tell you,” I said to the room of attentive girls, standing amid streamers and tables of cupcakes.
“I identify as transgender,” I continued slowly. “I feel like a boy, even though I was born a girl. Everyone here knows me as ‘J.,’ but I would prefer to go by the name ‘Donnie’ and male pronouns.”
The girls hugged me, supported me, and respected me. They corrected their peers, checked in on me, remained some of my closest friends in the years to come.
As much as the support of Palmer Dormitory meant to me, it was not the same as the support of a parent.
My college counsellor, Beatrice, called my mom at home with the answer to a simple admissions question. She used the name “Donnie” when referring to me. This is how my mother learned I had come out at school. And she didn’t even like Beatrice to begin with.
“I had to find out from that . . . woman!” she hissed. I wanted to remind my mom that she had already found out from me. I had told her first, and she could have been a part of this process. My mom needed more time, and I had no more time left to give.
Our late-night weekend living room conversations only served to put our views into sharper contrast: me, certain I needed legal and physical procedures to confirm my gender; she, distraught, convinced I was ruining my life. Loomis, unsure of how to manage its first out trans student, reacted in earnest accommodation.
Loomis, the one-time source of all my stress and exhaustion, was now my haven. My mom, my truest confidant and advocate, was now part opposition, part victim. I was finally accomplishing everything she had hoped for me — genuine optimism for myself, interesting classwork, a thriving social life — but it all came at the expense of her “daughter,” the one price she was not willing to pay.
When I graduated Loomis, the purgatorial haze remained.
I had been granted “permission” to graduate in the masculine style, khakis and a blue blazer. Students convened on the quadrangle where the genders were split into their two lines and herded onto bleachers. Our delirious, pomaded heads smiled for the camera and then filed through the main academic hall.
In a yard facing the picturesque entrance road, the senior class found the chairs we would call home for the next four hours. I brimmed with accomplishment and something else … disappointment?
After six months as “Donnie,” I would be graduating under my birth name, “J.”
My family had financed my education in conjunction with academic scholarships, and this was their official request. Actually, I don’t fully know what their request was. Maybe my mother’s nostalgic wish or her last bid to have “J.” leave Loomis “alive.” It stung and, ultimately, was a shoddy compromise.
My part of the roll call only lasted a few seconds. I stepped on stage to the cheers of my classmates. Then with a cloudless sky above, the class of 2011 tossed their proverbial caps in the air.
I remember my family, my mother, eyes filled with pride for the symbolic occasion. The child graduates high school.
I was going away, further away from them. I was leaving Loomis, and in a stranger, truer sense, I was leaving my family.
Privately, later that day, someone from the registrar’s office handed me another diploma, one bearing my chosen name. It felt like contraband.
If I seem callous or cold-hearted toward my mom, know that sometimes I am. When the people we love hurt us, often these are the only behaviours we find strength in. I continued to “live my truth,” knowing that my mother was grieving and in pain because I needed to survive.
Going into college, I couldn’t cope with my mom’s attachment to the very things I hated most about myself. Just as I needed to feel some space to change what wasn’t working for me, I felt more trapped by her devotion to J., her only child, her only daughter.
J. is both real and unreal; she existed, she is me, and yet she is not who I am. To look through our house, one would think I have a sister. For a while my mother continued to display photos of me before I was my “authentic self.”
For months, my mother and I didn’t speak, and for many more, we continued to clash over increasingly high stakes.
Meanwhile during the four years after Loomis, I met wonderful people in Boston and New York, called them friends and
family. I felt hopeless, undertook exhausting projects, sought help, and practised caring for my mind and body in new ways.
Amid everything, I wondered when, and if, my mom and I would have our own spring. I wondered if we could begin again.
Adapted excerpt from At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces by Mary Collins and Donald Collins (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
Going into college, I couldn’t cope with my mom’s attachment to the very things I hated most about myself.