‘I had to re-see you’

For the first three years of her fourth child’s life, Carolyn Hays perceived her toddler – now a teenager – to be her son. Then, everything changed

You were three years old, my fourth baby, amid your brothers’ very boyish toys and wearing their hand-medown clothes, when you began to tell your father and me that you were a girl. You heard me talking on the phone to my mother about you: ‘…He’s in the playroom…’ You shouted: ‘She! She is in the playroom!’ In a few years, the word ‘transgender’ would be everywhere. But this was 2010, years before Laverne Cox would appear on the cover of Time magazine and Jazz Jennings would have a reality TV show about her life as a trans girl. I wondered if watching you grow up would be like trying to create a bulletproof vest with the intelligence to know which bullets should graze you. But I wasn’t just creating that bulletproof vest. I was trying to be that bulletproof vest. You made wishes by blowing out candles. Not just on your birthday, no. Any time you saw a candle, you asked to make a wish. You said your wishes out loud; you wanted to be a girl. You started asking for candles at dinner, candles at lunch. Our next-door neighbour invited you over for crafts that included making tealights and jars. You made as many as you could and, when I lit the tealights in their decorated jars, you made the same wish over and over: girl, girl, girl.

How do I explain the emotion that I felt in those early days of your transition? I don’t know that there’s a word for it. It’s not one bright emotion with a clear outline. It’s an overwhelming confluence of emotions. It’s love, yes. And fear. It’s knowing that you’re going to change us, profoundly, and that there will be more love and more fear. It’s knowing that there will be pain that we can’t imagine or brace for. Your father and I understand the distribution of a child’s pain by now, how it multiplies violently inside of the parent when we can’t make it stop. It’s knowing that, with this pain, we’ll know more joy – or we’ll understand it more deeply.

I couldn’t rely on my mouth to say the right pronoun even as I tried to slow down and be more intentional.

We don’t realise how linked a pronoun is to a person and the built-up memories of that person. I realised quickly that I had to go to the pronoun’s source – you. I had to re-see you. When I was alone, I’d practise conversations about you. ‘She’s doing great. She loves school. This is her latest drawing…’ When your dad and I were together, we’d correct each other every time we slipped.

And then, after you’d fallen asleep, I’d check on you.

I’d look at the child there – the soft breaths, the fluffy curls, the lashes – and I would see my daughter, my little girl. ‘There she is,’ I’d whisper.

When I was pregnant with you – my fourth baby, whom I believed to be my last – I felt so in sync. I loved the way my stomach found the old pleats and started filling them, how it found the old stretchmarks and brightened them with streaks like lightning. I loved the swell and arch.

With my first pregnancy, I dreamed I was having a boy and was convinced I was prescient. How could I not know something so obvious about the person living inside of my own body? I was wrong. With my second, I had a gut instinct that I was having another girl. My reasoning was simple and idiotic: ‘It’s a girl because I have girls.’ With my third, I realised that I don’t actually know the gender of the foetuses inside of me (there is a larger metaphor here).

By the time you were born, we’d had 12 years of hands-on experience and gotten over the idea that our kids would be mini or idealised versions of us. We never mourned some imagined version of you, but many parents – even the ones who become great advocates and dedicate themselves to transgender rights – can mourn the story they’ve created around their child, the mythology of who they are as a mother and father, as a family. The stories they have to give up are beautiful, crafted in fine detail with the embroidery of their

imaginations and sense of self inextricably hand-stitched into them. They mourn who they thought they would be, and suffer from the hope transferred on to the child – some dream deferred. Writing a new story isn’t easy.

I imagine what they feel is this tidal feeling – a riptide, really, that makes you cry so suddenly. They think that some truth has been altered – it hasn’t. There’s a human being standing in front of them. That person is the truth – their own truth. That is the truth that matters.

If you’d grown up just one generation earlier, 10 years earlier or even five, your life would have been much more complicated. Sometimes I wonder: would we have listened to you? Would we have been more afraid of the dangers of the outside world pressing in? How would I have ever known this you? What would have happened to the real you?

She wouldn’t have gone away. I know that. But I wonder what toll it would have taken on you, how much damage.

Parents model love by gazing. As babies, we’re built to see faces, to search them for signs of danger, to fall in love with them, to see how they see us. In part, we come to understand who we are by how we’re seen. At first, it’s just gazing, but then it becomes crucial to be gazed at as you see yourself.

I imagine what it must feel like to keep looking in a mirror that shows you only a distortion of yourself; that to avoid the pain of being seen the wrong way, one might hope not to be seen at all and start to disappear. I imagine how it must feel to have longed to hear the correct pronouns, the right name, the words ‘my daughter’ or ‘my son’ and all the power that comes with them forming in a throat, moving through the mouth of a mother or a father. I imagine that being kissed by those words on the forehead, being gazed at with true adoration as the person you are by those you love helps you feel like you’re stepping into your own tingling skin for the first time.

You once said to me, ‘When you say I’m beautiful, say: “She. She is beautiful.”’

‘I will,’ I told you. And in that moment, you became my daughter.

‘YOU MADE THE SAME WISH OVER AND OVER: GIRL, GIRL, GIRL’

A Girlhood: A Letter To My Transgender Daughter (Picador) by Carolyn Hays is out now in hardback, ebook & audio