My daughter is trans. She was nearly taken away from me because I let her transition
One autumn day in 2011, an investigator from our state’s department of children and families knocked on our door. At the time we lived in a conservative state in the American south. Someone had made an anonymous complaint accusing us of child abuse for allowing our child to have a girlhood. A lawyer told us that, in this state with decades of Republican-appointed judges, we were at risk of losing custody of our transgender daughter.
The investigator’s visit felt like a bizarre clerical error; our four kids were thriving and we were well-liked in our community. The investigator ultimately found us to be good parents doing what was best for our child. However, it had become urgently clear that we would have to leave the deep south and move to a place where our youngest daughter, who had recently transitioned to she/her pronouns and a nickname, would have basic rights to equal education, housing, healthcare and, as she grew up, employment.
Our map of the United States included about 13 states where there were laws likely to pass or already in place that would allow us to live as a family fully protected by law. It was a shock to have our country suddenly shrink, almost overnight. My husband and I are white, able-bodied, cis-gender, and straight; we’d taken for granted that each and every part of the United States was available to us. That was over. We were still Americans, but the terms of our supposed agreement with our own country had changed.
We couldn’t have predicted that what happened to us would has now become an explicit rightwing political strategy. Earlier this year, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued an executive order directing the state’s department of family and protective services to investigate parents who support their transgender children, threatening to wrench apart families like ours, in a state that is home to almost 29 million people.
After our own brush with losing custody of our child, we moved to New England. Over the next few years, to our surprise, the list of states with anti-discrimination laws grew. In New Jersey, a Republican governor signed laws to protect trans students. Even below the Mason-Dixon line, some Republican officials signed laws protecting transgender students in public education. Eventually there were 17 states, then 21, where children’s rights to gender self-expression were protected. It seemed possible that our daughter might get to be an American anywhere in America.
That hope ended with the Trump administration. His administration waged a lockstep attack against transgender people – banning trans soldiers from military service, revoking civil rights guidelines that had protected trans students, rescinding protections for trans people who are incarcerated and for those living in homeless shelters and allowing discrimination based on gender identity in healthcare. It was ugly, swift and terrifying.
After Trump lost in 2020, states took up the charge. Republican-led state governments pushed slates of anti-trans laws, many of which targeted kids. Being openly anti-trans seemed to become a point of pride among certain Republican politicians. It felt like whiplash. While our transgender daughter was flourishing, the country taking shape around her was hostile to her existence.
We worry about what the map of the United States will look like in 2024 or 2025. If Republicans are in the White House with an uber-conservative majority in the supreme court and a Republican-dominated Congress, will individual states retain the right to protect families like ours? Or will the map of the United States be one solid antitrans bloc?
This issue has been clarified by the supreme court’s decision to repeal Roe v Wade. No longer allowed to make choices, with privacy and dignity, about their own bodies, people of reproductive age are being pushed to the edge of the same cliff as trans people. Every woman, queer or trans person – as individuals and as members of families and communities – faces threats to their bodily autonomy and basic privacy.
It has become abundantly clear that we need to protect that autonomy and privacy for every American. The right to privacy includes our right to birth control, to marry the person we love, and to seek the healthcare we need in conversation with our doctors and not our politicians. As the country gets carved away from us, we must draw closer, putting aside differences and rising up as one. We need the power of working in solidarity to reclaim America – not in bits and pieces, but in the entirety of these United States.
Carolyn Hays is an award-winning, critically acclaimed, bestselling author. She is the author of A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter, which she has written under a pseudonym