Maryhope Howland gave birth to a baby she thought was a boy. But at 6 years old, the child asked her questions such as “Mom, am I a boy? How do you know I’m a boy?”
“Once I clued in, I said, ‘The doctors make a best guess based on your body … but only you can know, and we love you no matter what,’” said Howland, now co-lead for the Families United for Trans Rights, an organization of transgender kids and their loved ones.
Her child’s questioning didn’t stop there. It marked the beginning of a yearslong evolution not just for her daughter, who came out as nonbinary at age 8 and transgender at 10. It was also a journey for Howland and her husband as they navigated what it means to be trans, ways of affirming their daughter’s gender identity, their responsibilities as parents, and the grief associated with “letting go of one idea of what our life is going to be,” Howland said.
Howland and her husband know they can’t shield their daughter from every news story or potential bully.／Wikipedia
Howland and her husband know they can’t shield their daughter from every news story or potential bully. “Desperately afraid about my child not having federal civil rights protections in this country,” Howland said she even has a spreadsheet of what countries they could move to if they had to one day.
To make her daughter aware and prepared, she has exposed her to the issues in as positive of a context as she can — such as the time she took her to a recent fundraiser for Sarah McBride, a Delaware-based trans woman who is the nation’s first known transgender person to serve as a state senator and who is now running for Congress.
“I say to her that it’s my job to carry that right now, not hers,” Howland said. “And that she’s safe and that we will always do everything we can to protect her.”
