What trans kids taught me about girlhood

My daughter, Marlow, has always been a tomboy at heart—a brown-eyed girl with unruly hair she won’t let you touch, whose first love was a toy construction truck, and who would roughhouse with anyone willing to square up. In pictures as a toddler, she might’ve been mistaken for a little boy, sitting on the floor in her blue shark pajamas, a crown of short curls on her head, with furrowed brows above her eyes and two fists full of tiny race cars.

My daughter is eight years old now, and her best friend, Jen, is two years older. Jen has always been Marlow’s opposite; she grew up playing with dolls, wearing princess dresses, and singing her heart out to pop songs. Marlow and Jen never minded their differences, of which there are many. Instead, it’s part of what bonds them—their uniqueness to each other and to the world. During their playdates, you might see my daughter covered in dirt, with scraped-up knees, defending the high seas in her imagination from ghoulish pirates, with Jen by her side, flinging her long blond hair over her shoulder, ever Marlow’s fair maiden.

Marlow and Jen are not immune to the nascent volatility of childhood. They stretch the wings of their emotional limits and test gravity. One day, they are besties telling spooky stories by moonlight; the next, they are sisters who want to go no-contact. They’ve put on plays together, whispered about boys together, and worked through hardheaded fights together. Marlow and Jen contain a whole spectrum of girlhood inside their two small frames, like bookends that perfectly complement each other’s individuality and encapsulate the power they collectively hold.

I’ve learned so much from watching Jen’s mom navigate the mercurial emotions of a young daughter who is learning how to find herself in a world that routinely discourages that exploration. I’ve often called her for advice on how to navigate those same waters with my own daughter. We are both moms who don’t want to force our kids to be anything other than exactly who they are discovering themselves to be. As mothers, we don’t want to hand them down a lifetime supply of tolerable shame. We are along for the ride—their ride.

We’re also mindful about the way we talk about diet culture and physical looks around them. Sometimes it feels as if the world wants nothing more than total physical assimilation and perfection from women, as if our uniquenesses and differences are not what give us the depth of real beauty. The world often tells us our sole job as mothers is to teach our daughters that women’s bodies are experiments born to fail in perpetuity, most especially the ones that do not conform. We long to have things be different for our girls so that they can grow up with a fighting chance to love exactly what and who they are, instead of hating what and who they are not. Why would we want that for them? To inherit the generational myopia passed down as wisdom between fragmented adults just trying to stay glued together in the best way they know how? Why can’t we want more for our children by giving them less of what we’ve had to inherit?

But not everyone feels the same way Jen’s mom and I do. I’ve explained it to Marlow like this: We’re all glued-together pieces of the beliefs that were passed down to us and that we picked up along the way—the good and the bad. It can be hard to identify and change those beliefs as you get older, especially because most people were never given the tools to know how. To know that our differences are worth honoring and fighting for, not against. Some people work really hard to break off the outdated parts of their beliefs, and eventually they do. But some people—a lot of people—stay exactly that same glued-together way for life. And sometimes those people make decisions and rules based on those rough stuck-on parts, no matter the harm they may cause to others.

“Glue People!” Marlow exclaimed. “Yes,” I repeated, “Glue People.”

“Do you know any?” she asked. I told her I did and that I also knew many people affected by their beliefs. People like her friend Jen.

“But … why?” she asked, perplexed by what I had told her. “They don’t think she’s really a girl, just because she’s trans?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Just because she’s trans.”

Marlow went quiet as she contemplated this, her reality breaking just as my heart did, for her and for Jen. It’s a humbling experience as a parent: witnessing the first time your child begins to understand the world beyond the innocence and safety of their playground imagination.

Marlow raised her eyes to meet mine and said, “Jen’s just a girl. She’s a girl just as much as I’m a girl.”

This conversation made me think a lot about the responsibility we adults have, not just to our children but also to examining the glued-together parts of ourselves and how they affect others. Is it possible that just because we can make children, it doesn’t mean we should make them in our own image, glued-together parts and all? Isn’t it hypocritical to try and teach our children new ways to love and respect themselves if we are simultaneously teaching them to deny that love and respect to others? We have a responsibility to keep them safe, to teach them boundaries, compassion, critical thinking, and a whole lot more. But we can and must learn from them too. Our children can show us not just the way but a way. A way toward the kind of authenticity, acceptance, and empathy that we were never afforded, free of shame felt and shame given.

One day, you might pass a playground and see two children playing pirates: one, the swashbuckling sailor; the other, the fair maiden. These are kids who look like Marlow, or like Jen, or like neither. They will be girls, or they will be boys, or they will be neither. What they will be is children, every single one of them different, finding their own unique way in a world that will want them to grow up glued together, one broken belief at a time.

When you see them, feel what might be stuck for you—stuck to you. Remember what it was like to be a kid yourself, different in your own way, testing gravity, discovering who you and other kids around you were becoming. See all of them, wild and free, trying to find themselves in a broken world and still be loved for it. When you see them, I hope something breaks through in you. I hope you start to shatter.

Lead Image: Hearst Owned

This article originally appeared on harpersbazaar.com

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