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Being a Queer Parent is Terrifying Right Now
On trying to get one tiny child through a culture war unscathed.
I’ve run out of things to say about myself during therapy. This is not to say I don’t still need it. I now spend my sessions talking about one and only one thing: My kid, who is preparing to enter kindergarten. Specifically, I talk about my fear that I have fucked up my kid’s life forever by coming out.
If you were to ask me why I transitioned when I did, I’d probably tell you that I did it to be a better parent. I’d point to the studies that say kids do better when their parents are happy; I’d tell you that I had a mentally ill parent who drank to numb his pain, and that I vowed never to be too depressed or dysfunctional to take care of my own kids. At a certain point, I realized that transition was the only way to get my shit together. Maybe, if I were alone, I would have found a way to put it off, but I had a child who depended on me. I had to play it safe.
There is, of course, nothing “safe” about transition or queer families in 2022. Every day, I see or hear something that reminds me how unsafe it is: I read about the gay couple who had to shield their young children from an enraged man screaming “they stole you, they’re pedophiles;” the boy with two moms whose teachers called him “dirty.” I go online…
