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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, where there’s a crowdsourced campaign to call child protective services on a non-binary colleague because they used the term “emotional labor” in regard to a tough conversation with their teenager. I go home to Ohio, where my very cisgender uncle — a public school teacher who’s been supportive of LGBTQ+ students — says that he finally figured out who’s been sending him all the death threats, but the guy works for the state, and has connections, so he doubts they’ll stop.
My daughter didn’t choose to grow up in this world. She can’t control who her parents are. She’ll be more supported at home if I’m not depressed and dysphoric, but by making myself healthier, I have also put her in the middle of a culture war. We are not city people. She will not know many other families like ours, and neither will her classmates. I can’t escape the feeling that I have created a human life and tossed it out into the world where people can bully her endlessly over things that were…
