body, work

thoughts on bodies by my past self for a child I didn't yet know was trans

Parenting a trans child is often an absolute delight. Yes, it can be scary as hell, and I can never take her to Florida. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. But that’s true of all parenting, right? We’re all just making it up as we go? (If, actually, all other parents know exactly what they’re doing and can’t relate: please just don’t tell me. I don’t think I could bear it.)

A long time ago, when we were starting to talk to her about her other parent being trans, we found a therapist to explain to her what gender was. She was a six-year-old who seemed completely indifferent to social norms of all kinds, and since gender is essentially a set of social norms, I suspected she’d find the entire concept confusing.

Sure enough, she pretty much responded with, “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like it’s for me.” She spent the next few years identifying as nonbinary and using they/them pronouns, then told us that she was a girl and uses she/her pronouns. The whole journey has been remarkably angst-free for her, which is a pleasant surprise and a reminder that nothing in parenting is ever what you think it will be.

my daughter levitating in a particularly joyful moment of embodiment

I love witnessing her commitment to authenticity. Her aesthetic is “rainbow tomboi with nerdy t-shirts,” and she owns it. She wore a bright blue suit to her cousin’s Bar Mitzvah and looked amazing.

Of course, now that we’ve settled into a nice groove, she’s on the cusp of puberty and everything is going to change and I’ll need to figure out how to parent her all over again. (Is there any more Sisyphean task than parenting? Is Sisyphus’ boulder actually a metaphor for parenting? Should Tantalus, the guy who killed his son and served him as a meal to gods, have had Sisyphus’ punishment? End of tangent.)

Her body will change soon, and that will be scary for all of us. Being embodied has always been something I’ve felt a little ambivalent about, and I can tell this journey is going to take us all to entirely new and terrifying places I haven’t even considered.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t thought about it. Five years ago I wrote my daughter a letter about bodies. My ex had recently come out to her but was really, really struggling with talking about her own dysphoria without breaking down, and I could see that the work of addressing that with our kids would largely fall to me. I was already starting to worry about how to talk mindfully about dysphoria and health and fatphobia and gender normativity and and and. So I did what I’ve always done: I wrote.

It’s an interesting document. It was written for the future self of a highly articulate six-year-old by a person maniacally fixated on doing everything she could to not fuck her kids up forever as her marriage fell apart. It was also written in 2019, when Donald Trump was President, and trans rights were under attack everywhere.

I was so desperate for us all to be ok. My eyes were on the horizon. But looking back at this letter I can see how that moment, with all of its potential energy, was an important one.

---

Dear [Daughter],

One of the most confusing things about the time a person will spend on this rapidly spinning space rock (aka their “life”) is their relationship with the fleshy container that they spend that time in (aka their “body”). This relationship can be challenging — your body may, at times, feel like your enemy. But your body cannot be your enemy, because it is you, just like your mind is. Try not to think of your mind as the real you and your body as something you have to fight against. Remember that sometimes your relationship with your mind will also be difficult, and your thoughts will feel like your enemies, and when that happens it will be easier if you feel comfortable in your skin.

Sometimes we don’t like our bodies. That happens to everyone. Even people whose bodies look beautiful and perfect and healthy to you have negative feelings about their bodies. Just think about the time, effort, and energy that those people probably have to put into thinking about what they eat and how much they have to exercise to discipline their bodies into perfection! Nobody feels good about their body all of the time. And it’s especially normal to feel bad about your body when it’s going through big changes.

If the bad feelings don’t go away, there are three main ways of addressing them. Your first strategy should always be to ask whether the bad feeling comes from an assumption that you’re making about what makes a body “good” or “beautiful” and then feeling bad because that doesn’t match how you see your body. Some bodies that we may think of as too big or too small or unevenly shaped or disabled or abnormal are actually perfectly healthy and beautiful, but the world we live in sends a strong message that there is only one way for a body to be “good”: it must be slender, symmetrical, young, fit, and white. These messages are so powerful that we can’t help but believe them a little bit. So if you look at your body and it isn’t exactly other people’s ideal of what makes a body beautiful, it’s normal to feel bad. But you can deal with those feelings by reminding yourself, calmly but firmly, that your body is good. All bodies are good. All bodies are beautiful. The first time you say this to yourself, it will feel like a lie. But if you repeat it enough times, you’ll start to believe it.

Retraining your thoughts is a powerful tool, but it might not be enough to conquer all of the bad feelings. Sometimes you might also need to make some gentle changes to your behavior or appearance to help you feel better about your body. You might not even have to change your body itself — just changing how you dress, or the makeup or nail polish you wear, can make a big difference. Other times, changing your body can help. I have a body that many people think is too big, but I exercise a lot and lift heavy weights. It makes me feel like my body is strong and capable, and those good feelings about what my body can do are more powerful than the bad feelings. Doing fun physical activities is a great way to feel good about your body. I also have a tattoo, and in the past I’ve dyed my hair bright blue and purple. Those small changes, along with retraining my thoughts, helped me feel much happier and more comfortable.

But some people have negative feelings about their bodies that are so big that positive thoughts and small changes aren’t enough. These people’s unhappiness with their bodies is so huge and unmanageable that it takes over their entire lives and makes it difficult for them to enjoy anything. This feeling is called dysphoria, and it is very painful. For people who suffer from dysphoria, more serious medical and surgical solutions may be the only way to make the bad feelings quiet enough to allow them to go on with their lives.

Your other parent is one of those people. She wants to make some very serious changes to her body in the next few years. To make these changes, she will need to go to the hospital and see a special doctor who will perform surgery to change the shape of her face and body permanently. After these surgeries, she will need to spend a while resting and recovering like we do when we get sick. The surgery for her face will probably happen next year, and she’ll need to rest for a week or two and be careful about playing with you. The other surgery will be longer from now and will have a much longer recovery time. These surgeries will be very painful for her, but she wants to do them because the pain of the surgery will be less than the pain of the dysphoria that she is feeling.

Her body is not “bad” right now, and there is not anything wrong with it, just like there isn’t anything wrong with your body or my body. But she feels awful about her body. She tried very hard for a very long time to tell herself that there wasn’t anything wrong with her body and to change her hair and how she dressed to feel more comfortable in her body, but it still wasn’t enough. After thinking about it carefully and talking to many doctors, she made the decision to have these surgeries done. We all hope that the surgeries will make her negative feelings about her body less powerful. They won’t be enough on their own – she’ll still have to do the hard work of reminding herself that her body is good and putting in the effort to make small changes to her body that will make her like it more. The point of the surgeries is to get her to the point where those first two strategies will be enough.

Bodies are strange and weird and delightful and annoying. Sometimes they feel wonderful, like when you’re snuggling with someone you love or taking a nice bath or running around or swinging on a swing and feeling yourself fly through the air. When you have a bad feeling about your body, take a deep breath. Feel that breath move through your body and fill up your lungs. Imagine the oxygen from that breath flowing through your blood and nourishing your organs. Try to remember a time when you felt good in your body. Try to remember: my body is a good body, and it is me. And try to remember that your body was made and nourished by my body once. I felt your body grow inside of me, and I loved to feel that tiny body squirm long before I knew what a wonderful person you would be.

Love,
Mama

---

My thinking on these issues has changed and evolved, of course. There’s no mention of gender at all, which feels like a big lacuna. And I didn’t yet have the language from

Kate Manne

’s Unshrinking to talk about body reflexivity, which would have been an improvement on the rhetoric of “all bodies are good bodies” that I was using at the time. (I was heavily influenced by Bodies Are Cool, a book I still love and highly recommend).

There are a lot of edits I could make. But one of the things I’ve been loving about this Substack is how it serves as a bit of a time capsule, a weekly record of my thoughts and obsessions that I can time travel back to in the future. I think there’s value in preserving a document like this one exactly as it was, without wishing that I’d done a better job.

It’s especially poignant now, as the election approaches. I truly have no idea what the future will hold for my trans family members, politically speaking. It’s a horrifying prospect. Currently my daughter is more concerned about facing sexism in her future than facing transphobia, but I know that could change. If it does, finding embodied joy might become an even more personally and politically urgent project for her. (No pressure!)

We’re all still baking. My child is a work in progress, and so am I, and so is my parenting. I just hope I can enjoy the unexpected beauty of the journey.