Support a Loving Mom Fighting for Her Trans Son

I’m a trans activist. I help people for a living. But over the past few weeks, I have had to deal with a personal issue that has stopped my advocacy in its tracks.

I’m also a mom of a trans boy. The election broke so many of our hearts, not just because Donald Trump won, a man who wants to end the right of my boy to decide who he is, but because so many of our parents voted purposefully for someone who actively opposes our existence. I expected hate from Donald Trump. It’s the betrayal from people you love that shakes you the most.

I don’t know how my boy’s other parent voted in the election, but from their behavior since the election, I have a good guess. Before the election, they said they supported my son’s right to be who he wants to be, and said they would move him to a safe jurisdiction with me if Trump won. But after the election, their behavior changed. They now actively oppose moving my son to keep him safe. I was floored. It didn’t make any sense.

So I shared everything with friends, and they said the obvious thing my eyes refused to see. My now separated spouse doesn’t want to move. They’re comfortable and lazy and care more about themselves than their child. And they’re using my and my son’s transness as leverage and blackmail. They figured out that when I have to leave my home to keep my right to gender affirming care like they had agreed if Trump was elected, they can just say no, and I’m powerless to stop them.

It’s funny how your love for another person can keep you so blind to their malicious motivations. They say they love you, and you believe them at face value when their actions say the opposite. I’ve seen it with so many trans friends whose parents voted for Trump. They harm you, deny you, destroy you, all while saying they care, and insisting you deny the truth of their actions. My separated spouse is just another bad parent who cares more about their comfort than their child’s existence, all while insisting that it is love.

That’s the thing we trans people know, we’re canaries in the coal mine for determining parental love. We test our parents’ love by merely existing and being slightly different. Will our parents still love us if we’re not exactly who they expected? For far too many of us, the answer is no.

But I don’t care if my son is a trans boy, or a cis girl, or a nonbinary genderfluid person who uses every pronoun and even a few new ones. What I care about is that HE is the one to decide. And he says he’s a binary trans boy. So he is.

Real parental love means loving and supporting the child you have, whoever they are. Real love means you fight until your dying breath to keep the person you love free. And I love my boy with every fiber of my being.

But what my boy really needs now is a lawyer, and unfortunately that’s one thing I can’t be for him and I really need your help. Please help me get a lawyer. Please help me stop a parent who would lie about keeping a child safe, and then deny that child healthcare care to keep custody from a loving parent who they know needs access to healthcare too. Please help me protect my trans kid, and show him that people like him deserve parents who love them for who they are.

Thank you.