My Older Child’s Coming Out as a Transgender Boy

In the summer of 2016, our older child came out as a transgender boy. And it was a huge surprise and shock for all of us.

No Atypical Development
Our older kid, assigned female at birth, had shown no signs of atypical development before puberty. We thought he was a girl, and his behavior, hobbies, and friends were what we considered normal for girls. For birthdays, he invited almost only girls. He wore long hair, painted his nails, and liked to use lipstick and eyeshadow. And I allowed it–even when he was only in elementary school. He painted many pictures, did many handicrafts, took ballet lessons, and sang in the choir.

He also wanted to have pierced earlobes for earrings when he was in elementary school. At first, I objected to his idea. This is something permanent, and I’d have preferred that he didn’t do irreversible damage to his body while he was still a child. But he begged so hard that I gave in eventually.

Although he had some dolls, he never did role-playing with them. And at the age of eleven years, he had a group of boys with whom he met frequently.

When he was eleven years old, he wanted to have short hair. With the new haircut, people started to treat him as a boy often. But at that time, it used to irritate him.

Later, he told me that he had already started thinking about being trans since he was eleven years old. It took him two years to find inner clarity and then come out to the family.

In September 2015, he had an exaggerated cute phase. He bought a wig with blonde and pastel-colored long hair and started to buy super cute and feminine kawaii-style hairclips. He wore that wig at school when the new school year started even though it must have been very warm under the wig.

Early Signs of Trans
Around the spring of 2016 when he was thirteen years old, the signs of trans started dripping in slowly. He made some remarks that sounded suspicious and could have alerted me. For example, he asked me whether it would be possible to change the gender later on an ID card or passport. Or he said that if ballroom dancing classes started in the fall of 2016, he would want to dress as a man for the ball. And later, he mentioned that he would also want to learn the dance steps of the guys and not the girls. He also wanted me to order a chest binder online. I wondered why he would want to wear something as uncomfortable as that. But I ordered it anyway.

I listened to this and just wondered where it came from. But there were no signs at all that he felt more like a boy. I thought of the recent super feminine Kawaii phase and thought that it was odd that he wanted to dress as a man now. In hindsight, I saw that there were lots of clues, but I didn’t get them.

Coming Out in the Family
In August 2016, at the beginning of our annual summer family vacation at the Baltic Sea, he told me, “I am a boy. Call me Finn and use the pronoun ‘he’. And, no, it is not a phase.”

We had named him Finja at birth thinking that our child was a girl, and Finn was a boy’s name derived from his former girl’s name (note: Finja/Finn are not his real names).

However, I still assumed that it was a just phase and that I just needed to keep calm and wait and see. I thought of the recent Kawaii phase and all the other phases he had been through with using make-up, lipstick, and nail polish. Probably, this would pass as well.

He also wasn’t very vocal after the initial coming out. He didn’t explain to me why he felt that way and since when. And if I had asked him, he would have reacted with annoyed resistance and defensiveness as he usually did at that time. Just the normal communication style of a teenager. So, to avoid this clash, I made sure to be careful when I asked him. But I didn’t get any more explanations. It was as if the short and firm statement of his coming out had taken up all his courage, and now there was no energy left for a Q&A session.

During the vacation, our house at the sea had no internet (yep, two weeks without online access; hard to imagine now). So, I couldn’t search anything online. And when I asked him later at home what that meant that he was a boy and how he would explain it and whether I could learn more, he just said, “Google is your friend.” He seemed very uncomfortable to give me further explanations.

The remainder of August and also September 2016 were fairly quiet with regard to the trans topic. Finn didn’t bring up the topic of the new name and new pronoun anymore. But I understood that he somehow wanted to wear masculine clothing. I agreed to that, and he bought a long-sleeved men’s shirt with a collar at the local supermarket. I remember how proud he looked when he wore it.

I didn’t really get why he needed to change his name and his pronoun. I still thought that my older child was a girl. And girls could have short hair and wear masculine clothing, too, and do all the things boys were allowed to do. No need to change the gender for that, I thought. As I have shared in my previous blog posts, in my own life I had demonstrated how to become a self-confident woman who just was who she wanted to be without giving a damn about other people’s opinions. Why couldn’t my child do the same?
My ignorance towards Finn being trans during that phase was partly due to the following things

• My own feminist path in life
• Finn’s childhood without any warning signs of trans
• My assumption that it was just another one of these phases
• My lack of knowledge about the transgender phenomenon

Coming Out at School
The event that eventually shook me awake happened around October 2016 around two months after the initial coming out. I was sitting on my bed when Finn came in, sat down next to me, and said: “Mom, now I have told our principal at school that I am trans and that I want him to use the new name and new pronoun. And in the next two weeks, I am going to have one-on-one talks with each of my other teachers. And I will let all of them know that they have to use the new name and pronoun.” He looked very determined and also very confident that after two weeks matters would be settled at school and that he would be accepted there as a boy.

This was the moment when I finally got it. He was serious about it. If this were just some teenage brain fart, then he wouldn’t have gone through the effort of telling his principal and all his teachers in one-on-one talks that he was trans.

He was thirteen years old at that time. What a courageous act for someone of that age! He wasn’t shy, and he did it alone. He didn’t ask me to coordinate this or speak up on his behalf.

Joy
I remember that the emotion I felt at that time when he told me about his coming out at school was strong joy. I noticed the joy and thought, How weird, why do I feel joy? Isn’t that inappropriate? (Also, an odd thought, right? Why can’t I just notice the emotion? Why do I have to judge whether it is appropriate or normal or whatever?) The joy was about the fact that my son had found out who he was and was courageous enough to stand up for himself.

Then I congratulated him. “I’m happy for you that you found this out for yourself. And that it happened already at such a young age.” I thought if he was really trans, then it was better to transition now than later at the age of forty-five years, for example, when the fall-out would be much larger if a partner and kids were involved.

From that time on, I tried to use his new name and pronoun.

The Struggles Were About to Start
From Finn’s point of view, his big inner struggle of the two years of pondering, doubt, and uncertainty was over now that he had come out of the closet. But the struggle with the outer world was just about to begin.

In the previous blog posts, I have shared the obstacles I encountered on my way growing up into a woman. In the following posts, I will share how the topic of just being who you are despite the expectations of other people played out during my son’s transgender journey.

***

This post is part of an online book about my journey with feminism and my son’s transgender journey. You can access the table of contents with links to each chapter here: TOC.

Looking Back

I was born privileged in the western part of Germany into a middle-class family. A good education was encouraged. No money worries. No disabilities. No family turmoil of things like abusive behavior, divorce, drugs, or mental illness. But rather good starting conditions.

Up to the time of my marriage and having kids, I had grown up into woman who had self-confidence.

But I was also confronted with gender stereotypes about how women have to dress and to behave and what kind of jobs they can have and how much work they are expected to put into taking care of the family. Looking back at all these stories I shared, I still find it incredible how retarded the population is–even in places where I thought that people would be more developed.

These stories happened in Europe, the US, and Japan around the turn of the millennium. This wasn’t back in the medieval dark ages. And it wasn’t in some bad misogynist society like Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. I assumed that during these times and in the Western world a woman should be free to be as she wants to be. Okay, for a woman, being oneself in Germany around the turn of the millennium is not nearly as dangerous as in Afghanistan after 2021. But still, there is this underlying everyday sexism, and one has to endure comments and develop a thick skin.

The misogyny here was not enforced by law, but it was more subtle. It pervaded the minds of almost everyone I met. Standards that people held in their minds voluntarily. Invisible standards. Unwritten rules. Which only erupted every now and then in sudden statements like “And does Karin also clean the staircase?” or “You can buy sports length nails and glue them on.”

And the mindset is still retarded. In June 2023, I heard of a study which said that one third of all young men in Germany think that it is justifiable to use physical violence towards their partner if they want to get respect (https://www.dw.com/en/1-in-3-german-men-find-violence-against-women-acceptable-survey/a-65884531). Additionally, more than half of the men think that women’s task is to take care of the household and the men’s task is to earn money. Old stereotypes die hard.

The huge flare up of the anger which I experienced around 1990 about unfair treatment of women had settled down by 1993 since I knew I could not do anything about it. It was not my main focus anymore. But it had gone underground into a slow boil, ranging from a constant mild annoyance to occasional flare-ups when I was triggered. And I was just focused on being myself and doing what I wanted to do regarding job and having a family.

Around after 2000, there was a colleague at my job in the corporate world who would make frequent sexist remarks. These were the only incidents that triggered the topic of gender stereotypes and the anger about injustice in regular intervals. Other than that, it was pretty much quiet.

Little did I know that the topic of gender stereotypes and all these questions of what makes girls grow up as girls and boys grow up as boys complying with the respective gender stereotypes would come up totally unexpectedly more than a decade after the birth of my first child.

***

This post is part of an online book about my journey with feminism and my son’s transgender journey. You can access the table of contents with links to each chapter here: TOC.

Shared Income and Shared Duties

Shared Income
My husband and I shared the income. After I had seen the disadvantages of how my parents had handled their financial responsibilities in an unclear manner, I wanted to handle this in a better way. So, we agreed that we would put our two incomes together into one bucket, then split it. Everyone gets half of the sum. And then we would split all the costs of living also so that everyone would pay their share.

We still each have our own bank accounts for our salary. The process of putting it into one bucket, splitting it, and then calculating who has to pay how much happens with the help of software my husband wrote.

This felt like a fair deal. We earned a similar salary when we started. But when one of us would go part-time in order to take care of the kids, the income would be lower, of course.

Part-Time Work and Shared Duties
When I later talked to women colleagues about how my husband and I worked both part-time, they would usually say something like, “Oh, my husband would never do that!” Their husband would work 100% and they as the wife would work 50% and take care of kids and do the household chores alone. This would lead to stress for the women, usually.

And it would also lead to a lack of understanding on the side of the husband because he would not know how exhausting it could be to take care of the kids with changing diapers and supervising homework, do the shopping, cleaning, cooking, and laundry. Some husbands thought that their wives were not at work which meant they have each afternoon off. Which meant that they should be pretty relaxed and they should not complain because they had an easy life while he, the husband, was off to work and earned the money.

I was glad that my husband also got to know how exhausting it could be to take care of the kids and cook lunch at the same time in a hurry after work.

I found work at the office to be much more relaxing that staying at home with little kids. Sitting in a meeting for two hours and not having to say anything if I didn’t feel like it. What a luxury! Having lunch served at our cafeteria. Being able to have a conversation with other adults during lunch. All these were things I valued when I escaped home and went to work part time in the office of my corporate job.

I didn’t reach as highly in career as my husband. While I earned more than he did in the earlier years of our relationship, that changed over time. He reached a higher career level than I did. This can only partly be attributed to the fact that I took more time with the kids later. (At first, he took more time off for the kids at home). My “failure” (compared to my husband) in career was more due to the story about my anger at work because of too little recognition. There was not really a functional career, only a project lead career even though the management would not admit that. I have talked to other men from my department who also felt the same issue that they didn’t get enough recognition for their work because it wasn’t project management. It is an issue which is particular to our department and not a gender issue.

***

This post is part of an online book about my journey with feminism and my son’s transgender journey. You can access the table of contents with links to each chapter here: TOC.

Pregnancy and Progesterone

I wanted two kids. A girl and a boy. From being the older sister myself, I thought it was good when the girl was the older one and got some self-confidence from that constellation.
So, I thought, Let’s have the girl two years older than the boy, please. And that’s what I got–very close birthdays in the same month, almost exactly two years apart. (Note to self: Always be careful what you wish for; two children’s birthdays in the same week can be exhausting.)

Apart from the wish for girl first, boy second, please, I wanted a strong, tall, and smart daughter. A daughter who would not be subjected to gender stereotypes of women which would undermine her self-confidence as I had experienced them.

Unfortunately, I had trouble becoming pregnant before the first pregnancy and needed a little medical boost of infertility treatment. After I successfully became pregnant, the gyn prescribed progesterone gel to make sure the child stayed with me. But she warned me that the side effects could be that if the child was a girl that she could have some masculine interests. I thought, never mind. I have no issues with a girl with masculine interests.

But when my child came out as trans during puberty, I thought, oh no, was it the influence of the progesterone gel?

***

This post is part of an online book about my journey with feminism and my son’s transgender journey. You can access the table of contents with links to each chapter here: TOC.