Pink Sheep Of The Family

One of the things that's a major concern for a transperson is their relationship with their family after you drop the bomb about your transition.

You are aware before you swallow your first hormone or inject yourself that the familial reaction can run the gamut from total acceptance to never being invited to a family reunion for the rest of your life.

It's a little more painful for an African-American transperson because we tend to place heightened cultural importance on familial relationships.

I talk to my mom and sister on a weekly basis and the relatives that do love and care about me from time to time. The reactions in my family to my transition ranged from relatives who don't want anything to do with me to outright acceptance by others.

While family ties are important, it was more important that I be my authentic self. In order to be the best person I could be and live an honest, happy and productive life it became imperative for me to transition.

I just reached a point in my life where I wasn't going to be stuck any longer in a gender role that didn't fit me and made me miserable just to make other peeps comfortable.

The way I see it, if your blood family is tripping, make your own. I'm also fond of saying that a transperson's family expands after transition, not contracts.

I'm blessed to have a diverse, international group of people I call my brothers and sisters and friends as well. If some peeps in my family see my being a transperson as a reason not to talk to me any more, or hide behind the Bible as an excuse to cut familial ties with me, then it's their loss.

So if that makes me the pink sheep in the family, then so be it.

What's In A Transperson's Name?

When a mother is pregnant with her child, one of the things that they think long and hard about during their pregnancy as soon as they have a general idea of the presumed gender of the child is the name.

African-American mothers, as descendants of Africans, realize that there's great importance to the name you choose for your child. It says a lot about the individual, their family and their connection to the community at large.

They spend a lot of time carefully putting together combinations of names, poring through various baby name books, and considering various factors in consultation with the father and sometimes the soon to be grandparents before coming up with that combination of three names that gets entered onto your birth certificate soon after you exit the birth canal and enter the world.

Names carry a lot of weight in our binary gendered society, and transpeople know this reality all too well. It's why one of the first things we do when we finally start making those moves to transition is choosing a name that accurately represents who we are. It's one reason why our fundamentalist enemies spend so much time making it hard for us to legally change our names and the gender markers to go with those names.

I believe that some of the negative friction that happens between transpeople and their mothers is fueled in one small way by the fact that many of us unilaterally choose our new names as part of the process.

Granted, some of that friction is caused by the parents rejecting their child in the early wake of the child's announcement of their wish to transition. But sometimes when we logically paint the worst-case scenario for transition and presume that we're going to get cut off from our immediate family's love and it doesn't happen, then I submit that one way to facilitate bonding of our families into the transition process is to allow them that input in the name change decision.

One of the things I would do differently in my own transition if I got the chance to start it over again would be to give my mother and my baby sister some input in choosing my new name. My brother and I got some input in choosing my baby sister's name, so I should have done the same and allowed sis some input in choosing my new one just to be fair.

One mild issue with my intersex roommate and her mother was that when it was time to choose a name that matched her new femme presentation, she went a different direction than choosing the feminine derivative of her old male name she was given at birth by mom. As V's mother saw it and told me in a phone conversation we'd had, she was hurt that her daughter didn't go that route. Some mothers see it rightly or wrongly as a rejection of them.

When I was going through the process of choosing my new femme name, I definitely wanted to keep my MKR initials, since they were my link not only to my family, but mom as well. I also decided to choose a feminine name which would have been popular during the decade I was born. I'd been to far too many gender conferences and attended gender group meetings in which 20-something, 30-something, 40-something, 50-something, and 60-something year old transwomen were running around with or had changed them to currently popular names of the 80's, 90's and 2K's that really didn't fit the person that was standing before me.

I knew too many people in the transgender community back home that had the feminine derivative of my old name and wanted to find another feminine name starting with M. I'd already settled on my middle name starting with K, which was a combination of the first and middle names of a female cousin who is more like a sister to me and I spent a lot of time in her and her two sisters lives on one level or another.

I then thought about the qualities I associated with various feminine names, and the name that I thought best fit the woman I was evolving into and wanted to project to the world while sticking to my 'it had to start with M' prerequisite.

One name that popped into my head as I was trying out various 'M' names with the femme middle name I'd chosen for myself was Monica. Most of the Monica's I'd grown up with or gotten to know were classy, smart, talented and beautiful women. I liked the name even more when I read one definition for it.

Possibly (Greek) "solitary" or (Latin) "to advise; nun". Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine, prayed for her son and saved him from self-destruction. As a result, Saint Augustine became one of the greatest saints in history. The name is popular with Catholics.

As an activist, writer and blogger I definitely do a lot of advising. Writing tends to be a solitary activity along with my tendency to engage in a lot of solitary thinking. Some of the work I'm trying to do is along the lines of getting transwomen to avoid self-destructive things and behaviors. My spirituality is a major component of who I am as a person. I'm happiest when I'm either writing or curled up with a good book, and I'm a Phenomenal Transwoman to boot.


That's how I arrived at my new name. It not only seems to fit quite well with who I am, who the people that meet me see and the woman I'm continually evolving to be, I'm comfortable with it as well.

If you sat ten different transpeople down and asked them how and why they chose their name, you'd get ten different answers as to how they conducted the thought processes or the myriad reasons that eventually led to their new name. It's why we transpeople go off on the media so much when they disrespect us by putting our new names in quotation marks or parentheses or don't use the proper pronouns in describing us in various news stories.

We go through a lot just to get to the point where we not only evolve to become the persons we are, but thinking about the various ancillary aspects of manhood and womanhood.

So what's in a transperson's name? Plenty of hard, solid thinking, blood, toil, drama, sweat, tears, hope, history, roller coaster emotions and prayerful consideration that it will lead to the respect that we demand for ourselves and from others in the world around us.



TransGrior Note: women in photos are actress Monica Calhoun and singer Monica Arnold

I Love* You

Give me your unconditional love
the kind of love I deserve
the kind I want to return

That's the chorus of the Donna Summer song Unconditional Love. It's one of the things that next to respecting our constitutional rights, a desire to be loved by someone and having loyal friends in our lives that have our backs no matter what is one of the things at the top of our request list when it comes to our families.

Unconditional love. Sounds like a simple, straightforward, logical concept, right?

Not when you have a gender identity issues and you come out to your family about it.

It's irritating to see family members that are chronically unemployed, go to prison or have drug problems get more support than a transgender person who's clean and sober, successful in their careers and never seen the inside of a jail.

If there's anything that a transperson needs most, it's the support of their family when they're trying to negotiate the drama of dealing with a gender identity issue. If you're reading this and you're the lucky transperson that has the unconditional love and support of your family, congratulations. I ain't mad at ya.

Just remember to say prayers of thanks to God every night from now until the time you pass away for the situation you find yourself in. Some of your fellow transpeeps aren't so lucky. If they aren't rejected out of hand, then the situation that is just as bad is the support and love with conditions attached to it.

You may have parents who continue to call you by the wrong pronoun or the old male name despite the fact you've been transitioned for a decade or more. You find out about family reunions AFTER they've taken place or too late for you to rearrange the work schedule to attend. You may have situations where you're sent an invite to a wedding, but a few days before the event your relatives call you up and request that you don't wear a dress or heels to the event or insultingly ask you if it's possible for you to 'dress like a man'.

The ones that are really irritating are the relatives that say they support you, but start imposing their religious beliefs on you or are bold enough to tell you to your face that you'll never be a woman in their eyes.

If that sounds like you, stop it. Unconditional love means just what it says.
We need the validation of having our blood relatives acknowledge the person we've evolved into now, not the kid they remember ten to twenty years ago.

We transpeeps need that connection, that feeling of belonging, that desire to be recognized as a valued respected member of the family in our new gender role. It's something we need to help fortify our self-esteem. It's comforting to know that as we go out and deal with the slings and arrows hurled at us from a not too sympathetic and sometimes hostile world, our families love us unconditionally.

We transpeeps need to believe that come hell or high water our families be they our nuclear or extended ones, have our backs and are not finding excuses to place knives in our backs.