BY KATHY HERSH

When does a mother stop worrying about her child’s safety? Never, if you are the mother of a transgender child. When my son was younger, I worried that he would be lonely, maybe never find a partner to share his life with.

What worries me now is how right-wing ideologues are exploiting irrational fears and insecurities about sexuality and gender by using transgender young people as the scapegoats in a cynical ploy to elect politicians bent on creating a “one-size-fits-all” society. According to the ACLU, in 2022, more than 150 anti-trans bills were introduced in state legislatures that would prohibit the special medical and mental health care essential to the well-being of transgender youth.

Even before the anti-trans campaign began, transgender youth had a high suicide rate — 52 percent had thought of suicide, and 20 percent attempted it, according to The Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health. Guidance counselors were trained to counsel gender-questioning kids and displayed a rainbow sticker on their doors indicating that they were safe to talk to. Thanks to the “Don’t Say Gay Act,” that’s now illegal in Florida.

As the mother of a trans child, I have been invited to speak with educators, guidance counselors, and parents about my experience. I’ve spent hours on the phone counseling mothers in despair about their child’s questioning their gender identity. The current diatribes against trans kids are making it difficult for society to shift from the binary gender frame of reference, which among young people is becoming obsolete, to the more flexible notion of a gender spectrum ranging from extreme masculinity to extreme femininity with most of us in the middle.

Some children simply do not feel like they belong in the bodies they were born into. Before my son transitioned, he “presented” as a girl, so beautiful my mother feared he would be snatched from the stroller if I turned my back for one moment. When I put a dress on him, he would say, “Mommy, that’s too fancy for me.” He was not a “girly girl.” Later, it became clear to him that he was not a girl at all but was really a boy and having to pretend otherwise was a denial of who he was.

I accepted this because I truly loved my child and his happiness was all that mattered, not whether he wore dresses or pants. Inside the outward “package” was a beautiful soul who did not choose one gender over another. He chose to be true to himself and only he could really know who that self was. That took integrity and courage.

When he was 3, we had an argument about whether a certain food I insisted he eat was spicy. We went back and forth — he said it was spicy, I insisted it was not. Finally, he put his hand on his hip and shouted, “I say it’s spicy!” I realized that I was denying what his own taste buds were telling him, as if my taste buds were the universal arbiter of spiciness. I’m glad I learned the lesson early about trying to contradict my child’s experience of the world they live in.

My son is now 36 years old. We have long phone conversations sharing our innermost thoughts. We cook together; he’s vegan, I’m not, so we accommodate. He is tender with children, although he has none of his own. And he is a man who loves to hike in the mountains, swim in the sea, and wear a tie to friends’ weddings.

Even though he is a self-realized adult with an adoring partner, I still worry about the increasing politicization of everything that ought to be personal — gender, politics and religion — now a volatile mix that makes transgender people especially vulnerable to gender vigilantes bent on conformity to a society infected with toxic masculinity and abuse.

Although I am open about my being a “trans” parent, using the play on words to lend levity to a serious subject, I want to set off alarm bells at the growing intolerance rearing its ugly head across the country despite the rigorous work that’s been done by organizations like Equality Florida, the Human Rights Campaign, The Trevor Project and the ACLU.

I contribute to these groups, write letters, re-post support articles on Facebook and hope that as more children and their parents come “out,” a person’s gender identity will cease to be a public issue, allowing us all to relax and be ourselves.

Then I can simply be a mom, bragging about my son, who happens to be transgender.

— Hersh is a DeLand resident.