Some Things
Don't Run
In The Family

By Emily Alford

"Daddy, can I tell you something?" asked my son, just short of three years old, as I tucked him in. "I want to be a lady."

My heart sank. "Not you, too," I thought but didn't say. I'd known that was what I wanted since I was six, and I'd fought it hard all that time. The doomed marriage between his mother and myself still had five years to run. Emily didn't have a name, and I was holding myself in with all my strength. Did he have to go through what I had known? I shuddered at the very thought.

I don't know what my own father's reaction would have been if I'd told him that when I was tiny. At some point he and my mother must have figured me out, but they never let on. Now, on the surface, I kept cool. "There's nothing a lady can do that a man can't do too, except be a mommy, and there isn't anything a man can do that a woman can't do, except be a daddy," I responded. That was all I said. He seemed to accept it. Once, in his teens, he wore a skirt to school to raise money for Anti-Apartheid, with no hassle at all from either his friends or his teachers. Now he's twenty-five. He's straight, and as far as I can tell neither prejudices nor hang-ups plague him.

His mother and I split a few years after that night, for reasons that went well beyond my own transgenderism. Some TG people find that the end of a marriage gives them the chance to be themselves at last. I was far too uptight. I did realize, though, that I had to face it, and when I met the incredible woman to whom I'm now married, I outed myself to her almost immediately. She realized before I did that Emily isn't a part-time thing, it's who I am all the time inside, and who I could readily be to the world. Her acceptance, her love, and her trust that I won't "make her a widow," tell me that transition would shatter someone and something that are truly beautiful. That's all that holds me back now, but it's a lot more than enough.

It took me a very long, bad time to really accept what she offered me from the start. Playing the fool, I kept tormenting both myself and everybody around me. One terrible night when we were still dating it all came pouring out, to her and to her older daughter and my son, both of them then on the cusp of adolescence. It was a classic case of how not to tell the children, and I very nearly lost the boy because of it. She, not I, saved my relationship with them both.

I pulled out of that tail spin, and we did marry. The "something borrowed" that she wore was mine, and the marriage has worked immensely well. My older stepdaughter, a very wise young woman, came to terms pretty fast, and has teased me lovingly about it for years. She used to waltz into my home study wearing one of my skirts, together with a wicked smile. The last time I saw her she put a heavy handbag over my shoulder and said "I know you would like this, so carry it a while." I could not ask for more.

But my son held back. When he turned twenty-one, I figured that the best thing I could do was address him fully about everything, as one adult to another, in the hope of setting him free. So I wrote him a long confidential letter about it all: the failed marriage, my own transgenderism, and a lot more. He received it, and told me he valued it, but gave no response. He still wasn't ready to talk.

Finally, at last, he has spoken, in just a few words that say everything I could want to hear, not about himself now but about what he thinks of me. He and I stood chatting recently at a big family party, and my spouse walked over to join us. It was a dress-up affair. She was in a very elegant raw silk dress with a confection-hat of felt, lace, and feathers. She took the hat off her own head and placed it on his, telling him that it made him look good.

He handed it back. "No thanks," he said, looking at me with a grin as wickedly loving as his step-sister's. "Some things don't run in the family."