Love Lives Here

by Amanda Jette Knox

  One thing that did matter to her was the end-of-year trip. The grade six classes had been fundraising for most of the year to pay for a day of sports and activities at a local university. A few weeks before the big day, I got an email from the teacher and sighed in frustration. There were no gender-neutral washrooms available to the students, the teacher said, and everyone would be using gendered group change rooms. I knew that was not going to work for Alexis. It was too early in her transition for her to be comfortable. After fundraising for most of the year, she was going to miss the big school trip.

  The news sunk her morale even further. Alexis was already refusing to get out of bed most days, her attendance was poor, she had no friends, and now she couldn’t fully participate in the curriculum or go on the field trip. I hadn’t seen her that low in a long time. The staff noticed it too. She was shutting down at school, not completing her work or engaging in class discussions. “I’m worried we’re losing her,” one of the staff members said with tears in her eyes.

  Being trans was not the problem for Alexis. The problem was how society treated her.

  In early June, we pulled Alexis out of school. We could have waited until the year was finished, but there was no point. She couldn’t go on the school trip and she feared she’d be ridiculed for wearing a dress at her grade six graduation. Alexis knew who she was, but the world wasn’t seeing her that way yet. She had just begun to take hormone blockers and was waiting for them to start working. Meanwhile, she was dealing with the full impact of dysphoria. She hated her body; she didn’t want to care for it, look at it or acknowledge it for what it was. It would sometimes take several hours of encouragement before she’d bathe, and then I’d hear her sobbing in the shower. Then I would cry too.

  We had to do something or risk losing her.

  Alexis and I decided she wouldn’t go to middle school. Instead, I would homeschool her while doing my own online classes. That way, she could go through early transition and rejoin her classmates in high school. We hoped they would have matured by then, and Alexis would have two years to transition in relative safety.

  TWELVE

  mainstream

  IN THE FALL OF 2014, I won the award for worst teacher. I don’t know how many people were competing for this prestigious prize, but it doesn’t matter because I deserved it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. For a person who loves kids, I’m embarrassingly bad at kid-centred careers. Daycare wasn’t my forte, I was only passable as a teacher’s assistant, and I was a complete embarrassment at teaching middle-school math.

  Alexis and I did our best that year to keep up with the curriculum—and failed miserably. We did, however, read To Kill a Mockingbird, which I consider a rousing success. It’s my favourite book, and to read it with my daughter and see her fall in love with the story made the whole year worthwhile. She immediately grasped several of the deeper concepts in the book—themes that had taken me a few high school essays to fully wrap my head around. Once again, I was a proud mom.

  I didn’t lean on her too hard to learn algebra or the periodic table. More than anything, I wanted her to catch her breath after years of internal torment. The 2014–15 school year was all about self-discovery. It was a solid decision. Her confidence grew, along with her hair, which was a rich medium brown, full and shiny. Slowly, we started to see her smile more often—and not the shy smiles she used to give, but big, happy grins. We would hear her laugh and wonder aloud how long it had been since she found so much joy around her.

  We were on our way to an appointment one afternoon when Alexis asked if we could get something to drink.

  “I’ll never say no to coffee,” I replied and pulled into the Starbucks drive-through.

  When the barista handed us our drinks, she said, “Have a great day, ladies!”

  Alexis beamed.

  “She called us ladies! So cool,” my daughter said, leaning back in her seat and sipping her drink triumphantly.

  It was the first time she had been acknowledged as a girl by someone who didn’t know her. My heart beat excitedly, and it wasn’t just because of the caffeine.

  * * *

  —

  One day in the early spring of 2015, I received an email from a CBC reporter. She had been reading my blog and wanted to do a story on our family for local radio.

  I had entered a comfortable space blogging about raising a trans child. I confined my pictures of Alexis to my personal Facebook profile and had asked others to do the same. I was still using the name Gutsy when referring to her in any public online setting. With the blog, I was doing what my family and I felt was important without sacrificing certain elements of our privacy. It was a good balance.

  I had recently written about Alexis in a local magazine about supporting trans kids in Ottawa. But I’d made sure the photos I took of her didn’t show her face. Instead, I went for the artistic approach, photographing her from the neck down or getting a close-up of her fun multicoloured shoes. It added a personal touch while maintaining her anonymity.

  An interview with CBC Radio would throw a wrench into the works. I knew if we did this, our names and photos would appear in the accompanying written piece on the CBC website. Once out there, the genie could not be put back into the bottle. I tensed at the thought. Alexis was a twelve-year-old trans kid in a world that wasn’t quite ready for her yet.

  When I called the journalist, Hallie Cotnam, she said she had never done a piece like this, but wanted to do it justice. I could hear the sincerity in her voice. She truly hoped to introduce her listeners to something new and positive. I promised her an answer soon.

  After a healthy family discussion and an impressive anxiety attack on my part, we decided to do the interview. We hoped our story would help Canadians understand transgender kids. We knew the risks, but the potential rewards far outweighed them.

  Hallie arrived one weekday morning and the whole family participated, describing events from the email Alexis sent us on the eve of Pink Shirt Day to my decision to blog about her transition. I looked around the living room and smiled. My family, for its flaws, was full of love. I listened as Aerik and Jackson talked about how brave their sister was, and I teared up as my spouse compellingly answered questions from “a dad’s point of view.” But Alexis, once a little wallflower, stole the show. It was her moment to tell the world who she was and make them see why they should accept her. She killed it. She was sweet, well spoken and so relatable. She was proof that once you get to know trans children on a personal level, you realize that they’re just regular kids who happen to be trans. That was what we wanted to get across.

  Hallie contacted me a couple of days later to say that the piece would air the following morning. This was it.

  I sat quietly for a minute, collecting my thoughts. Was there anything I should do before tomorrow? Yes, there was. My blog readers had been following our family’s journey through transition for over a year. It only felt right to introduce them to Alexis before CBC Radio aired the interview. I went online and wrote the post that would change how I talked about my family forever, entitling it “World, Meet My Daughter.”

  “Okay. Deep Breath.” I began. “This is about to be the second-hardest post I’ve written on this blog. I’m not the best at handling change.”

  I recounted how my family had opened our doors to journalists. “What this means is that very soon, the world—or at least our corner of it—will know our daughter’s real name and what she looks like,” I wrote. “It’s big, scary stuff.”

  I went on to explain why we had chosen to do this. “We know it’s a decision that carries risk, but we also know it can carry a lot of hope.” I followed up that statement with a picture of Alexis, one bright blue eye visible under brown bangs with hot-pink streaks. It was my favourite photo of her, taken first thing in the morning, as she was about to get out bed. A natural beauty illuminated her face.

  “Here we are,” I wrote in closing. “We’re out out. I won’t lie and tell you I’m not
afraid. Of course I am. But Alexis is choosing to step up and make the world a better place, and that fills me with far more hope than fear. So no matter what happens in the next little while, I know we chose hope over fear. And that means hope wins.”

  I hit the Publish button before I could think about it too hard. Now the regulars who read my blog would see Alexis before she made it onto the CBC website. I went on about my day.

  While I was at the grocery store, a friend texted me. “Your daughter’s face is everywhere!” she wrote.

  I shot back my own text: “What do you mean?”

  “EVERYWHERE!” came the reply in all caps. “Alex is blowing up the internet.”

  I checked Facebook.

  Yes, she was everywhere. “World, Meet My Daughter” was being shared and retweeted constantly. It was madness. My feed filled up with tag notifications and pictures of my daughter’s beautiful face, her pink-streaked hair falling over one eye. We heard not only from friends but also from some of her old teachers, former neighbours and colleagues, and a host of complete strangers. Thankfully, nearly every comment on the three platforms where it was shared—my blog, Facebook and Twitter—was positive. So much love for one brave little girl.

  Alexis’s name and face were now part of a bigger movement: the affirmation of transgender children. It was 2015 and the scales were starting to tip.

  The CBC story aired the following morning. We nervously listened in while making school lunches in the kitchen. Hallie had a knack for taking the best ten minutes of a two-hour interview and turning them into something memorable. It was a warm, compassionate piece on supporting our child and what that meant to all of us. It was one of two CBC features on our family to win an award.

  A couple of hours later, I got a call from a reporter with the TV news division of the network. The listener response to our family’s story had been so positive that he wanted to talk to us for the evening news. Could he come right now? Alexis shrugged when I asked her. Why not? We were already that day’s talk of the town.

  “Okay, but the house is gross,” I said. The journalist laughed and assured me they were used to filming around mess. That did not stop me from rigorously cleaning (and swearing under my breath while I did it).

  By 11 a.m., we had a news truck in our driveway and a camera in our faces. The journalist was kind, but we did have to correct some of the language and ideas he used. For example, we corrected the notion that Alexis was “born a boy.” She wasn’t. She was always a girl, but she was assigned male at birth based on her body’s appearance. The distinction is important; this is who she has always been, even if we didn’t know it for the first eleven years.

  That was the beginning of our first media storm. It felt like the whole country wanted to talk to us. Reporters wanted a family angle on transgender issues, and we were willing to provide that in a way that was relatable. The media seemed to love how statistically average we were, beyond having a trans child.

  I spent a lot of time correcting journalists’ language and assumptions back then, and I often thought about how exhausting it must be for trans people to do the same. I could only imagine the invasive, embarrassing and downright insulting questions they had likely been asked over the years about their genitalia, surgery plans and sexual preferences.

  For a long time, the public wanted nothing to do with the trans community. When people finally got interested, they were fixated on all the wrong things—things that didn’t further the conversation or encourage acceptance. They wanted the shock factor. It took trans elders a lot of time and effort to begin steering society away from the idea of trans people being freaks or punch lines, and especially before trans children could be interviewed in a respectful way. Even then, I had to interrupt some questions. Children like Alexis should not be asked about their genitals. Nor should their mothers, for that matter, unless you want an earful on how inappropriate that is.

  A friend who has a trans son put it well: if you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking your neighbour, don’t ask a trans person. And chances are you don’t ask Dave from next door what his junk looks like or how he has sex. (If you do, we need to have a little talk about boundaries.)

  The good news was that the world was changing. Laverne Cox, a trans woman of colour, made the cover of Time magazine. Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympian and current reality star, was speaking out about her own transition, as controversial as she could be. And families like ours were beginning to get positive press rather than being thrown to the wolves.

  A few days after our interview aired, I heard my own voice on the car radio. It seemed our documentary had gone national. I couldn’t help but laugh. So much for blending in.

  People all over the country, especially trans people and their families, began to contact us. “Thank you for speaking out for those of us who can’t,” one person said to me. “It’s too dangerous where I live.” Messages like that were a reminder of why we had shone a big, uncomfortable spotlight on ourselves. We were in a good position to do so. We had far more safety, security and support than a lot of people. It was vital to use our privilege to lift everyone up.

  THIRTEEN

  goals

  I HAD BEEN EATING my feelings for as long as I could remember. Stuffing my face with complete abandon was a coping mechanism I had learned in early childhood. For a little while in my teen years, I all but stopped eating and instead used drugs and alcohol to cope. But once I got sober, I returned to a familiar lover, and since then, we had been going steady for decades.

  Stressed out? Eat.

  Feeling sad? Eat.

  Excited? Oh, you guessed it, you smart (and likely delicious) cookie: eat.

  I wasn’t managing my anxiety disorder the way I should have. Instead, I was choosing to self-medicate with food.

  But it wasn’t just food. My whole lifestyle was unbalanced. I didn’t make time to exercise—I didn’t move very much in general—and I had put on a lot of weight over the past several years. I was nearing three hundred pounds. I’m not someone obsessed with being thin, but I was heavy enough I had health issues: sore joints, a bad back and steadily climbing blood pressure.

  By February 2015, I had had enough. My health had started to worry me. I had a child who needed me to advocate alongside her, to be extra strong for her, and I wanted to be around for a long time to do just that. She and her brothers also deserved to have a parent who modelled confidence and self-love. But like many caregivers, I’d found reasons to neglect my own needs: life was busy; my children needed me; I had an article due; the dogs, the house, appointments. Life.

  Enough of that. Why was I still my own worst enemy? I had to make myself a priority.

  I decided not to do anything drastic; instead, I would try slow, simple changes that I could maintain. I would still eat what I liked, just less of it. I would exercise and try new things. I would gradually implement these changes instead of shocking my body with an alien new regimen.

  Most importantly, I wasn’t going to tie my success to the scale. I knew I would never be a small person without a great deal of sacrifice—and who wants to sacrifice things? I wanted my blood pressure to go down and my heart to stop racing, and I needed to find better tools to manage my anxiety. I wanted to replace some of the fat on my body with lean muscle mass, which I hoped would help my back and knees.

  I joined a weight management clinic that shared my philosophy of being the best version of myself, rather than the version expected on a BMI scale or in a magazine. The team supported my desire for slow, incremental lifestyle changes, which I was already making, and helped me stay on track for the first few months. It was time. After years of feeling like I didn’t deserve it, I was finally going to put myself first.

  In early 2015, I also wrote my very last high school exam. Knowing I had aced it, I walked back to my car feeling on top of the world, closed the door and screamed excitedly. Eight different high school programs, so many obstacles, several failed attempts—and I had finally done
it.

  I was thirty-eight years old and I was going to get my diploma.

  My friends threw me a surprise graduation party. They had me pose for cheesy photos and even made me a yearbook with all their baby-faced high school pictures in it. They took turns signing it with all the same ridiculous stuff teenagers sign in each other’s yearbooks.

  Graduation day was in June. The staff at St. Nicholas Adult High School went all out for their grads. We were in a beautiful auditorium, wearing caps and gowns, and were called out on stage in alphabetical order. My partner, children, siblings, parents and two close friends, Liliane and Angela, were in attendance. When my name was called, everyone cheered. “That’s my mom!” Aerik yelled, doing his best to embarrass me.

  Toward the end of the night, I was presented with the school’s English award. I was floored. “Nobody is surprised but you,” Angela whispered when I sat back down, still in shock and positively beaming with the plaque in my hands. After two decades, I was leaving high school in style.

  It was a good time in my life. And the good just kept on coming. First, I got an email from the principal of our local middle school. She had heard our story on CBC and wanted to talk about bringing Alexis to the school for eighth grade. We were hesitant. We knew that most of the kids who had been quick to drop or mock her would be at the same school. Alexis was just starting to get her confidence back, and we didn’t want to put her through social hell again. But the principal assured us the school had a welcoming and inclusive environment. They would work hard to make her feel like a part of the community.