How to Love Trans Friends or Family
Spoiler: the same way as anybody else, really...
The history of trans people has many examples in which a child, a spouse, a parent, comes out as trans and the family rallies around them with love and support. They are shocked to learn how much suffering had been happening, right under their noses, and become valiantly dedicated to doing whatever they can to make it stop.
But that same history is littered with just as many, if not more, opposing examples. Families who reject. Who disown. Who decry sin, shout “no son of mine!” or “not under my roof!” Who cast their child or spouse out into the cold to fend for themselves as best they may.
Maybe someone in your family has come out recently, and you wound up here because you’re not sure how to feel about it or how to react. That’s ok. You’re allowed. It is nearly always a huge surprise when this happens, but no surprise at all that you aren’t sure what to make of it. Not sure which of those two broad paths to go down.
I can’t tell you what to do. But to the families, friends, and other loved-ones of trans people, I want to ask you a question:
What does love mean?
We all know the feeling of loving someone, but what follows from that feeling? I’ve thought about that a lot in my own life, especially once I had kids. What does it mean to truly love my children? Or my wife? Or anyone else? What do we want for the most important people in our lives?
Easy answers come readily to mind. Society gives us a script for them, a Standard Life Plan. You know the one. It’s the script that has them staying in school, staying out of trouble, getting a good education. The one in which we want them to get a good job and save money and buy their own home. The one where we hope they find love, get married, settle down, have some kids. Maybe a dog. Where they’re successful in their careers and make something of themselves.
The Standard Life Plan, however, does not include gender transitioning.
We want our loved ones to have a good life, and the Standard Life Plan script fills in our imaginings for their lives with a million hypothetical details that are supposed to give them one. So when a family member comes out as trans, it feels That’s not in the plan! How can they have a good life this way?, we wonder.
But first, what is even the point of having a good life? Why is that our wish for them?
Ultimately, because we want them to be happy. A good life is supposed to bring happiness. That’s why we want a good life for our loved ones, and why we imagine for them all the things we believe will bring them a good life. We just want them to be happy.
A deep and abiding wish for our loved ones’ happiness: That is what it means to love someone. That’s the root of it all, so that is our answer. To want them to be happy, no matter what.
Not convinced? Ok. Try to imagine loving someone but not wishing them to be happy. It doesn’t work, right? A wish for someone’s unhappiness, misery, or suffering is the opposite of love.
To claim to love someone without also wishing their happiness does not to me seem like love at all.
What’s love got to do with it?
Obviously, you want your trans family member or trans friend to be happy. You love them. Of course you do.
But many loved ones find themselves balking at the idea that their trans person might want to transition. If you have a trans loved one in your life, you may find yourself balking at the idea that they might want to start wearing dresses or makeup. Or stop wearing dresses or makeup. Or grow their hair out, or cut it short. Or start hormone replacement therapy. Or even get any of several gender-affirming surgeries.
And, look, I get it. I am not here to attack you. I understand how weird or strange it can seem for someone to transition. I understand how unfathomable it can be to people who aren’t transgender. Sometimes it feels weird and strange to me, and I’m doing it!
I understand how afraid you might be for them, for the possibility that they’re making a mistake or ruining their lives. After all, these transitioning activities are very off-script relative to the Standard Life Plan is supposed to bring our loved ones a good life, and therefore happiness.
Your concerns are reasonable. You might not expect me to say that, but I do. Not because you might be right—if your loved one has gotten so far as to actually come out to you, odds are high that they are very, very sure about it—but because those concerns come from a place of love. A place of wanting the best for this person in your life. A person who has come out as trans and is now wants to do things that, to you, seem entirely unfathomable. Things you cannot imagine producing the best for them.
You love them and want them to be happy. Of course you’re concerned!
The Possibility of Happiness
If you have not experienced gender dysphoria, then I don’t expect you to understand what it feels like or what it does to you. And the truth is, I can’t explain it to you either. I can’t make you understand what it feels like any more than I could genuinely convey the feeling of an orgasm to someone who’s never had one, or describe the color red to someone who has been blind from birth. I could put adjectives on these things—dysphoria feels bad, orgasms feel good, red is a warm color—but that’s not the same as knowing.
So if you yourself have never experienced gender dysphoria before, you’re going to have to trust me on this: it is the bleakest misery. It may start small, but it only grows worse the longer you live with it until it becomes unbearable.
If you want to know more about dysphoria (and you should), the go-to resource is the Gender Dysphoria Bible. You don’t have to go read that first. All that matters here is that to experience gender dysphoria is to suffer, and to suffer all-pervasively: Gender dysphoria stems from a mismatch between our bodies and our innermost sense of ourselves, our true selves. And because virtually every aspect of our lives is gender-coded in one way or another, affected by the way people perceive our membership in either the male or female genders, the net result is that everything in our lives rubs the wrong way against our fundamental identity.
Everything constitutes a micro-aggression against our identities. Every time we speak and the voice is wrong, every time someone calls our name, every time we get dressed in clothes that mis-present our identity to the world, every time we look in the mirror, even every single interaction we have with another human being. All of it.
Nobody means it. Nobody even knows they’re doing it. There’s no malice intended. People are just treating us according to how we look, same as anybody else. They can’t read our minds. They can’t see inside us to see our true identities. We can’t expect them to somehow magically know to call us “ma’am” when there's an obvious beard shadow all over our face, or to call us “sir” when we have obvious breasts and an hourglass figure.
Nobody means it, but that doesn’t change how it feels. That doesn’t change that each little thing is another impact. Another painful reminder that the world cannot see us for who we truly are.
You can tolerate this for a while. Some people can tolerate it for a very, very long while. But eventually it wears you down. It burns through all your emotional reserves. It hollows you out, demanding more and more of your daily energy just to keep functioning in the face of it. It becomes deeply traumatic and leaves you no room for anything else but enduring the suffering.
It strips away the very possibility of happiness.
To have gender dysphoria is to suffer. You may not understand it first-hand, but I tell you first-hand that it is true. Can you imagine living not just without happiness, but without even the possibility of happiness? What would even be the point?
Transitioning and the Standard Life Plan
A trans person can follow the Standard Life Plan all they want, but it won’t bring them happiness in the same way as it will for a cis person. It can’t bring them happiness. That possibility is blocked.
I know this first-hand, too. I tried it. I followed the Standard Life Plan for over fifty years. And I did really well at it. Doing under my mountain of undiagnosed gender dysphoria was extremely hard, but I did it. I stayed in school, stayed out of trouble. I got a good job, bought a house. I found love, got married, had kids. No dog though; allergies. I did the whole plan, start to end, just like everyone expected me to.
By any normal measure, I had a good life. I had it all!
Here’s the real kicker: all those elements of the Standard Life Plan? I actually wanted them. I wasn’t just blindly following that plan because that’s what the world expected. No, the whole comfortable suburban family life thing actually sounds good to me. It’s what I dreamed of building since I was a child. And I did it!
But it hadn’t brought me happiness. I came into my fifties riding a knife’s edge. Barely able to continue holding together my life, my career, my family and my obligations to my family. I knew by then I was trans, but I thought I could just keep following the plan. I had not yet realized that dysphoria was robbing from me the possibility of happiness.
I had everything I ever wanted, only to realize that I couldn’t enjoy it because dysphoria was overwhelming me. Dysphoria was the problem, and it stemmed from the mismatch between my inner self and my outer self. My female insides and my male outsides.
To have the possibility of happiness, I needed to fix that. I needed to transition. Re-shape my outer self to match my inner self, so that the world can see me and treat me for who I really am. So that every moment of my life is no longer a micro-aggression against my identity.
I’m doing that now. Will it get me happiness? There’s no guarantee. Life never guarantees happiness, whether you’re cis or trans. (Though so far it’s looking pretty good!) But you literally could not pay me enough to detransition. To go back into the bleak emptiness of the closet.
I won’t do it because it was horrible, yes, but also because I deserve a fair shot at happiness. To play this crazy game of life unburdened by gender dysphoria. Which means transitioning, since that is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria.
Love your loved ones
If someone in your life is trans, someone you love and care about, keep loving them. Keep wishing for their happiness.
But understand that for them, gaining the possibility of happiness is going to mean transitioning. Doing things that, for a cis person, would absolutely not bring the possibility of happiness. Things that, for you, would push your body out of alignment with your innermost self, but that for your trans loved one whose body is already mis-aligned, helps correct that problem.
For their sake, engage with your humility. Accept that you do not live inside their head. You do not know what it feels like to be them. You are not in a position to judge what truly will, or won’t, bring them happiness or even just give them a fair shot at it. Trust them when they tell you how they feel and what they need.
Love them, yes. Wish for their happiness, yes. But understand that for the trans people in your life, that almost certainly means transitioning. Even if you don’t understand it. Support your trans loved ones in their transitions, because when you love someone, you do not wish for their unending suffering.
Besides, it’s the only way your wish for them might ever come true.
This article is a revised, republished version of this substack’s inaugural post, which has since been removed.