An Open Letter To My Children, April 29, 2025, Held Undelivered, For Now

#ThingsYouCantUnsay

I love you so much, no matter what, my wiggles.

I’ll leave your names, ages, and genders out of this letter for your privacy, and who knows, perhaps you will find that other names and genders are a better fit. I did.

I want you to know that the things I’m absolutely the most proud of in the world are how kind you are, your strong senses of fairness, and your stubborn insistence on doing things your own ways. Sometimes, in the moment, that stubbornness frustrates me, and I apologize for that. It will be a great strength for you.

I want to use the rest of this letter to tell you about why I’m writing to you in this moment, about being trans and queer, about who I am as a woman in relationships, and about how I’ve explored my emotional traumas and valued myself, in the hopes that will be helpful to you as you grow into adults, just in case I don’t get a chance to tell you in person. My sincere hope is this letter goes undelivered, the world turns out to not be as dark as I fear, and I write you a lighter, updated version in a few years. I’m not writing this letter to scare or unsettle you. I’m writing it because I want you to know important things about valuing yourself, and if I’m not there to teach you about them, I want this to be one way for you to learn them. Goddess, I hope I’m there to tell you in person.

1/9

Let’s do the dark part now.

I’m writing this letter in this moment because, while I think I’m still safe in our community for now, I worry I won’t be safe here soon. I’m writing it as an open letter (which means I’m letting other people read it) because I want to help them understand that trans moms are moms just like all moms, and we love our children fiercely.

We live in America. America is not the force for good that schools teach us it is. At best it is a messy, mixed bag. And it is very rarely at its best. Earlier this year, a group of people called “fascists” took control of the national government. Fascists use fear to control people, and part of how they create that fear is they make a big show of talking about how horrible small but visible groups of people are and then attacking those people. Those groups getting attacked include immigrants, Black and Brown folks, and queer people. “Queer” includes lots of kinds of folks, and definitely includes me.

Part of the control fascists seek is to control the bodies of everyone who isn’t a man. They don’t necessarily say it outright like that, but it comes through when we look at what kinds of actions they take - that is how you know what someone’s politics are; you look at what they DO with their words and their power, not what they say that they do. This includes making it normal for people to dislike women and nonbinary people, it includes making it harder to get medicine and healthcare for trans folks and bodies that have vaginas (remember how some women have penises? Some men have vaginas), it includes encouraging violence against nonbinary people and women, partly by refusing to punish men for hurting nonbinary people and women. That scares me, and it’s been getting worse consistently for months. It makes me worry that I might not be safe.

2/9

We’ve done some things to prepare ourselves. This is an open letter, so I’ll leave out lots of that, but I’ll focus on the public things I’ve done. I write essays about being a trans woman so that other queer people, especially trans femmes (“femme” means a feminine person, and includes nonbinary folks who feel feminine), feel seen and like they are not alone. I also write those essays so that my collected writings can serve as a testament to who I am and what I lived through.

I’ve thought about whether publicly writing about being trans will make me more of a target for fascists. I’ve concluded that it’s probably not a big increase in risk, because just BEING trans is something fascists hate enough to be willing to persecute me. And my transition is something that the national government had written down in its files when the fascists took power, so I’m probably already on lists of people who might be detained if I interact with federal law enforcers. That’s why there are lots of places I don’t go with you and Mommy - it’s not safe for me to travel, BECAUSE of who I am. I’ve decided that if I already am at risk for those reasons, I’m willing to risk writing about myself, because that is part of resisting fascism.

Also, I’ve been public about my transition. Everyone in our community who knew us before I transitioned knows I’m trans, and I try to not make a secret of it. I do this so that people experience knowing a trans person. Many people in America don’t know that they know any trans folks, and so when fascists tell them that trans folks are evil and want to infect their children with trans-ness and hurt children’s bodies by convincing them to medically transition, people who don’t know trans folks sometimes believe them. Being visible and known is an important way to show people that none of that is true.

The good news is fascist governments don’t usually last more than a decade or two. The bad news is, first, that they usually harm a lot of people along the way. And second, that America does lots of awful things even when its government isn’t explicitly fascist.

3/9

Okay, that’s the dark part. Here’s the trans and queer part.

Of course, no one “becomes” trans - you either are or you are not, when you are born. It might take you a while to figure it out, though - it took me 37 years. And “medically transitioning,” which I mentioned above, is what I do when I take my “no-grumpy meds” - that’s estrogen, it’s a hormone that makes my breasts grow, my curves soften, and my feelings calm down because my body expects that hormone to be inside me, and my body gets grumpy when estrogen isn’t there. I’m basically going through puberty again.

Queer identities are ways in which people experience themselves that are radically different from some of the core ways people in our society are expected to experience themselves, typically in areas of gender and sexuality. The majority of stories in our society don’t tell us about queer ways of being, though Mommy and I have made a specific point of making sure a LOT of what we read to you has queer themes, so you would know it’s okay to be yourselves, whoever you happen to be.

4/9

Now for who I am, as a woman in relationships.

As I mentioned, I’m queer. Queerness is also something you are born with, or not, but whether you are queer or not, there’s lots of good lessons to learn from queer people about valuing yourself. I’m queer in multiple ways.

I’m trans, which as you know in my case means that the doctors made a mistake and thought I was a boy when I’m actually a girl (other types of trans people exist, too). I’ve written a lot about this, but the big thing was, everyone thought I was a boy, so I assumed they were right. The problem was I didn’t want to be a boy, but had no words to express that, so in confused despair I concluded that only girls mattered, so I didn’t matter. Discovering I’m a girl helped me accept that I matter. That I have value.

I’m a lesbian, which means I’m a woman who loves women. This is more accepted than being trans, but also, fascists want men to dominate women, so they don’t like women who refuse to have relationships with men.

I’m asexual, which means that my way of loving people often doesn’t include exactly the types of physical loving and desiring that get described in stories. A big part of that is feeling like I don’t really experience thinking that other people are sexy, and also, I’m pretty ambivalent about sex. Bluntly, while I sometimes have sex with partners, it’s not very common and I don’t base any serious relationships on sex.

And I’m polyamorous, which means I maintain loving relationships with multiple partners at the same time - Mommy and I have kept that part of my identity away from our home and family because we worry it will complicate our family’s life in the community we live in. It doesn’t mean I love you or Mommy any less, and you are my only kids and I love you more than anything or anyone in the world. It does mean I’ve had to learn a LOT about clear communication and healthy relationship skills, though.

5/9

It took me YEARS to figure out I’m queer. I grew up in a time when all the stories around me were heavy with glorifying violence, ignoring feelings, ignoring consent, and centering straight relationships where love was a promise of eternal, perfect, uncomplicated devotion and connection. I have had to unlearn all of that.

That process has taught me that joy, consent, going slow, listening to others and myself, and emotional connection with myself and others are all WAY more important and often more difficult than I was taught in school and by society.

When I seek to form relationships with partners, one of the most important, non-negotiable things I need is to confirm that they listen to me about my boundaries and that they ask my consent and listen when I say no. This applies to how we talk to each other, how we touch each other, how we decide how to spend time together, how we reserve time apart to be alone, how we make decisions about what we mean to each other, and even how we give gifts to each other. This intentional way of being is part of me valuing my partners, yes, but even moreso, about valuing myself.

6/9

Now for the bit about healing trauma and valuing yourself.

I want you to know about how I value myself, and how that shows up in the relationships I form with others, because whatever kind of relationships you have, I want you to value yourselves. Patriarchy tries to tell us that nonbinary people and women have no value, and that men only have value if they participate in oppressing people. Valuing yourself as a person is a radical act of resistance and self-love. It can inspire others to value themselves, too.

I’m a trauma girl; most people have emotional trauma, the world is a rough place, and the tragedy is that we’re told we don’t have trauma and we don’t need to heal it. But we do. It’s okay to have pain, it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to cry, to despair, to feel like you don’t know the way forward. I love you, especially then. And you may find some of what hurts is things from your childhood - fears we passed on to you. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to, but it probably happened. The only person who can heal your traumas is you. Though a therapist can help.

Keep in mind that your traumas might lead you to seek out or construct unhealthy relationships. That’s what happened to me; I sought to be in relationships that made me feel safe, but I twisted myself in order to do so, and my understanding of safety was warped. To find my traumas, I often work backward. I first find myself behaving in a way that feels normal to me, but someone points out that it is deeply unhealthy. I’ll offer an example:

7/9

I used to lie constantly to make it seem like I “was normal.” Little things, like about my mood. Or about my sex life. I lied to seem more like what I thought other people were like. I did it so much and so frequently I didn’t even notice it most of the time. It wasn’t big lies, just little deflections. Only they really were big lies - not to the world, but to me. They were part of trying to prevent myself from seeing that I was insecure and in emotional pain. Each lie hurt me - not in a judgmental “lying is wrong” way, they hurt me because I was denying who I am and what is true about me. The hurt had come so thick and fast and for so long, I was numb in the places the lies hurt me. One day I heard someone say that people with emotional neglect trauma lie to seem normal, and it hit me like a truck. That confirmed for me that I had emotional trauma, but I didn’t have the details, yet.

I need touch to feel safe and cared for, but when I finally expressed that to my partner and she offered it to me, I rejected it. I couldn’t accept what I needed. This was baffling to me, but it turns out that rejecting things you need is a really typical response to being insecure and anxious in your relationships. I began to understand I was insecure and anxious in relationships by observing how I lashed out and how irrational that seemed to me.

As an adolescent, one of my traumas, the one I’m describing as an example here, was the way I came to believe that I could not be safe in relationships, I could only offer safety to my partners and hope for some of my needs for touch and safety to be met, sometimes, by accident. This was engrained deep, and it shaped the way I acted in relationships for decades. It is only recently that I’ve come to identify it and talk about it with my therapist, with Mommy, and with my other partners, to try to heal myself and believe that I can feel safe and secure just by myself as well as by talking about my needs with my partners.

8/9