Hope for the future

Photo by Pablo Martinez on Unsplash

Happy Easter!

If you celebrate Easter, you might be thinking about HOPE.

A few weeks ago, I served on a national panel for Duke University, and we talked about all the horrible anti-trans bills and laws around the U.S. right now and their effect on families with transgender kids. Since it wasn’t a super-happy conversation, the moderator closed out the panel by asking me if I had any hope for the future.

Absolutely!

KIDS are the hope for the future, because - mostly - the youth of today don’t have issues with kids being transgender. It’s the adults. The kids get it. It’s not that hard to understand: believe people when they say who they are!

I told a story about talking to a mom whose four-year-old told her that he wasn’t a boy and he wasn’t a girl but didn’t have the words to tell her how he felt.

So she bought him an age-appropriate book about gender identity (It Feels Good to Be Yourself by Theresa Thorn). At the part when someone was talking about being nonbinary, he got really excited and said, “That’s me!! Mommy, that’s me!”

A four-year-old who can articulate that he’s nonbinary? THAT gives me hope.

And the books that exist to mirror back trans kids’ experiences also give me hope. As do the parents who provide those books.

So yes, I do have hope for the future. How can you not?