The Harry Potter Alliance

By Heather Murray

April 20, 2011

Different, like Harry – My Experience Raising a Transgendered Daughter

This blog was submitted by an HPA member who wishes to remain anonymous about her experience raising a transgender child.

I am angry. Angry because the nurses are calling my daughter “baby.” Enraged because the doctors are calling her “it.” And pissed off beyond belief because my father-in-law just called to ask, “Does the baby have a penis?” And now… NOW the entire endocrine team has walked in and, in what can only be described as a in a kingly, holier-than-though manner, the head endocrinologist has announced, “We have decided IT is a girl.”

There is no parenting class for this, no “book “ to read, no other person I can scream and cry and laugh with. You are isolated by a once-in-a-lifetime event. My daughter, my precious baby, has been born. She arrived with mixed genitalia, mixed chromosomes, and a wide variety of medical issues ranging from a hole in her heart to undescended gonads. All I know is that I love her. I will always love her no matter what.

Acceptance. A simple word . A sacred word. I choose that day to open my heart and my mind to another human being that defied science. I was asked if I could handle it. My response was, and always is, “Can she handle it?” and “How do I teach her to?”

Her testosterone levels were that of a normal newborn male, her uterus the same as a normal newborn female. Her genitalia was an organic car wreck, as if two worlds had collided. And they had. Many had advice. Quite a few asked innocent, yet painfully ignorant, questions. And no one, no one, had answers. The best advice came form her cardiologist, “All you can do is take her home and love her.” So we did. I read, and I spoke with countless specialists, and I discussed her future sex life when she was a week old. I tried to wrestle with the job, a godlike job, of deciding her sex assignment. Even after the grand announcements came multiple meeting, tests, surgeries, and medications. We had nine months to decide.

In the end all I knew was that I wanted her to be happy. If at the end of the day she wanted identify as a female, a male, a transgender, I didn’t give a damn. She was placed on a road that veered EVERYWHERE and only she would know which path to choose. We asked as many questions as we could. But soon they became unanswerable: “If she is a female but is attracted to females, does that make her gay or is she straight but following her male chromosomal instincts?” We simply ceased to attempt to look into the future. We concentrated on her medical needs, the cancer that showed up, the heart that possibly needed surgery, the genital reconstruction.
　
She would require her first surgery at nine months. It would last fourteen hours. There were tumors, two types of cancer. One was deadly. They were not 100% sure whether it had been contained. We waited three days. Long agonizing, thought-provoking days. She was clear. Her next surgery came at thirteen
months. And over the past sixteen years she has had seven major and six minor surgeries since her birth.

She survived, thrived. An inborn light and humor shone through. We raised her as a female, but always with an open mind. Her favorite toys were golf clubs, she hated dolls. She did not want to be cuddled but loved giving hugs. She refused to wear dresses, but loved dress up clothes. She knew she wanted children. We explained adoption. She really, really wanted breasts. We explained that she would require medication. “Okay, as long as they are as big as Mommy’s.” She had crushes on boys and girls.

At the age of six, she found Harry Potter. A boy, who like herself was alone in the world. No other person had experienced what he had. She was the only child in the world with her genetic makeup. Separate, life seemed lonely, but together they made an unstoppable team. She became Harry, disappearing into his world for hours at a time. Forcing us to read and re-read the books over and over again until copy after copy had to be replaced.

We got a call when she was ten-years-old. It was a difficult time. She had developed severe osteoporosis. The specialist were baffled. Endocrine was called in. They reviewed all her paperwork. “We may have assigned her the wrong sex, based on what we know today.” A nuclear bomb. My emotions and the level of guilt I felt that day are still indescribable. We scrambled to find someone, anyone who could help us. Her bones were falling apart but they did not want to give her estrogen therapy if they had made a mistake. We found him at Columbia University. He did all the work for free, and spent countless hours on the phone explaining all the intricacies of sex assignment and body chemistry. He reviewed ten years’ worth of labs, surgical notes, x-rays. He spoke with her and all her beloved teachers. He felt she identified most as a female and that a certain chemical switch in the brain had not occurred. “You need to explain it all to her.” She is ten-years-old, medically fragile, and mentally challenged. HOW, HOW do I explain this???? “You can do it, you got her this far,” he said.

“Just like Harry, Mom, right? I’m different, like him?” These were her first words after our first conversation.

“Yes, sweetie, and like Harry we all love you and will be here for you.”

“I am a boy and a girl?” she asked.

For the next two years, these are the kind of questions we discussed. In the end, she is a sixteen-year-old young lady with an amazing boyfriend. She knows some bits and pieces work differently. Sex is openly discussed in our house. There are many discussions that make me dizzy in their complexity. But she is happy. She has accepted herself and her body. She wishes her “boobs were bigger,” wants to wear half shirts, and go to R-rated movies like all teenage girls. She also jokes about how when she tells people she is “special” they really have no idea how special she is. But we do.