Who My Child Was and Would Be

""What do I know about being a woman?" Nat said. "Sometimes I have to ask myself. The thing is, I don't know shit about womanhood." It was December of 2019. For most of the previous decade, I had understood Nat as a gay man, his identity blurred only by the erosion of the old rules about sex and gender that had shaped my youth."

"We were on FaceTime—I in New York, Nat in Berlin. His hair was long, the light of the laptop whitening his eyes. He wore an orange tank top, silver necklaces, and dark nail polish, and sported a tattooed eye on his biceps that seemed to study me in return. A few days earlier, Nat said, he had been hit hard by the idea that transition might be an affirmation, not an escape, as he had thought."

Nat, a twenty-six-year-old son, intends to transition to womanhood, prompting intimate FaceTime conversations across continents. Nat expresses uncertainty about womanhood and recognizes transition could be an affirmation rather than an escape, and believes estrogen might unlock new emotion. Nat plans to keep his name and much of his wardrobe and values the silhouette of his clothes while weighing surgery as an open question. The narrator experiences sadness and a sense of loss as familiar physical markers shift, realizing that a loved one's transformation requires emotional adjustment and changes in relational identity. For many trans people, the misalignment between body and identity can be present from the start.

Read at The New Yorker