We could use a bright spot, yes? A bit of happy?

Not long after I came out of the hospital, Sammy came out of the closet as a trans boy.

I will confess there were some mixed emotions, but none of them will stop me from loving him unconditionally and supporting his desire to transition.

What with him being 9, I’d like to discuss what a healthy transition looks like today and how it will progress.

A few days after he came out, I took him to get his hair cut. He expressed a desire for a boy cut, so he got one.

He also wants boy clothes. Since it’s that time of year where I buy him new summer clothes, that just meant shopping in the boy section. He did add in that he wants some girl clothes too. He likes pink and purple and unicorns and dresses and boys are allowed to wear these things. He just wants a balance in his closet.

In a year or two, if he still identifies as trans, we’ll start him on puberty blockers. The nice thing is these aren’t like hormones with irreversible changes. They simply delay puberty.

Did you know it’s seriously a lot easier to change your name if you’re a minor and your parents do it for you? We’ll change his name to Samuel when he’s 16 before he gets his first ID.

Then when he’s older we’ll discuss hormones and surgeries, if he wants them, and help in any way we can.

So transition will be a long process spanning the next decade or so. But for now? He’s experiencing gender euphoria over his handsome new haircut and the boy clothes I’m buying him. Which means, I guess, that I’m doing something right.

With that handled, I settled into my youngest being my son.

But then he met some of my found family when made an emergency trip to Indy, which I’ll blog about later. There he met more nonbinary and trans masc people. He slowly started adding definitions of different genders to the queer wiki in his head.

Around that time he started talking about how he was a boy but still wanted to be a pretty princess. I confirmed prince was not an option. So I cautiously suggested he might be he/him nonbinary, and explained that that is a thing. He took this knowledge and worked with it for a while.

Not long later he dressed as a girl for a day and told me that while usually he’s a boy, for that day he was a girl. At which point I taught him about the gender-fluid identity.

It’s been a roller coaster of watching him discover himself over the past few weeks, but he’s finally settled on Gender Fluid, for now. If he changes his mind, then he changes his mind. If he doesn’t, then he’s gender fluid. I’ll use all sorts of pronouns for him from now on based on what gender he was on a day something happened.

I’m just really glad I’ve raised my kids comfortable to explore who they are, and secure enough to share their findings with me.