I used to think freedom was something you declared, fists raised, voice hoarse from shouting into a world that didn’t care to listen. But then my teenage son came out as trans, and without ever shouting, he cracked open a door I’d long ago forgotten was even locked.
Growing up, I knew I wasn’t quite straight, not quite cis, but none of the available labels felt right. I didn’t have a closet to come out of. More like a house with no mirrors. I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t straight, I wasn’t entirely feminine, I wasn’t entirely masculine. None of the words I knew fit me, there was no community I could call mine. There was just a sense of grey unknowing. I didn’t even know what I was missing, only that I felt wrong in ways I couldn’t explain.
There was no one to ask, no one who could’ve helped me make sense of it. My parents were well-meaning but conservative, and the idea of not fitting neatly into the little cishet box they built for me was entirely alien to them. So I stayed quiet. I tried on other people’s truths, wore their labels like borrowed clothes, hoping something might fit. Nothing did. I wasn’t trapped, just blurry, undefined. I had no idea who I was.
I sought validation like a lifeline, in friendships where I shape-shifted to match what they needed, in relationships where I shrank myself to fit how they defined love. They told me wanting to be masculine was odd, so I locked it away. They told me that finding women beautiful was perverse, so I shoved it down, cut off parts of myself to fit what friends and boyfriends told me I had to be. I thought love meant being easy to hold, easy to please. I stayed when I should’ve run. I said yes when I wanted to scream. But every yes became a new cage. The parts of me that didn’t fit: the sharpness, the queerness, the hunger for something more—I pushed them down, shut the door, turned the lock. How could I fight for myself when I didn’t even know who I was? How could I trust my own voice when that voice didn’t have answers to the questions I asked every day.
Finally, I grew up. I learned. I found the answers, I found the words, I found my voice. A world in which the abundance of labels felt excessive to some was my heaven. I found words like gender-fluid, non-binary, pansexual, panromantic. I learned slogans like “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.” I learned which words fit, which words felt like comfort, like knowledge, like coming home and I learned how to fight for the identity I’d been looking for all my life.
As I grew into myself, life became a battlefield. After years of letting my voice be silenced, I fought to be heard, fought to be seen, fought for the right to stand steady on my own two feet. My entire adulthood has been lived with my fists half raised.
And then, my son.
His questions came just before puberty, at the same age mine had: the restless itch under the skin, the sense that something didn’t line up. Puberty, that old thief of certainty, cracked him open. He came out as non-binary first, a word I never had. Later, as he learned the edges of his identity better, he found another name for his truth: trans.
What stuns me still is the grace he carried, even when his voice trembled. At 10, 11, 12, ages when the world tries so hard to box kids up and stamp the lid shut, he showed more patience than I had ever found for myself.
His dad and I told him we’d need time. A decade of one name, one pronoun, now we’d have to rewire our tongues. “Please correct us,” we said. “Be patient.” And he was. Each time I stumbled, old habits flaring up when I was tired or rushed, he’d just smile, correct me, let me try anew.
He never made me feel like I’d failed him, even when I failed the sentence. He never let my fumbling shape how he saw himself. His validation doesn’t come stamped by the world. It doesn’t need the world’s approval or permission. It doesn’t even need mine. It wells up from somewhere deeper, quieter, immovable, a courage that says: I exist, whether you get it right or not.
And the humbling, bone-deep truth is that at 13, he was braver with his truth than I was at 30. Maybe braver than I am even now, inching closer to 40.
I spent so much of my life trying to shout my truth loud enough that no one could take it from me. I thought if I didn’t fight for every inch of who I am, the world would snatch it back while I slept. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Maybe that fight was needed for me. But him? He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t bargain with the world for permission.
He just is.
He knows who he is in a way I never did. And in that calm, he’s teaching me a freedom I never thought possible: the freedom of not needing society’s permission.
Still, I am terrified. I watch laws get drafted by people who’ve never met him, never sat across from him at breakfast while he laughs about Pokémon or asks for more syrup. I watch grown adults spin cruel stories about kids like mine, and I want to roar, raise my fists, stand between him and a world that wants him small, hidden, undone.
He just shrugs. They can’t make me not me, he says.
He’s right. Laws can make his life harder, crueller, less safe, but they can’t strip him of who he is.
When I see his calm where I have only ever had noise, I wonder what I could’ve been if I’d known how to hold my truth that gently. If someone had said: You don’t have to fight to exist. You just have to breathe.
I’m supposed to be the one teaching him how to be in this world, how to stand tall, stay safe, hold fast to his truth. But he’s teaching me.
He’s teaching me that freedom doesn’t always have to be wrestled for, teeth bared and fists raised. Sometimes it’s quiet, patient, unbothered by the world’s noise. That you can hold your truth so gently it doesn’t break and so firmly it doesn’t bend.
He’s given me a new way to be. A way that doesn’t demand I wake up every morning ready for war. A way that lets me lay down my armour sometimes, breathe deeper, look in the mirror and see someone I’m still allowed to become. I can be someone who wears softness without apology, who wears what she likes, who speaks without rehearsing first, who doesn’t brace for judgment and confrontation simply for existing in the room.
The future still frightens me. This world can be so quick to punish anyone who lives outside its lines. But when I look at him, at the boy who knows exactly who he is and refuses to apologize, I remember he’s not alone. He has tools I never had, answers I never knew to seek, words that once felt miraculous to me but now slip from his tongue like second nature.
He knows he’s held. He knows his truth won’t vanish just because someone writes a law or raises their voice. And in moments when fear knots my stomach and the headlines feel too sharp to bear, he reminds me: there is beauty still. There is freedom still, not in shouting, but in existing, calmly, exactly as we are.
In loving him, I am learning how to love myself. In watching him live, I am learning how to be free.
He is my son. And he is my teacher. And for that, for him, I am braver than I have ever been.
Why you can trust Xtra
