Me with Mom and Dad, in July 1997, just before I moved from Calgary to Rhode Island. I told them I was transgendered two months previously, and to my enormous relief, the sky did not fall!

Within six months of joining the Illusion Transgender Society, I realized that the time had come to tell my parents that I was transgendered. This was not something I looked forward to doing, but it was unavoidable.

I was determined to escape the stifling and stultifying constraints of living in the closet. I was becoming increasingly public about my gender identity. Sooner or later, my parents were going to find out, anyway. I preferred to tell them in my own words, rather than have them learn from someone else that their son was "queer." This was a question of respecting both their dignity and my own.

Still, the prospect was terrifying. I spent many sleepless nights wondering how my parents would react, and what it would mean for my future relationship -- and that of my wife and children -- with Mom and Dad. At times, I felt guilty: that by coming out I would somehow disappoint them, or let them down.

But I realized that this feeling of guilt was just the lure of the closet, trying to deceive and seduce me with the false promise of security in secrecy. But there is no security in the closet. And as a parent, I knew that it was important for Mom and Dad to know the truth about their child.

All the same, the temptations of the closet pursued me up to the moment I stepped through my parents' door. They played tricks with my mind; they manipulated family dynamics and history; and they exaggerated the depth of the fault-lines that naturally exist between parents and children, even in the closest of families.

My folks are decent middle-class working people, now retired, and they have been good and loving parents. They are generally liberal and tolerant, but they can also be quite conservative. On the other hand, I became a rebel in my adolescence, and as a young and stubborn adult, this translated into a commitment to socialism and communist politics.

This is me at the age of six, in the fall of 1965, already wondering about my gender identity.

This often generated heated arguments and tensions in my family, especially with my equally-stubborn Dad. This never drove us apart, thanks to my Dad's firm belief in my right to expound my views, regardless of how 'wrong' they might be -- but also thanks to the resourcefulness and determination of my Mom who always found a way to keep us together.

Neither Mom or Dad were especially thrilled with my news. I am sure that "transgender" is something they do not -- and perhaps cannot -- understand. But they were both at pains to make it clear that my gender issues did not change the most important fact in our relationship, that I was still their child and that I could always expect their love and support.

It was much easier telling my Mom that I am trans. She told me that she had sensed, early on in my life, that I was somehow different, and that she had always struggled to protect me.

It was much harder with Dad. But he listened to me, quietly. Then told me the story of a friend from his boyhood, who was also "that way." He was rejected by his family, and at the age of sixteen, he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Dad looked at me and said, "it's up to you to live your life." At that moment, I never felt more love for Dad -- or from Dad.

I had finally come home.

This page was last on January 20, 1999

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