He told me he’s a girl.
He told me he has a new name.
He told me that
the baby boy I cherished, loved, protected… is gone.
The replacement is alien to me… mean, disconnected, punitive.
He told me the name I chose for him is his deadname.
Like my grandfather who I named him for… who was my person…
Gone.
And now, he says he’s alive, and the same, but it seems… he merely shifted his desired deadness.
To my heart.
My daughter says her given name is a trigger so we shouldn’t use it. I say using her new name is a trigger for me. Whose trigger is more important?
Our pain is summed up perfectly with these words. I am a widow. My kids lost their dad to cancer as teenagers. Yet we pushed forward. Survivors. When my youngest went to college, she suddenly decided to become a boy. And the name, Savannah Catherine, was buried. When I was away she put away items from my house that bore her name and pictures of her as a girl. It was another death. I know. I had experienced it before in losing my husband. I thought the worst life experience was death. It’s not. It is betrayal. To be betrayed by my own daughter this way is worse than any death imaginable. My favorite name betrayed to an ideology growing exponentially among our beautiful children. How, I beg for someone who can tell me, how do we stop this before a whole generation is killed and the lines of our families are lost and buried with the dead.