She/Him/Us

I still remember the way it was in the beginning.

She was an infant then, riding behind me in her car seat. I didn’t realize how quickly she would grow up, how she would become a child and then an adolescent before I was ready. I didn’t realize how the world would come for her, how it would dig its claws into her and attempt to drag her away from me. If I had known it was coming—if I had truly understood what it was—I would have fought harder against it at the beginning.

As a psychiatrist, I thought I had the tools to navigate this, but I was wrong and ill-prepared for the battle in front of me. After three long years, I got her back, and the two of us emerged from the depths of that experience like people who had nearly drowned. There are parts of us that remain there still, lost to the deep waters that almost consumed us.

There is something both therapeutic and haunting about revisiting those recent years, and I decided to write about it. The memoir, She/Him/Us, will be released by Pitchstone Publishing on August 4, 2025. It follows my experience as the mother of a trans-identified teenager who I did not believe was transgender. I have utilized my training as a psychiatrist to make the narrative richer and the explanations more interesting, but this is an achingly personal story that reflects my anguish and desperation as I strove to support and protect my child from permanent harm, to find resources and allies where very few existed, and to do so without destroying her in the process.

She/Him/Us is for anyone struggling to understand or navigate our approach to trans-identified children and adolescents. It is for physicians, politicians, mental health providers, and policymakers. But mostly, it is for parents of trans-identified teens. For those parents, the risk of losing their child is high. It is critical for them to get this right, to avoid the many pitfalls in front of them, and to do whatever it takes to protect the health and wellness of their child.

For more information, or to order a copy of the book, please visit www.shehimus.com.

Here is the first chapter.

With gratitude,

Lisa Bellot, M.D.

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Chapter One: The Disclosure

From Magical to Messy

We rolled into town in a U-Haul, my husband Zack working the steering wheel of the twenty-six-foot monstrosity while I followed behind in the SUV. As we merged onto Main Street, a sign greeted us: “Welcome to Dante’s Watch.” I read the words out loud to eighteen-month-old Jordan, who was checking out the scenery in retrospect from her rear-facing car seat. I couldn’t see the ocean, but I could smell it through the open window, the fog rolling through town like an empty stagecoach, the seagulls riding the breeze or gathered in small, watchful congregations in restaurant parking lots.

I surveyed the landscape in my peripheral vision as we lumbered past the surf shop, the pizza joint, and the town cinema advertising Raiders of the Lost Ark as one of its summer retro movie features. A teenage boy in a wetsuit rode past us on his bike, a nine-foot longboard nestled in the makeshift cradle attached to its frame.

“Gotta get you a surfboard,” I told Jordan.

She rattled her toy shark in her tiny fist. “Smurfboat!” she echoed, and I snorted at that as the laughter rolled through me. “Smurfboat! Smurfboat!” she chanted, giggling from her car seat behind me.

I drew a deep breath and took in the scent of it, this place we would now call home. It smelled like popcorn and saltwater taffy, seaweed and Pacific Ocean mist. I had spotted the eucalyptus trees from the highway, spread out like sentinels along a coastline that would soon become speckled with evening bonfires as the sun dipped below the horizon. After years of medical training in Philadelphia, I was excited to be returning to Coastal California and a town that was closer to my roots.

I did not grow up here, but we used to visit when I was younger. I remember the tide pools, the aching cold of my feet submerged in the water, the way hermit crabs used to skitter right over them if I stood still for long enough. When Zack and I had talked about settling down at the end of our training, Dante’s Watch had been on the short list. The people, as I remembered from my teenage years, were kind, welcoming, and inclusive. I wanted our daughter to grow up in this kind of environment, a small town that was big enough for magic and wonder.

Over the next few months, it was strange how quickly we became part of the place. We moved into our house, enrolled Jordan in preschool, and Zack and I both started local jobs that we loved. As first-time parents, we marveled at every milestone Jordan achieved. She had a flavor for drama from the beginning, starring as Maleficent in a kindergarten depiction of Sleeping Beauty. (“Oh, ho! If it isn’t the lovely Princess Aurora…”) She embraced art, creating such spectacular works as Pig in a Bikini, which I had professionally framed and presented to Zack for his birthday. One of Jordan’s childhood watercolors of a momma frog and her baby still hangs on the wall of my living room, a painting people sometimes mistake for the work of Eric Carle.

Watching her grow, we enjoyed listening to her chatter about the things she was interested in (mermaids, Princess Merida, puppies) or uninterested in (soccer, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, spiders). Jordan watched seemingly endless episodes of My Little Pony and Dora the Explorer. She made pretend tea and muffins from sand on the playground and served them to us during our make-believe tea parties. She loved telling her friends that both of her parents were doctors. “My dad helps people when they’re bleeding. My mom helps people when they’re mad or sad.”

Our daughter was the opposite of a tomboy. She gravitated toward anything fancy and loved bling: the more sequins, the more shine, the fancier, the better. She wore tiaras and headbands adorned with plastic jewels or large tropical flowers that matched her outfits. Her favorite shoes were her pink Uggs and ruby red slippers, both gifts from my brother. She had a velvet red Christmas dress that she literally wore to pieces, and the puffy satin blue dress that replaced it became her all-time favorite. To Zack’s suggestion that she save the blue dress for special days, her memorable response was, “Daddy, every day is a special day.” She had us with that one. We let her wear the dress every day it was clean.

As she matured, Jordan nurtured our aging dogs with maternalistic ease. We went apple picking in the fall and baked cakes and apple pies together. She helped me make soup from treasures we gathered at our local farmer’s market: a wide array of vegetables fresh from the craggy, foggy coastal farmlands. She wanted to wear the aprons I’d inherited from my grandmother: beautiful garments with pink and yellow gingham patterns, bordered in lace and tied in the back with large white bows. We took a mommy-and-me ballet class. Her favorite part was wearing the pink tutu.

On cool, coastal, foggy evenings, we would drop by the beach on our way home from school and watch the sun set and the waves crash. I had a Volkswagen convertible that she adored, and it was perfect for our evening sightseeing. At night we would settle in for a movie of her choosing, and it was usually Mary Poppins, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, or the like. I was lucky enough to find a complete Disney collection at a local thrift store. Together, Jordan and I explored the movies, characters, and lessons involved in those enchanted tales.

And then … Jordan grew up. Her interest in Princess Aurora morphed into a fascination with Taylor Swift, and her infatuation with Snow White became a love of Camila Cabello. Colorful pictures of mermaids were replaced with photos of narwhals, swordfish, and other non-make believe creatures. Making fun of the boys in her class turned into crushes on teenage heartthrobs, going so far as to say, “Justin Beiber looks like a prince,” and, “Draco Malfoy is hot.” Dr. Seuss was replaced by John Greene and J. K. Rowling, and later, by the works of Stephen King.

Things were changing. And then, sadly, things changed some more. We lost both of our beloved dogs, one of them tragically and the other unexpectedly. The acute inpatient psychiatric unit where I had invested so much of my time and passion closed. I followed a logical career path, but one that did not feed my soul. Our marriage, which had been limping along for the last few years, finally crumbled. The split was amicable, and Zack and I shared Jordan easily and remained friendly. We tried to minimize how much this transition affected our child, but the sadness of our parting lingers in all of us still. During the process of separating our lives and homes, Jordan found herself in a new school district and starting junior high at a school where she had no established peer connections.

Jordan was eleven, almost twelve, and teen angst had settled upon her. Her playlists included songs like “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” by My Chemical Romance, “Misery Business” by Paramore, and “I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie. It was in this vulnerable phase of life that Jordan started junior high school in a new district with one acquaintance but zero friends.

Things had already gotten messy. They were about to get worse.

What She Said

It was an unseasonably cold spring day in Dante’s Watch. Jordan was twelve and had recently engaged in a bit of self-injury: cutting behavior that was new to her. Zack and I were naturally concerned and had decided we needed to talk to her about it. In hindsight (always so painfully clear), this was garden variety tween girl acting out. It probably didn’t need an official sit down with both of her parents. We thought that we were doing the right thing, of course, based on the information available to us at the time. I wish we could go back to that day and handle it differently.

We sat in hard, uncomfortable chairs in the outdoor seating area between a closed Mexican restaurant and a bustling coffee shop. I had ordered a latte, and I hunkered over it against the intermittent bursts of wind. Zack had grabbed a juice, but Jordan had declined any refreshment, which was unusual for our trips to Coffee House. She’s not getting anything? I wondered to myself, accustomed to her typical orders of an iced mocha or a decadent pumpkin scone. I remember thinking even then that something must be wrong with my daughter, a stomach bug or the first symptoms of the flu perhaps. Whatever it was, she looked pale and unwell sitting across from me. I half-expected her to vomit.

“So, what’s this all about?” Zack asked her. “What’s going on with you?”

She danced around it for a while as we sat there, waiting for her to say something meaningful.

Eventually, she came out with it: “I have gender dysphoria; I feel more like a boy than a girl. I’ve always known something was wrong with me. Now I’ve discovered what it is. I’m going to start living my life as a male—my authentic self—and I want you to use he/him pronouns when you refer to me.”

I stared at her. The things she was saying were so ridiculous that I almost laughed. As a psychiatrist, I’ve been trained not to do that, but still, it almost happened. She could have said, “From now on, I’m going to communicate only through puppets, and I’ll be wearing a hat with rotting fish on my head,” and I would not have been more surprised than I was in that moment. Zack shifted in his seat, as if he was experiencing a bit of intestinal malaise, and again I almost lost it. The laughter wanted to bubble out of me, but I pushed it down and told myself to be still. I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t. How would she have responded if I had laughed out loud and said, “Okay, cut the shit and tell us what’s really going on with you.” How might that have changed everything that followed?

She was prepared, I’ll give her that. She described the discomfort she experienced in her own body, how she wanted to escape her female form but couldn’t. She had polished and articulate responses to all our questions, and she assured us that now that she had “come out” there would be no more self-injury. Jordan educated us about the risk of suicide for individuals with gender dysphoria who were not affirmed and supported by their immediate family. Although she was not overtly threatening, the threat of ongoing self-injury hung in the air between us. She advised us that several months earlier she had come out to a small group of friends at her new school (of which I estimate about 75 percent identified as LGBTQ), and they were all accepting of her new identity. There had been a time, she told us, when she had explored the possibility that she might be gay, but she had “grown out of it.” Things were clear to her now.

I sat there and held my tongue, nodding when it was appropriate. All of this from a twelve-year-old, I marveled. How could she know anything about her gender identification and sexuality for certain? She was right about one thing, though: it was important for us to be supportive. The worst thing we could do was to push back against what she was telling us. This will be nothing, I thought, an inconsequential blip in her self-exploration. We would sit with this for a while and see how it unfolded. There was no harm in that, I reasoned, but I was wrong. I just didn’t know it at the time.