The Tale of Tommy

The year was 1981, the place was middle America. I was four years old, and I insisted that I was a boy.

According to my long-suffering mother, who groped her way through this phase of mine, along with many others to come, I became fixated on the idea that I was not a girl, but rather a boy named “Tommy.” I wore a single outfit that I thought was a “boy” outfit and would become furious when anyone would call me my given name. I did this at home, at church, at preschool, and with my other family members.

The Human Rights Campaign tells us the following: “The general rule for determining whether a child is transgender or non-binary (rather than gender nonconforming or gender variant) is if the child is consistent, insistent, and persistent about their transgender identity.”

I was all three. I was, according to the definition laid out by this LGBTQIA+ activist organization, a transgender child. I was consistent in this presentation across all settings and situations. I insisted on being called Tommy and being referred to using him he/him pronouns. And I persisted in this long enough for my parents not only to be concerned, but to seek professional guidance.

This went on for the better part of a year. My mother finally took me to our pediatrician because she was afraid I was struggling with something significant. But because it was 1981 and the world had not yet lost its collective mind, he told her not to worry, that I was going through a fairly common phase, that my only sibling and all my cousins were girls, and maybe I figured this was my chance to get some attention. (My sister had also been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at age two, so there was a fair bit of family distress going on, to put it mildly.) He said, “Just let her know it’s fine if she wants to pretend to be Tommy, and say, ‘I can see you’re pretending to be Tommy, that’s fine. Dad and I know you’re a girl, but it’s okay to pretend.’ She’s a smart kid and she’s trying to get some attention however she can.”

Basically, don’t sweat it. Just ride it out and it will pass. Don’t make it into a big deal.

His advice sounds alarmingly rational. What is unbelievable about his advice is that if this same pediatrician were to say this today and trans activists got a hold of it, he could lose his license.

My mother tells me that within a few months of that pediatric consultation, the whole thing was just.... over. I was never terribly girly growing up, I didn’t wear pink or grow my hair very long. She says I would rip my tights and dress off in the back seat on the way home from church. I was extremely sensitive right from the beginning, and had attachment problems, anxiety, and constant nervous stomach aches due to my sister’s illness and my mother’s lengthy stays with her at the hospital. We were all very stressed out and coping as best we could.

Tommy wasn’t around anymore by middle school, but with adolescence looming, the idea of getting my period was worse than death. Puberty was a hateful word, and I despised my female body. Picking out a training bra was a nightmare beyond explanation. Sex? Disgusting. Children? Never in a million years. Breastfeeding? Lord, take me now.

Yet here I am, writing this as a nearly fifty-year-old mom with two healthy children who I happily conceived, birthed, and breastfed, and a dear husband of twenty-six years who I would gladly marry again in a heartbeat.

I thank God that I was not born in the current era of affirmation, of progress pride flag-wielding teachers and school counselors who might have gleefully called me Tommy and encouraged me in my “identity”, of doctors who might have told my parents that they should get used to having a son and not a daughter. That same pediatrician in today’s middle America may very well have told my parents to “affirm” me, and to introduce me as Tommy and refer to me with male pronouns and let my teachers know I was a boy and not a girl.

I could easily have been someone who “knew from the time I was four that I was a boy.”

I’m sure many people might think at this point, “That’s fine for her, but I know REAL trans children.”

No, you don’t. You know kids who are struggling, or kids who don’t feel like they fit the mold. Kids whose families are dealing with inexplicable distress, or kids who are autistic or neurodivergent and who see the world in rigid absolutes. Kids who have been abused or neglected or exposed to online pornography and violence before their brains could make sense it, or kids who’ve decided that “changing their gender” will lessen the shame of having same-sex attraction.

You know kids who have been fed the lie that there is a way to opt out of what they perceive to be the expectations inherent in their natal sex.

Had all the adults in my life gotten on board with and celebrated my perception of myself at age four, there would have been no off-ramp for Tommy. How can a child of any age say, “You know mom, I think I was wrong. You can all stop pretending now”? Possible, but not likely. If this had happened in the present day, many of the adults and teachers in my life would likely be ideologically captured (or just cowed by the threat of CPS and/or cancellation), especially since I went to a decent-sized public school close to a major university town, and I would have assumed that my feelings of uncertainty were wrong. It would have been hard to give up my special status as Tommy.

Because adults are right, aren’t they? They’re all telling me I’m a boy, so I must be a boy.

I could have been robbed of my ability to grow up normally, robbed of all the painful lessons I learned as I struggled through the discomfort and angst of childhood and adolescence. My fertility could have been stolen from me, my brain development stunted by puberty blockers (and no, they are NOT reversible), my voice and body decimated by testosterone, and possibly mutilated by surgery. Would I have been able to go to college had I been taking “T” and obsessing over my gender? Would I have had the energy to go to graduate school to get the degree I wanted so badly, and later, the career that I love? Would I have met my husband? If I had met him, would he have been interested in someone like me?

The answer to all these questions is an unequivocal “no.”

And yet frighteningly, had all the proposed solutions to “gender dysphoria” (puberty blockers, binders, surgery, testosterone) been offered to me as a distressed 12-year-old, I would have been hypnotized by the magical possibility of a “get out of womanhood free” card.

The thought that keeps me up at night when I think about the transgender mind virus and how little Tommy dodged a bullet is that had I been born in the last twenty or so years with affirming parents, I may not have had my children. My precious babies, who until I was almost thirty, I had no interest in even knowing, but who are part and parcel of everything I am now, of every thought, every breath, and every action I take, and will be until I die. It was not until I conceived, carried, gave birth to and nourished these two miraculous beings with my own body that I actually appreciated it.

Thirty years. That’s how long it took me to appreciate my body and what it could do and what a freaking miracle it is to be a woman. Only after thirty years could I look in absolute awe at what my body had done and say, “My God. That’s what all this was for.”

I was one of the lucky ones, as were countless unnamed girls and boys of my demographic (and all demographics until the last three seconds of human history), back during the dark ages of the Carter era, rife with transphobia and knuckle-dragging biological determinism, with its bigoted insistence on acknowledging what we can all see with our own eyes. I was allowed to go through this phase with the grownups firmly holding the line on what was and was not real, and lo and behold, I passed through it unscathed. I actually have no recollection of this time in my life, and apart from what I have been told and a couple of pictures in family photo albums of an obviously-female four-year-old child in jeans and tennis shoes, trying to sit “like a boy,” there is no evidence of it ever having happened. “Your Tommy era” is a running family joke. It comes up sometimes, but rarely.

It’s a distant memory for my parents, and one I don’t have.

But it’s 2026 and not 1981. How many Tommys are out there right now, going through a painful phase in their lives? How many sensitive, anxious, precocious, creative children, battered by life in some unfair way, believe it would feel so much better to be a boy or a girl, but instead of doctors who tell worried parents to lovingly “just wait it out” and set clear, reality-based boundaries, they are having their futures stolen by the very people who are supposed to protect them? Instead of being allowed to pass through this discomfort and deal with reality on its own terms, as the billions of neurons in their brains rewire themselves over a period of years in a process we can barely understand as a child brain becomes an adult brain, they are being inundated by messaging from trans influencers, teachers, doctors, activists, social workers, therapists, friends, actors, and politicians (and sadly, sometimes parents, relatives, and pastors) who tell them that yes -- yes, you were born in the wrong body. Yes, we all see how uncomfortable you are. We understand you, we see you. We believe you. We affirm you.

And we have the solution.