ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the author’s experience as the mother of a transgender adult child. When an adult child comes out as trans, the reaction of parents is subject to scrutiny by both the child and themselves. Love, support, and acceptance, no matter how deeply felt, are inevitably shadowed at first by confusion, fear, and resistance. The adult child needs support and can bear little of the burden of the parents’ struggle, and the parents’ initial grief goes underground. An essential task of coming to terms with loss is creating a narrative of what has occurred and what the implications will be. Both the child and the trans community find the “where did this come from?” question painful, and contemporary psychological literature tends to avoid etiological speculations about transgender phenomena. The reasons for this are compelling, but the situation challenges a psychodynamic therapist’s primary mode of understanding human experience, confounding an already complicated grief process.
