An Unlikely Advocate

An unlikely advocate. That’s what I have become. But I am first and foremost a parent of two amazing young women, ages 25 and 20, and like any parent, I want nothing else in the world above the happiness and health of my kids. What follows here is a story about our family’s relationship with the oldest of our two daughters. It’s not her story – that is hers alone to tell; rather, this is the story of how her experience has influenced me as her father. Before I go any further, I must point out that I am telling this with the permission of our daughter in hopes that our experience may be able to bring something positive to somebody else who may be struggling. With that said, here goes…

Back in January, we went out to dinner to celebrate my kid’s graduation from an intensive 7-month long coding boot camp, where the focus was on learning to write code to support back-end web development (something I know literally nothing more about than that). As soon as we sat down at the table that evening, we learned something that would turn our lives upside down and inside out. Our son of 24 years cut right to the chase and told my wife and I that ‘he’ was a transgender woman. As we sat stunned and began to let what was said sink in, we also began to ask the questions that any parent would want to know. What we came to learn was that from the time our child was about 12 years old and starting to go through the natural changes of puberty, things felt horribly wrong. Our ‘son’ had felt completely wrong in her own skin, felt completely wrong about what came with being a man, and had known then that things just didn’t fit with what was supposed to be happening. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, she had forced those feelings away and buried them as something that would pass or something to be dealt with later.

Fast forward to 2017, and our kid had finally finished something she was proud of, had a vision for what a future could look like, and had taken the huge step of acknowledging the repressed feelings that had been there for years. She had been seeing a counselor for months by the time she came out to us, and there seemed to be palpable relief in finally being able to be her true self to us.

For our part, we were floored. We are asked all the time whether we had any indication beforehand, and the answer is an unequivocal no. Our kid had always been a bit of a homebody, with a small handful of friends, and rarely socialized, but we never thought too much of it. She certainly made things interesting for us as parents… as a young kid, she began reading full books long before other kids her age, and yet had a sensory-motor integration diagnosis, speech therapy, occupational therapy, eye therapy, and where social skills always seemed like a challenge for her, there was an off-the-chart IQ. Think super-smart kid who didn’t care about the popular crowd or social norms, and that was our child.

Sidebar

To remove any thought that I might be trying to push a particular agenda here, let me take a minute to give a little background on me, just so all the cards are on the table and you know where my own biases are. I am a Republican, have voted Republican (except for a couple individual candidates) in every election since I was 18, have worked in the financial services industry most of my adult life, grew up in a very middle-class military family living on or around Air Force bases all over the country, and while not coming from money, have done OK building a reasonably comfortable life for my family. I would define myself as spiritual, but not religious. And even as a Republican, I would characterize myself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal. My views on transgender issues were uneducated. I believed somewhat nonchalantly that it was a matter of personal choice. I had nothing against anybody who identified as transgender, but I also didn’t have any interest in learning much more. To each their own, I figured. That was my starting point. About the Author

Back to the Story

As my wife and I began digesting the news that our adult child was transgender, we sought out what we could find to understand what that meant and how we could best love and support her. We researched everything. My wife found support groups. I spoke to friends who had similar experiences. And as we began to put the pieces in place, there were a few things that came to light.

First is the fact that gender identity is unequivocally not a choice. Knowing just how difficult the path is for a person (especially an adult) to come out and make the transition should make it clear that simply choosing to be another gender is not something anybody would opt for. The process is brutal. People can be unkind. And for our daughter’s sake, I can say there is no way she would have taken such a difficult path unless the alternative – living a life in someone else’s skin – was just too unbearable to move forward.

Second is that there is an alarmingly high suicide rate among transgender adults. I happened across a broad-based transgender research study released in 2014 that was co-authored by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute at UCLA. Their findings… 41% of transgender adults had attempted suicide. Forty-one percent. That compared to a 4.6% rate for the overall US population. As a parent, that scared the hell out of me, especially with our kid having a history of depression.

Third, for all of our desire to accept the new reality of what our kid had expressed, there is a very real sense of loss that a parent experiences. I certainly don’t pretend to speak for all parents of transgender kids here, but my reality is that I find myself simultaneously welcoming my new daughter and grieving the loss of a son. She is the same person, with the same quirky sense of humor and wit that has always been there, but I’d be lying if I said taking down pictures of her before transition was not heartbreaking.

Everything Changed

If our story ended here, we would simply be talking about the process of helping our adult daughter figure out her new life and how to best support her. Unfortunately, things took a dark turn over the summer… our daughter became part of the 41%.

Without getting into the specifics, our daughter had been in and out of three different inpatient treatment regimens over the course of about six weeks to help her stabilize after bouts of depression and suicidal ideation. Just seven days after her release from her third inpatient stay, my wife Kim and I found our daughter on the floor of her apartment nearly dead. She had made a horrific attempt on her own life the night before, and was miraculously somehow still clinging to life when we found her. I would not wish what we saw on my worst enemy… the scene was like seeing something out of a movie set, but it was real. And it was happening.

Things were a blur over the next few weeks. Kim and I watched her carried into an ambulance, raced behind it to the hospital, stood in disbelief in the ER trauma room, consulted with surgeons, spoke to chaplains, cried with each other, broke the news to our family – including the hardest call to our youngest daughter, spent hours (which turned to days) by her side in the ICU, all in a fog. The whole thing felt like it couldn’t possibly be happening, and I think Kim and I were both waiting to snap out of the nightmare.

It would be appropriate for me to point out that as of today, our daughter is still with us. She spent four days in the ICU and almost two more weeks in the hospital before being admitted into a residential treatment program. We feel extremely fortunate that she is medically OK and can now focus on getting the kind of help she needs to find her life worth living.

As for Kim and me, the weeks came and went, and we slowly began to accept that there would be no waking up from this. We both have struggled to regain our footing in normal daily routines. We’ve been quiet in social settings, and almost non-existent on social media (until this week, as you’ll see below). As parents, our first instinct is to want to ‘fix’ things – to make them easier for our kids. In this case, it feels helpless that we can’t fix anything. What we can do is love our kids and try to give them the support they need.

A Truly Unexpected Interruption

Wow, just wow. I had been sitting at my desk a few days ago writing what you’ve read to this point when I got a frantic call from Kim… she had just received word that our daughter “AMA’d” – signed herself out of her treatment program against medical advice. We knew from talking with her and her therapist a few days earlier that she’d had thoughts of signing herself out and walking into the mountains to die, but hoped that she had managed to work through those thoughts.

Our world quickly collapsed again. She was out on her own, on foot, with no money, no phone, and no ID, and we knew the only reason she would have AMA’d would be to take her own life. And we were an 8-hour drive away, powerless to do anything. We spoke to the local police, sent a photo and description, and got their assistance in the form of an ‘Attempt to Locate’ alert in the county where she was last seen. We both threw a few things into a bag and hit the road, not sure what we would do, but we knew we had to get there. Before leaving, though, Kim turned to the only resource we had to recruit help in finding her… she posted about our daughter on Facebook.

I write this two days hence, and for those of you who followed our updates on Facebook, you know that the outcome was positive. Our daughter resurfaced, very cold, very tired, and more than a little shaken, but also very much alive. She had done exactly what she had expressed, and somehow still found a deep primitive survival instinct. Today she is safely back in her treatment program, and clearly still has a long road ahead, but we will be behind her for every step she wants us with her.

During these couple days, we were faced with an almost unbearable sense of dread, helplessness, and uncertainty. We drove hours on end in an unfamiliar area, showed photos to anybody who would listen, and tried to do what we could to help ease the same all-consuming emotions our youngest daughter was experiencing on the other side of the country. And that’s where Kim’s Facebook post taught us something so very valuable… people are inherently good, and kindness is incredibly powerful.

Within 24 hours of the original post, it had been shared more than 1,100 times. The outpouring of love and support we experienced was overwhelming, and just thinking about it has me in tears as I write this. Eleven hundred people, many of whom we knew but most we did not, jumped in both to help us find our girl and to lift us up and out from the nightmare we were in. Your comments, your thoughts and prayers, and your selfless acts of kindness meant the world to me, Kim, and the rest of our family.

Coming Full Circle

For those who know me, you know that I am an avid triathlete. I’ve done many Ironman races over the years, and this year for the first time I planned to compete in two full distance Ironman events in the same year. As luck would have it, our daughter’s massive suicide attempt came just a few days after I finished my first Ironman of the year in Madison, Wisconsin. Following that attempt, I didn’t exactly have any desire to continue training, and the thought of competing in another Ironman this year seemed somewhat meaningless and self-serving… my plan to race Ironman Arizona in November didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

As I began to cope with almost losing our daughter once (the events of the last couple days hadn’t yet happened), and with a nudge from our therapist, I started to get back into running, biking, and swimming again. What I found is that these were the only times when I could quiet the thoughts in my own head – a three-hour run effectively became a three-hour therapy session for me. And from there, I started thinking about whether I could salvage my Ironman Arizona by using it to do something positive for our daughter.

And this is where I began thinking of myself as that unlikely advocate. But it fits. I decided to keep Arizona on the calendar, and instead of racing it for me, trying to squeak out a few more minutes for a small personal victory, I will be racing it for Rivena, my daughter, who is one of the kindest, most accepting people I have ever known.

In Rivena’s name, I will be racing Ironman Arizona this Sunday to promote kindness and acceptance for people who are transgender.

If you don’t know much about what it means for someone to be transgender, that’s okay. I am learning with you. All I ask is that you be kind, show basic human decency, and be willing to accept people as people, regardless of what our differences may be. A 41% attempted suicide rate is way too high, and while more research needs to be done around this, we can start from the ground up by being kind to one another and accepting people we might not understand. This is how I can best help my daughter.

While the last few days have been an incredibly difficult way to start an Ironman race week, Rivena is now safe and back in her program and Kim and I are back home, so we decided to keep our plans to be in Tempe this weekend. More importantly, all of you who jumped into our story this week serve as beacons of hope for me. You have shown me how much power there is kindness, and we’ve already witnessed more than 1,100 non-judgmental acts of kindness from you. How many more can we get?

Thank you for taking this journey with us. Thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing. And for any families struggling with similar issues, we are still deep in the trenches with our daughter – her story is far from over – but our hope is that by sharing some of this, you can know that you are not alone.  Let’s work together to promote kindness and acceptance, and hopefully we can all do some good for our kids.