“Not Pink Or Blue, Mom. Silver; I’m Silver.”
By: Martie Sirois
Tags: Parenting, Transgender, LGBTQ, Nonfiction, Equality

“Not Pink Or Blue, Mom. Silver; I’m Silver.”

Here was a 10 year old child, grasping the notion of who they were at their innermost core better than most adults I knew, including myself.

Photo by Eric Patnoudes on Unsplash

Five years ago my youngest first learned about gender neutral pronouns. It happened during a visit to our local LGBT center. I’ll never forget the look on their face when my then 10-year-old discovered a glass bowl on the front desk filled with alternative pronoun lapel pins. I followed my child’s gaze and watched their body magnetically pull towards that bowl before reaching their hands in. None of us knew for sure yet why our (presumed) boy rejected everything masculine, but in that moment, I became part of an ethereal epiphany.

As I watched this young child — but old soul — gently scoop handfuls of small, shiny, ‘singular they’ lapel pins, letting them sift like beach sand through their slight fingers, I sort of got it, all at once. My child whispered, “this is me.” And from within me, tears welled up. Both at the simple beauty of the moment, and the complex, difficult reality that my child was not merely a feminine gay boy, or a binary trans girl, as I’d estimated in previous years. This was going to be so much harder.

But for my child, realizing that “they/them/theirs” was an option? It was like suddenly finding this huge piece of an impossible gender puzzle. And it was right there all along, hiding in plain sight.

It was their fifth grade year in public school, and my child had already begun socially transitioning, although in retrospect, I’m not sure my husband and I knew that’s exactly what was happening at the time. We only knew our child was miserable and desperately wanted to express their gender in a way that was more authentic to their identity. Only, not just at home anymore; they were ready to enter the rest of the world like this, even with knowing how ignorant, how cruel the rest of the world could be.

This social transition included a total switch from traditional boys clothes to traditional girls clothes, shoes, hair gadgets, and accessories; growing their hair as long as they could; and beginning to tell others — not something easy to do in fifth grade, let alone, public school, in the conservative south, where peers and teachers have known you for several years as “he/him.” Undoubtedly a boy.

I worked in the same school my child attended, so I saw (and heard) a lot of things up close and personal. It was both a blessing and a curse. I savored the lovely moments, but it was damn near impossible to remain professional and contain my inner “MamaBear” when I heard homophobic and transphobic slurs directed at my child. One afternoon on our drive home they said, “Mom, I’ve started asking some of my friends to start using my they/them pronouns.” I smiled.

Then they told me about a few classmates who responded (as expected), saying, “Nuh-uh! You’re a boy and you know it! You’ll always be a boy!”

“They still don’t get it, Mom. I just don’t know what to say back to them anymore,” they said in a tired voice.

And just like that, this became one of those MamaBear moments. Moms, in general, tend to launch into immediate problem-solving mode during occasions like these, so I started answering as if my child hadn’t issued only a rhetorical statement.

“Well… I would take that as a great learning opportunity,” I offered. “You can really educate people on what it means to be you. Or, you know, you could say something like ‘you’re partly right. My sex assigned at birth was male, but —” And then my kid cut me off.

“Okay. Mom, I’m going to have to stop you right there and let you know that if I use that word, they will all start running around and screaming, ‘He said a bad word!’ He said a bad word!’”

“Sex isn’t a bad word,” I reasoned. “In fifth grade it is,” they countered.

I should’ve taken the hint and gracefully exited the question and answer portion right then and there. After all, my kid had given me a convenient out. But instead, I kept going. (This is why my kids sometimes avoid talking to me now. Lesson learned.) At the time my child had frequently insisted that they felt neither male nor female. Whenever anyone asked the notorious “do you feel more like a boy or a girl” question, they’d always respond without equivocation, “I feel more like just a person.”

“Okay,” I continued. “How about, ‘I was assigned male at birth, but I have never identified with that label my whole life.’” My child actually considered this for a moment before saying, “You know, I think I was actually born with two souls.”

“Yeah?” I asked with interest. “Tell me more about that.”

“So, it’s like this: I started out in your belly with a pink soul and a blue soul, and then the two souls meshed together and created a silver soul. A little pink and a little blue made me, well, ME. Silver. And that’s just how I was born. Two colors came together and made something that was not pink or blue. A little bit of pink and a little bit of blue, combined to make silver — something totally new.”

And then I felt those damn tears welling up again. Because here was a child, a ten year old child, who grasped the notion of who they were at their innermost core better than most adults I knew of, including myself. And to top it off, as the religious Hamilton fan they’d always been, and the child of a theatre person turned writer, they ended this little monologue with an impromptu rhyme (dear God, how could I not love this kid?!) But I held the tears back and told my child that actually, that was a perfect response for the kids at school. It was far better than anything I would’ve or could’ve suggested.