Ujima: Raising a Trans Child

As promised, here is my final interview from today’s Women’s Outlook Show. It features a lady I will name only as Jools. She is the mother of a trans child, and she kindly came into the studio to tell me about her experiences in that very difficult role. It wasn’t an easy interview for either of us: Jools because of the pain that her family had gone through, and me because it inevitably brought back memories of my personal journey.

There are a few things I should note before presenting the interview. The first is that the whole thing is solely from the point of view of a male-to-female transsexual. That reflects the experience of Jools’ daughter, and of myself. It does not necessarily reflect the experiences of a trans man, or of someone who identifies more as genderqueer and neither needs nor desires medical transition. I apologize for these omissions, but Jools had come in to tell her story, and that of her daughter, and I did not want to spend her valuable air time on explanations of the varied nature of other trans experiences, equally valid though they are.

Probably, along the way, we may have been slightly clumsy in our language and phrased things in ways that could have been better. Live radio is like that. I haven’t had enough practice to be perfect every time, and most guests have no chance of being so.

Finally, a trigger warning for trans people thinking of listening. The interview does contain mention of two separate suicide attempts. If hearing about such things will upset you, please don’t listen.

This podcast is now available from my new, gender-related podcast channel, Neither Simple Nor Binary.

2 thoughts on “Ujima: Raising a Trans Child

  1. Cheryl,
    the program was excellent, I could hear nothing clumsy in it at all, it was balanced and at the same time very moving.

    1. Oh, trust me, there are one or two things in there that I could have phrased better, and will have the more shouty type of trans activist denouncing me at some point. You have to be *so* careful about language.

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