Well…maybe, but then again maybe not.

When my son Connor first told me he was transgender and was not, in fact, the daughter I thought he was for the first 12 years of his life, I could have handled it a lot better.

It’s not that I kicked and screamed. I didn’t throw him out or call him vile names. I wasn’t even disappointed. It almost feels worse than all that: I didn’t believe him.

What if she’d said she was a llama, or a hummingbird, or Chomolungma? Would you now think you should have believed her?

A girl remains a girl even if she has picked up the novel cultural belief that her body is irrelevant to what sex she is.

What is blindingly obvious to me now, five years later – and probably to you as you’re reading this – is that Connor’s struggles with mental health were intrinsically linked to feeling that how he felt on the inside did not fit with his body and gender identity. Like he was trapped in a lie. But at the time, I couldn’t see it.

She hadn’t been saved yet.

What I realise now is that I should have just believed him and created an environment of acceptance, and I wish I’d done it immediately. I was so consumed with all the “what ifs”.

What if he changes his mind? What if people give him a hard time? What if his younger siblings are confused? What if I feel weird or uncomfortable?

The answer those all of those questions, of course, is “who cares?”

Uh, no, and there’s no “of course” about it. Who cares if she changes her mind?! You’d think she was talking about a tatoo.

Five years later, Connor is in his final year of high school, and is the happiest I’ve seen him since he was a child. We were lucky enough to access a gender clinic in our city, where both he and I were both nurtured through the process of his transition. He has been getting testosterone shots for more than a year now, and recently had top surgery, which removes the breasts, leaving a masculine chest.

Maybe she’ll be happy that way for the rest of her life, but maybe she won’t. It’s not just obvious that trying to “change sex” is always a wonderful and healthy idea and the fix for an unhappy kid.

Sadly, the damn fool who wrote this is “a freelance health and parenting writer.” I hope she has very few readers.

Update: I corrected all the occurrences of “his” and “he” to “she” and “her” – having been lulled into getting it wrong by exactly the word magic that there’s so much argument about. Apologies for the CONFUSION.