Transitions of the Heart edited by Rachel Pepper; Cleis Press, $16.95
From Cher's son's heavily-publicized transformation from Chastity to Chaz, to the Miss Universe Canada pageant's recent first-ever transgender contestant, gender issues (and the opinions they solicit) have graduated to the forefront of American media scrutiny and water-cooler conversations. But it is the many heartfelt and often heartbreaking stories of transitioning people who are not in the media spotlight who perhaps touch us on a more personal level, and have the greatest impact on the general public's impression of them.
Celebrated journalist, marriage and family therapist, gender authority, and frequent B.A.R. contributor Rachel Pepper (The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals, 2008) expands on this theme with Transitions of the Heart, a collection of essays penned by mothers with transgendered children. Their experiences and reactions are expectedly wide-ranging, but the support and unconditional love shown to their children unify this anthology in a beautifully humane fashion.
The book includes more than 30 first-person narratives, and they collectively encompass a kaleidoscope of personalities, genders, ethnicities, sexualities, and circumstances. The commonalities among these mothers' experiences surface soon after one reads the first few stories: many of these children began questioning their sexuality from early childhood, and began demonstrating attitudes and intentions to "rectify" their gender soon after. A mother's love is a powerful one, and many of the writers in Pepper's anthology fiercely protect their children from bullying and ostracizing, while performing a kind of internal reconciliation of their own feelings of doubt, fear, and deep-seeded disappointment.
Included among the many evocative profiles included in this superbly edited book are the difficult acceptance of a gender-questioning child as effectively rendered by a "hard-shell" Southern Baptist who submitted to Pepper's project anonymously; revelations from a 60-year-old Kansas City former homemaker who is experiencing her own epiphanies in life in conjunction with her son's; an 80-year-old Ohio mother who expresses pride in her "new son Sam"; and the amazing journey of western Pennsylvania's Michelle Schnur, who, in addition to handling her son's emotional and physical transformation from Heather to Damon, has also had to process her husband's decision to change his gender, along with the death of her father and a breast cancer diagnosis. Schnur's incredible story, related in just six paperback pages (along with several other notable standouts) definitely deserves its own book!
Though brief (some disappointingly so), these true stories give a powerful voice to the transgender movement and resonate on a variety of levels, from emotional to psychological. Uniformly heartwarming and edifying, Pepper's labor of love will prove enriching and galvanizing for parents currently in the throes of their own familial transgender odyssey.