Woman Wonders If She Is Wrong For Not Telling Family Friends Her Daughter Is Transgender
Family friends are calling the woman a liar.
Prostock-studio / Shutterstock A woman has posted on the subreddit 'AITA' (Am I The A**Hole) for failing to tell her family friends that her daughter is transgender.
The woman's daughter, 12, told her that she was a girl a week after she had turned 2-years-old.
At first, the woman thought her daughter was playing pretend, and didn't take it seriously. However, after a year of her daughter repeatedly saying it, the mother realized it was something more.
"By the time she was [three and a half] she had fully transitioned (in every way she could at that age) and we havent looked back since," the mother wrote in her Reddit post.
Recently, the woman's cousin got married, and his wife and her family did not know the daughter before she had transitioned, something the woman presumed her cousin had never thought to mention it.
The woman and her daughter were at their cousin and his wife's house one day, where his wife has two daughters from a previoius marriage, and her younger sisters spend a lot of time there as well.
All of the girls were playing together when the woman's daughter excused herself to go to the bathroom. The woman wrote that one of their cousin's stepdaughters followed her.
"About two minutes later, we hear my daughter yell before the littler one runs downstairs and announces to the whole room that my daughter has a penis," the woman shared.
The woman runs straight to her daughter, who's in tears, and learns that she hadn't locked the door and the cousin's stepdaughter and barged in while the woman's daughter was peeing.
"My daughter pees sitting down and the toilet faces the door, so it was kind of obvious."
The cousin's wife asked the woman what was going on, and after she explaining the situation, she asked the woman if her daughter was secretly a boy.
The question upset the woman's daughter even more, and the two of them left without answering any of their questions.
"It was a day of cuddles following that, with my phone turned off," the woman explained.
The woman's cousin ended up showing up to at her house and revealed that his wife had kicked him out after he stated that he wouldn't share her daughter's private information.
"I thanked him, and decided to deal with the situation. My daughter had given permission to tell them, but I worked on a sort of protective force first."
The woman called her two older sisters, one of which is married to a trans woman, and asked them to come over and stay with her daughter while she dealt with the situation.
The incident that happened with her cousin's wife had managed to reach a lot of people, leading to the woman receiving an influx of angry people telling her that she'd deceived them and now couldn't trust her in case she lied about anything else.
"I made a public post explaining that my daughter is transgender, came out at a young age, and that I didnt lie to anyone. She's a girl, regardless of what genitals she has."
No one took the post particularly well, according to the woman, besides the people who had already known.
The woman is not sure if keeping the secret that her daughter was transgender was the best way to go about things, seeing how it negatively affected everything.
"I feel bad for my daughter, and the family this has negatively affected," the woman wrote." I will not apologise for not telling them, I dont feel like an apology is owed. But I still don't know if I was necessarily in the right for keeping in secret."
Most people under the Reddit thread were in agreement that the woman was NTA (Not The A**Hole).
"It's your daughter's business not anyone else's. Their kids shouldn't be trying to look at people going to the bathroom. That's the real issue here. The bathroom door is closed and shouldn't need to be locked for someone to not walk in," one user commented.
"First of all, you are proof that not all heroes wear capes - you are a wonderful parent and deserve all the credit in the world for supporting your daughter. Second, you never deceived anyone. Your daughter is your daughter," another user commented.
"This is a fact. As far as whether to reveal whether or not she is transgender - that is entirely up to her. You never out someone without their permission. If anything, their reaction proves that you were correct in not telling them."
Nia Tipton is a writer living in Brooklyn. She covers pop culture, social justice issues, and trending topics. Follow her on Instagram.