When Home Becomes The Only Safe Space: Raising a Trans Child in Post-Skrmetti America
Fierce love, dreams deferred and what I need from trans allies in Michigan
It's getting harder to talk to my young adult children about the news. Not because they aren't old enough to comprehend it, but because I know they do.
I know they understand that our federal government has decided their basic dignity is up for debate — especially my adult trans child. I just don't know how to explain how we got here, a place where instead of looking out at the horizon of young adulthood and imagining the limitless possibilities, my gentle, kindhearted firstborn is mostly focused on whether they will get arrested (or assaulted) for using the "wrong" bathroom at their university or in a government building. It's hard to plan a big, bold future while your elected officials debate whether or not you deserve civil rights — or civility at all.
The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Skrmetti didn't just change legal precedent; it changed what it means to send your child into the world.
Overnight, basic human dignity became a matter of geographic lottery. For parents like me who are watching our queer and trans young adults navigate early adulthood, the ruling transformed what should be an exciting threshold into a minefield of fear and strategic planning.
Ironically, we moved from Michigan to Ohio, my home state, to raise our children in a city that felt like it offered more opportunities for them. To say the landscape has changed dramatically over the past 19 years barely tells the story. These days, we head north whenever we can, and everyone in the car breathes a literal sigh of relief as we cross the border. Where we live currently feels a few decades behind when it comes to LGBTQ+ affirmation. Sure, there's a tacit acknowledgment that queer people exist in 2025, but there's still a pregnant pause when you casually mention a same-sex couple in public and a lot of stammering and panic around anything related to trans people. In Michigan, we rarely encounter this vibe, even in cities not quite as progressive as Detroit or Ferndale. Maybe we just feel more comfortable because the state has taken real steps to affirm and protect the community through actual laws on the books. Meanwhile, just over the border in Ohio, it's the literal opposite.
I'm a good mom who feels like a criminal in my home state for doing right by my child, for exercising caution and consulting with trusted, vetted medical and mental health professionals to help them through a painful, challenging journey to their authentic self. That journey has been a hard journey for me too, in some ways, and not because I’m "grieving the loss of my child," but because, as a parent, you never want things to be harder for your kid than they have to be. Being trans means something different to every individual, but it almost always means experiencing pain cisgender people won't. As a parent, you learn the same lesson over and over again: You can't change who your child is. And hopefully, you also learn to ask why you would want to.
So no, I'm not grieving the loss of a child. My child is still the same curious, incredibly intelligent, hilarious person they have always been. What I grieve is their innocent worldview, the one that not so long ago, assumed that most people are good and that even strangers can usually be trusted. I hope that moving back from Ohio to Michigan when the time is right will bring renewed hope and a chance for them to just exist comfortably while building a future, but I worry that federal overreach will not stop until it becomes criminal to exist as transgender in public everywhere, even in our beloved Michigan. It seemed like a paranoid thought only a few months ago, but here we are, post-Skrmetti, in a country where books featuring LGBTQ+ families will soon be effectively kept behind glass in public schools like cold medicine at Walgreens — taboo, dangerous and somehow shameful.
It’s said that as an affirming parent to queer children, you also undergo a “coming out” process, and I think there’s some truth there, though this coming out has been far more painful than my own fledgling steps toward acknowledging my personal identity among safe people. This coming out has meant losing people we thought we could trust to support our family, who we thought had loved us all unconditionally. Through words and deeds, we know we were wrong in some cases. Our circle has grown smaller here in Ohio, though it’s also grown tighter. And knowing we have a safe place to return to in Michigan has kept hope alive. Please keep the light on while we’re away, and please keep fighting to hold on to the rights you’ve secured through civic engagement.
This is our generation's test. Future historians will ask who stood up when it mattered and who looked away. They'll want to know how we let fear and prejudice masquerade as policy, how we allowed lawmakers to make political pawns of our children's lives.
I can’t predict what happens next, and it’s so easy to fear the worst, but I try not to live in speculation (as managing editor, I also try to keep our publication’s content focused on what we do know, not what might or might not happen). Here’s what I do know: This community is strong (like superhuman strong), and it’s strongest as a collective, where every person under that increasingly wide umbrella has a place. When this community advocates for love, it’s not rainbows and puppy dog love (though we do love our pets). It’s fierce love. It’s “you will have to go through me” love. And, our Michigan queer community is beautifully complicated, with a scrappy, Detroit-built engine that takes zero shit, picks up one another when the journey gets rough, and keeps on trucking.
Last weekend, my child stood in our kitchen, flour dusting their hands as they wrapped up a brownie recipe with the same focused intensity they bring to everything they care about. We talked about nothing important — a show they'd watched, plans for dinner, whether we needed more coffee — while the house filled with the smell of double chocolate brownies and possibility. Later, as we snuck in a few too many chocolatey treats, I watched them laugh at something on their phone, completely absorbed in being 18 and alive.
This is what I want for them everywhere: the freedom to exist fully in their own skin, to move through the world without calculating risk at every turn, to plan road trips and create art and fall in love and make mistakes and dream big dreams. I want them to feel as safe and whole in a university bathroom as they do in our kitchen, as free to be themselves anywhere as they are curled up on our couch on a Sunday afternoon.
Right now, home is the only place where tomorrow feels limitless for them. But that fierce love I mentioned? It's not just about protecting what we have within these walls. It's about expanding that circle of safety, one conversation, one vote, one act of courage at a time, until no one is erased and the whole world feels like home.
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