A monologue from the play by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder
JESS (early-forties)
Jess talks to her therapist about the decision to allow her eight year old son to transition from male to female.
When we decided to do this, decided to move our family, we wanted to go where Morgan could get the best support possible.
Isn’t that what you do as a parent? You try to give them the best.
So we started out by reading up on who was the best at dealing with this sort of thing and once we found you we moved so we could be close.
I mean, it’s New York. People here are open- minded right? Luke and I both grew up in a small town, so this is really different for us.
Back home there weren’t any resources. The school sent us to a psychologist. The pediatrician sent us to an endocrinologist.
They did tests. They’re doctors. That’s what they do. They do tests and hope they can find answers. Some explanation.
Was this happening because of something hormonal? Something in his body that wasn’t working right.
And we went along with it because we didn’t know what else to do. Dragging Morgan to doctors and tests, because we were trying to understand what was going on too.
We had a little boy who wanted more than anything on earth to be a girl.
The only way I could get him to wear boy’s tennis shoes instead of girlie sparkle shoes was to paint his toenails pink and pray he never took his shoes off except at home.
But all of the tests came back normal. Only the doctors, the spe-cialists couldn’t accept that. In their minds there had to be something wrong.
And in our minds too, at least at first. I think we were hoping they’d find something. Some explanation.
Because then we would know what to say to people. And most of all, we wouldn’t have to blame ourselves because there was a whole lot of that going on.
The hard part isn’t dealing with Morgan. Morgan knows who she is.
It was the other people who would ask questions and we didn’t have any answers. It’s like we didn’t have the vocabulary.
So finally, I said enough. I wasn’t going to continue looking for something to blame for making Morgan who she is.
The doctors kept saying they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.
Like if we knew what was wrong it could be fixed. We shifted gears. And that’s when we found you. We knew we needed to give Morgan a chance to be her true self.
I’m sorry. I’m rambling on and on. It’s just that I haven’t had a lot of people I can talk to about all of this. It’s not really conversation for the carpool line.
