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“Just Let Him Be:” The Mother of a Neuroqueer Teen Shares His Story
Grayson’s journey as a trans boy didn’t come out of the clear blue sky.Though he liked to wear skirts and play with makeup, he also cut his hair short and kept it that way — even when other kids teased him and said he “looked like a boy.” When Grayson, who was assigned female at birth, was about 7 or 8, we were talking about puberty when he made a horrified face and said, “I don’t want to go through puberty.”During one of these conversations, I remember him saying, “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”At the end of fifth grade, when he brought all his schoolwork home, I looked through the papers and saw that he’d been signing his work with the name “Michael.” I asked him about it, and he said he wanted to use they/them pronouns. A couple of months later, he requested that we start using he/him pronouns, and took on a different name.