I'm all over the Internet, in little bits and pieces. This will be more private than Facebook (which is where I interact with family, a few coworkers, and lots of superficial acquaintances) but less open than another blog I have, where I feel free to vent about pretty much anything in my life. I'm thinking this will be where I write for semi-public consumption about Swen's journey toward the man he wants to become. Swen, you see, was born female. We had lost our first daughter during the pregnancy, in 1991, so when Swen arrived in 1996, I was thrilled to finally have a baby girl. Not that I thought this new baby could replace that daughter, but I'd always wanted to be a girl's mother. I come from a big family of daughters, and I felt that I didn't know how to parent a little boy, much less a teenage one. Imagine my surprise as, over the past year, our little girl (now a teen taller than her parents) revealed to us that, inside her head, she was really he, and always had been.
Between his birth and mid-December, 2010, Swen had a different name that was feminine if not girly. About a year ago he started pushing us to get his name changed legally. We were already calling him Swen unofficially, because he basically refused to acknowledge us when we used his birth name. Last August, when he turned 14, we began the process for a legal name change. The court date was December 16th and we were lucky that the judge herself belongs to the LBGT community. She never asked Swen why he wanted to change his name; she just looked at his outfit and his hair and probably figured, "Transgender youth!" and the entire hearing was done in less than 10 minutes. So that day, Swen officially began his transition from teenage girl toward young man.
