Jodie Pattersons son Penelope wasnt even in kindergarten yet when she realized that her son was transgender.
That kind of stuff was constantly traumatic in our house.
This discovery set Patterson, a mother of five, and her family on a most unpredictable journey.
Credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images; Random House
She didnt know what she didnt know.
But what she learned changed her entire outlook on life, identity, and her family.
She chronicles this journey in her new memoir,The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation.
She comes to several sobering conclusions.
But her book is ultimately one of hope.
Read on below.The Bold Worldisnow available for purchase.
That kind of stuff was constantly traumatic in our house.
But lives are so busy with five kids.
It wasnt until I sold my beauty company that I had a moment to really stop and think.
The more I thought about Penelope and what we were going through, the more I learned about transgender.
I didnt know anything.
The original idea of this book was I was going to give a roadmap to parents of trans kids.
The Bold Worldis not exactly that book.I couldnt really get that book off the ground.
They were placing it in relation to a disease.
So it ended up in a place much different than I thought itd be [in].
It wasnt the truth: It was media frenzy, misinformation, fear.
But that image kept coming back to me.
The other movie wasParis Is Burning.
Beautiful documentary on kids who are gender-nonconforming.
Many of them die or are murdered; many of them are addicts or homeless.
I thought thats what we were up against.
[Laughs] It sounds so hella-dramatic right now.
Now I know it so differently.
Were talking about, in my case, a kid we accepted from 4 years old on now.
Hes an A-student, class president, helpful and happy kid, karate champion.
You write at one point, The world is unkind to people it doesnt understand.
That took a long time.
My grandmother was jailed dozens of times.
She was called a communist.
She sued school boards and hospitals and won in the segregated South.
They were not always seen as heroes or as great folks.They tried to portray them negatively.
It rang so familiar to the criminalization of black folks.
And it plays out really ugly.
Theres this understanding that if you attempt to change the world, people dont want that.
Ive seen it with black folks, with women, with LGBT activists.
The hatred that we have towards the other, this process of othering, is very nasty.
We find an other and we determine that other is very dangerous.
What has your son taught you, in all this?A new language.
I didnt know identity had that ability.
He taught me the very things that we feel are solid and impenetrable; they are not.
You cannot dictate someones happiness.
And I learned whatever we dont know about another person is the very thing we dont know about ourselves.
I didnt really fix the kid, I didnt really fix the gender.
I just changed the bias and pointed it back at myself.Its really difficult as a parent to not lead.
You want to have the answer, you want to use your experience to benefit the family.
The parenting of a trans kid will quickly teach you that, sometimes, its best to hush up.
Something we dont do that often.
