Venice & Marie
My sister was in the hospital, and my nephew told me, “Auntie, I want to be transgender.” I think he was expecting me to have a bad reaction, but I was fine with it.
There has been a lot of fighting about this in the family. There’s been a lot of disapproval and rejection; and there are people who just think my nephew—we now call her Marie—shouldn’t be able to wear dresses or put a picture of herself in make-up on her Facebook page. My husband is really supportive of Marie. He says, “If you’re going to do it, do it right.” His mother’s fine with it, too.
For a while, Marie was living down south in Arkansas with other family members. he problem was, down there she couldn’t really be herself. My family down there doesn’t agree about all of this, and some relatives just don’t approve of Marie wearing dresses, or her desire to be transgender. When Marie moved back up here I was really her only family member. I’m there for her no matter what is going on in the rest of the family.
We are a churchgoing family. It’s not my place to judge other people, and the Bible says as much. Too many of the people who are happy to judge Marie are doing wrong things in their own lives. I just think, “Marie and other transgender people aren’t bothering you, so why do you want to bother them?”