Cassidy Dallas’ Story
He/Them
Cass uses He/They pronouns
.
My husband, child, and I went on a trip to the playground after school one warm spring afternoon in 2022. I was wearing “dad drag”: white sneakers, jeans, a flannel shirt. I was, also, sporting scruffy facial hair, thanks to a year of testosterone injections. The scruff, my deepening voice, and my surgically-”masculinized” chest ensured I “passed” as a man–usually. Cultivating my gender presentation and understanding how much I “pass” as a man have been a calculus for me that is in flux, with multiple variables including safety, creativity, style, and also my own understanding of my gender. To be candid, I don’t understand myself as a man, but I do understand myself clearly as not a woman. “Not a woman” is the only piece of my gender that has been clear and constant. I understand passing and presenting as a man as a “close-enough” refuge, a home where I reside on many days as I move through different worlds. On this day in the world of “parenting on the playground”, our then-3-year-old, blonde curls, blue eyes, and ruddy cheeks, came plowing into the circle of dads I’d infiltrated. Ezra said, “Mama has to come watch me on the slide.” One guy backed away a couple of steps in the sudden silence. I saw a movie montage of the gender and sexuality math happening on their faces.
It wasn’t the first time. Or the last. That same afternoon, I chatted with a mother who’d given birth in the same hospital as me. Excited to bond over the shared experience (that chicken pot pie hospital lunch!), I shared my own birthing story. A brief moment of confusion that washed over her face and her subtle lean away reminded me that I “pass.” they see a dad. A man.
On Halloween that year, Ezra and I saw a friend from church. “Wow, Ezra is so big! I go to church with Ezra’s mom.”
“Me, too,” I said and smiled. I figured that I could catch her up on the chapters she had missed at church when I next saw her next, or let the community do it for me.
As uncomfortable, anxiety provoking and fraught moments like this can be, making space to understand myself and to live authentically is well worth the moments of difficulty. And, I hope these moments of difficulty help build a world that is easier for my child and other families like us.
I told in-the-womb Ezra how much Mama loved them. Their father and I played Ezra music, and made up songs listing the people who loved them: Papa, Mama, relatives, then pets. In our sleep-deprived delirium, the list got progressively sillier, and it was some of our best bonding as a growing family, me clutching my belly as we laughed. “Mama” was one of Ezra’s first words.
I have embraced a life with added complexity. I understood myself as a woman for most of my life, birthed Ezra, and centered my life around our emerging family. With a different type of labor pains, I then birthed a new gender identity alongside– partially informed by?–processing my role as a parent, and relationship to parenting in general. My gender journey may not end. I understand myself now as not-a-woman; the rest is part of a beautiful, sacred process of unraveling and becoming.
Throughout this, one thing is clear to me: my identity as Mama is also sacred, part of me. Living as a non-woman called Mama is complicated, but worth the special relationship, connection, and bond that Ezra, myself, and our family have. This transcends many people’s comprehension. I welcome them to witness the magical, expansive flexibility of transness, and to examine whether love and support require comprehension.
In this trans life, as a parent, that is beyond others’ comprehension, I have embraced a life with added uncertainty. Others in my life bristle at the discomfort of their own uncertainty, which I feel in their questions about words, procedures, future plans. In their questions like “How far are you going with this whole thing?" “Do I call you dad?" I hear the want to love me and show up, and empathize with the wanting to know. It’s just that, some things, I also don’t know, and not knowing together is the best I can offer. In many of these moments, I have recalled the warmth and love of Ezra calling me “Mama,” and said sincerely, “I don't know.” I’m keeping “Mama,” though. Occasionally, other parents who I share my experience with have expressed empathy for how "difficult and strange being pregnant and getting gendered so much as a female” must have been. I appreciate their intentions, and see the desire for a clean, neat, linear narrative for my experience of my gender. I also appreciate that many others may feel this way about their experiences as people who don’t understand themselves as women being pregnant. However, the primary experiences I had being pregnant with Ezra were feeling a lot of joy and sacredness carrying Ezra in my body. Growing together, giving birth, singing, nursing, and nurturing–these felt divinely maternal to me, integral aspects of who I am. While I can’t resist the urge to make dad jokes, and now have a beard and mustache, I still feel like Ezra's mother, and enjoy hearing his “Mama.” He seems to understand this, saying “Papa is a boy, and Mama, he is nunbunny (Ezra’s charming toddler word for nonbinary)"
Like any life change that happens in a family, I look forward to hearing and learning from Ezra about the experience of watching a parent transition. While it is difficult to answer the question that folks ask of “how has this transition been for Ezra”, I will say that I hope it has been magical. I hope that it has shown Ezra that we are capable of great change, and that we can love each other in every iteration of ourselves. I hope it has shown Ezra the deep love and care that are possible in the community, including and especially the way his father, my husband, has loved me through multiple genders. His love through this destabilizing process of self discovery has been a root, a base, a constant, a home, over the decade plus long life we have shared together. Like many others in our life, my husband has seen how much happier, healthier and more present in myself transitioning has made me, and he has made sure that I felt loved because of exactly who I am, never in spite of or “even though”-- and this is what we of all identities deserve. He’s shown our child that this love is not only possible, but easy to do.
I hope this process has taught Ezra about tolerating uncertainty, and how to be okay with and love ourselves and others, even when we do not know. I hope our child will continue to learn the joy and vibrance that comes with living authentically. I hope they learn the magic of creation and the abundance and eternity of love, the way that the queer and trans community show up for and love each other. More than anything, I hope Ezra has learned that there are so many ways to live and be a human being, and that love is possible through it all. I look forward to getting to share conversations together about how much I loved carrying Ezra in my body, getting to love and mother Ezra as my old self and my new self and selves.I hope Ezra has learned that our happiness and wellbeing matters and is worth chasing in spite of what the world tells us, how to thrive in adversity, how to be resilient, and how to find and hold onto kind and loving people. I feel so grateful for every person that has made the birth of myself and our family along with the birth of our child possible.
