May we, all of us, raise treasured kids

The genius of the trolls, if you want to call it that, is to force us into black and white, into boxes, when there are really only shades of grey. It is a nonsense. Nothing that is human is also clearcut.

E, my nineteen year old, has been tidying his room - in the way that a nineteen year old does when, after weeks of asking, his mother finally loses the plot and demands he get his act together.

And when a teenager tidies his room, it's like discovering a time capsule - one with a dusty, grimy exterior, but when you open it, you will find traces of your own heart.

E brought armfuls of stuff into the lounge: clothes too small for his body, toys too small for his mind; papers to rifle and boxes to rummage. He dumped it all on the carpet. With laughter and poignancy, we went through it together.

Some of his memories were hard: the feelings of being different, the bullying.

Some were funny. I mean, trust E to notice, years on from Catholic primary school, that his earnest crayon tribute to the Holy Spirit was actually scrawled in the colours of the bisexual flag.

And some were irritating. The police constable who taught the DARE programme to E's class never gave the him the lollipop he was promised for answering the don't-do-crack quiz with a vigilance even Nancy Reagan would admire. (E has never moved on emotionally from the lollipop thing. I suggested he try doing drugs.)

The trolls have tried to force us into a defensive position, those of us who raise transgender kids. We cannot admit to them the delicacy of the ethical issues we traverse, the agonised care with which we do it. We cannot admit that there are a host of emotions we go through, some of them challenging, when we realise our parenting journey has taken a different course.

These things, the trolls would have us believe, are admissions of our unnaturalness, the failure of our 'ideology', our snowflake weakness.

They try to goad us with accusations that our children are unstable, that we are abusers to indulge their fantasies or sickness. And we, in turn, are made to feel that to defend our children, to demonstrate our love for them, we must belligerently make out our lives are easy, our choices effortless - when anyone who's raised a kid of any gender knows this to be a farce.

One of the trickiest decisions we face is how to acknowledge our child's past.

For a trans kid, the past can come burdened with the weight of hurt. For a parent, that same past - with its first words spoken, first steps taken, things desperately precious - is a treasure.

How do we, as parents and children, reclaim the fullness of our shared experience; of what we and our children have been and are? How do we push off the black and white the trolls would force on us, and claim instead our human right to the grey, the mess, the complexity, the joy that resides between?

Facebook memories are hard. I never know what to do with them. I want to share them, laugh and tut and revel in nostalgia, do all the silly things you do when you reminisce on the time that your kids were small. Until now, I never felt I could.

The past is like the pile of things on the floor of the lounge. They may be outgrown, but that does not detract from their value - not then, and not now.

E emptied the contents of a box, and looked at the first ever school photo he took with his younger brother. And he smiled. And he let me post the photo because, even though the past was hard, he had found peace.

To see him accept the time he was my daughter is the beautiful fulfilment of everything I have wished for my son.

To those who read my writing, thank you. You've walked with me. You've cried with me over a wine, laughed with me over another. You have extended to me and to mine the kind of acceptance that can sit in silence or move a mountain.

May we, all of us, raise treasured kids.