Trans dad shares sweet conversation with child about gender: "I decided to grow up to be a boy"

A transgender dad has shared an adorable conversation with his four-year-old in which he explains how he came to present as male.

“Why did you used to be a girl?” the child asks in the video that author Dr. Markus Harwood-Jones posted to social media.

“The grown-ups, my parents and the doctor who brought me into the world looked at my body and said that they thought I would grow up to be a girl because of how I looked,” Harwood-Jones explained calmly, respecting his child’s curiosity.

“Then, when I got old enough to tell them how I felt, I said, ‘I don’t feel like a girl.’ But I didn’t know anybody else who had been raised to be a girl who didn’t grow up to be one. So it took me a while to figure out what I was feeling, and when I did figure it out, it took a while for people to understand. But then I decided to grow up to be a boy instead, and that’s what I’m doing now.”

The child then replied, “How did you grow up to be a boy?”

Harwood-Jones explained that he first shared how he felt with the people around him and then chose a name that felt right.

“Like daddy?” the child adorably replied.

“Yeah, like daddy,” he said, smiling.

He told his child that when he turned 18, he started taking medicine “so that I would feel good about my body and that I would look the way I wanted to look, and I could grow a nice beard, and talk the way I do. And from then on, I was just Markus.”

“And then you were daddy,” his child said.

The video ends with someone yelling in the distance, “The baby did a really big throw up.” Harwood-Jones laughs, yells “I’m coming,” and signs off, underscoring the fact that trans people are just people, parenting and navigating baby vomit the way any other parent would.

Folks in the comments praised Harwood-Jones for the creative and accessible way he explained his gender identity to his child. Some thanked him for giving them a template to talk to their own kids; others merely said they teared up watching.

“This is so precious!” one person wrote. “Convos like this with kids are the best because they are so unphased because of course it makes total sense.”

Harwood-Jones’s account chronicles his life as a trans artist and parent of two in a three-parent family (him, his husband, and a platonic third co-parent).

One video praises his child’s preschool for updating its forms to accommodate their family. Another explains their fertility journey for each child.

Another video shares another conversation he had with his older child about gender identity.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.