Trans dad pens touching ode to daughter who taught him to be "happy & secure" in his gender

On Father’s Day, a trans dad published a beautiful tribute to the relationship he has built with his daughter, one in which “gender was never complicated,” as he explains it.

In a series of cartoons for the New York Times (illustrated by Hannah Jacons), Zach Ellams says that he has been living as a trans man since the age of 18, but that learning to be a trans dad to his daughter Elliot was a whole new adventure.

He explains that raising Elliot made him want to be open about his identity.

“I wasn’t out to everyone as trans,” he wrote, “But with Elliot I had to learn how to talk about it.” The drawing sharing those memories shows Elliot asking about an old photograph of her dad from before his transition.

“I had to trust her with the most vulnerable version of myself,” he wrote, adding, “I’d carried shame around my whole life. I didn’t want to pass that onto my daughter.”

But the balance was difficult, he shared, as he doesn’t always reveal his trans identity to others. However, sharing it with a child and teaching that child not to be ashamed of it also means letting it become something she can talk about.

“It was hard sometimes,” he said, though his comic also included a panel depicting his daughter telling her friends that she wants to grow a beard when she grows up. When her friends tell that her girls can’t do that, she replies, “My dad did, and he was a girl.”

“Kids can accept things at face value,” he said. The adults are the ones “that complicate matters.”

“The more I’ve watched Elliot embrace who she is, moving through the world with her wild and free spirit, and her sense of humor, the more I’ve learned to embrace who I am,” the proud father said.

It turned out, he wrote, that Elliot had been the one teaching him to be “happy and secure,” rather than the other way around.

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Originally published here.