My mother is amazing.
We talked for hours - laughing, joking, crying, being brutally honest, talking about fashion, sex, one night stands, porn - as well as gender dysphoria. We talked about what relatives who'd died would've thought - she agreed my father wouldn't have cared less but just seen me as me. My grandfather would probably be upset, but considering he was born pre 1920 it would be understandable, and he'd come round as he always did with everything else.
She doesn't knit - not that sort of girl - but she said "before you were born I knitted a blue cardigan and a pink one, should've kept the pink one". No, blue is my favourite colour, you did right.
She offered to remortgage to fund anything and everything, an offer I cannot accept because she's worked hard through tough times to be financially secure, and she deserves to be entering her sixties without financial debts hanging over her.
She said, is it ok to ask stupid questions? I said of course. So she said you're not going to turn up dressed as a hooker or in Laura Ashley flounces are you? I said no, skinny jeans and Jimmy Choos. She said, "so this ends in your knob being cut off right?" - yes ASAP.
I asked if she was going to tell her new boyfriend, and she said "not yet, but I will, and if he has a problem he can sod off". Which I don't want because he's really good for her.
She said, I knew, but I thought maybe you were just gay and effeminate and embarrassed, and she couldn't understand why I would be because she's the ultimate ->-bleeped-<- hag. I said, no, I'm as straight as you are.
She asked who else knew, I said some names she'd know, but said it stopped short of everyone because I didn't want her to be the last. I said I haven't told this particular friend who's a second wave unreconstructed 1970's feminist with some retro hang ups about sex changes - and having never met her or seen a picture of this friend, my mother said "yeah, well, she never got hit on at the disco and that's what her problem is".
That couldn't have gone better.
