How do you tell your family you are transgender?

[Shana A]

How do you tell your family you are transgender?

Soon she would have a different body, a different voice, and a different name .... How would Juliet Jacques tell her parents that their son was becoming their daughter?

    * Juliet Jacques
    * guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 July 2010 12.09 BST
   
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/14/tell-family-transgender

I knew that there was no right way to tell my family that I was transgendered - just that some ways were more wrong than others. (Dressing as Marilyn Monroe and bursting from a cake at a birthday was the first I discounted.) To find the least wrong way, I had to rack my memory for any clues, however minor, however old, as to how my family might react - and try to anticipate them.

I'd come out as 'gay' to them aged 18, when someone who'd been at school with me called to say he'd heard "a horrible rumour" that the girl over the road had seen me wearing a dress (imagine!). My parents were aware that I wore makeup around college, but I knew that I couldn't pass off dressing at home as youthful rebellion: panicking, I decided to tell them something before someone else did.