Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family's Journey of Gender Transition

by Annette Langlois Grunseth

Overview

"Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family's Journey of Gender Transition", a collection of poems by Annette Langlois Grunseth, shares the parental experience of an adult child transitioning from son to daughter. Through understandable poetry, information is woven around one family's story to provide awareness about the journey of gender identity. Narrative poems explain changing avatars, using bathrooms, selecting clothing, grieving, passing as a woman, job discrimination, unique health issues, what happens to marriage and family, along with the joy that comes from seeing a child transition into living an authentic life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635342420
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	06/09/2017
Pages:	44
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.11(d)

About the Author

Annette Langlois Grunseth is a poet/freelance writer with a BA in Radio/TV/Film and Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a lifetime member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems have appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review, Midwest Prairie Review, SOUNDINGS: Door County in Poetry, The Poetry Box/Poeming Pigeons, The Ariel Anthology and other publications. Her poem "Lost Seed" from her forthcoming book "Becoming Trans-Parent, One Family's Jounrey of Gender Transition" won an Honorable Mention in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Muse Contest in 2016. Her readings from the book have been well-received in churches, support groups as well as poetry/bookstore venues.

Table of Contents

Change Is on the Wind

Becoming Trans-Parent 1

Milkweed 2

Naming My Grief 3

At the Baby Shower 4

Avatars of Transition 5

No Regrets 6

Lost Seed 7

The Child I Carried

The Child I Carried 8

The First Time I Enter a Ladies Restroom with

My Daughter 9

Sharing Clothes with My New Daughter 10

At the Clinic 11

In the Neighborhood 12

After a Long Talk with My Daughter 13

How Are the Boys Doing? 14

Younger Brother Speaks 15

Tears of Joy 16

Social Justice

How is it Love 17

Gender Dysphoria 18

Halloween Fright 20

Justice for All 21

Health Risks for a Transgender Woman 22

Pronouns, It’s Personal 23

Trans Etiquette 24

I’m the Daughter You Always Wanted

Embracing Your Name 25

Wings 26

Love and Marriage 27

Facebook Says We’ve Been Friends for Three Years 28

Key Change 29

When Your Child Comes Out 30

Epilogue 31

Transgender Resources 32

Notes on poems 32

Editorial Reviews

Annette Grunseth is an advocate, a poet, and a mother. The advocate in her conveys information: what words mean--words like safety, and dignity. The poet in her asks us to consider the milkweed pod, the Monarch, chrysalis & transformation. As a mother, she wants us to know her daughter is her inspiration, editor and reader. And as human beings, with our own loves & stories & shared bonds, how can we not listen? Poets name things--it's what we do. In one of my favorite poems in the collection, Grunseth asks us to consider naming. Her daughter selects her new name, "derived from your mother-roots" and this gift, the power of this choice is palpable in the poem; but the poet doesn't let the reader off here (or herself). In this poem, titled "Naming My Grief," the poet admits, "yet the day you told us the court approved your female name, / I cried that night in bed." Moving from one identity to another, whatever the context, requires some loss, some grief. A loving parent, whatever the context, grieves this moment, and celebrates the child's casting off of the past self & moving on to the future. Over and over and over in Becoming Trans-Parent we are reminded what it means to love, to learn, to be honest with ourselves, to be human.

--C. Kubasta, author of Of Covenants and All Beautiful & Useless

Annette Grunseth's book of poems, Becoming Trans-Parent, is a guidebook for the heart...at once exquisitely personal and tenderly universal. The questions are clear, the answers are not so transparent, regarding pronouns, restrooms, dress, dignity, health issues and social justice. These poems are about transformation and love and love and transformation. Thank you, Annette, I am a better person for having read Becoming Trans-Parent.

--Bruce Dethlefsen, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2011-2012)

The poems in Annette Grunseth's chapbook, Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family's Journey of Gender Transition, are frank, informative, full of feeling and love. From the family's time-stopped shock to mother and daughter sharing clothes, a mother's fierce defense of her daughter to those who exclude her, and advocacy for all in her daughter's situation, Grunseth underscores the need for the family to make the journey too: Truth is, 41 percent of transgender people lose hope, and attempt to end their lives unless they get love (the unconditional kind), she says in "Gender Dysphoria." These are fine poems that every one of us can learn from.

--Robin Chapman, Professor emerita of Communication Sciences and Disorders,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts,

and Letters, and poet, author of Six True Things

From the Publisher