At the Broken Places by Mary Collins

Author:Mary Collins [Collins, Mary; Collins, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8836-4
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

Hidden Fees

Donald Collins

I’ve heard parents say all they want is “the best” for their children, but the best is subjective and anchored by how they know and learned the world.

—Janet Mock, Redefining Realness

Spring 2011

The first openly trans adult I ever met was Tony Ferraiolo, a genial trans man in his late forties who co-ran, and still runs, a youth support group for gender-variant teens in the New Haven area. I attended this group on and off my senior year of high school. We all just called it “Group.”

Originally, Tony told me, Group started with him and two members but grew within a year to encompass dozens of participants of all identities and backgrounds. He even started a group for parents and an art-based one for younger kids.

When I found out about Group and told my mom I wanted to go, she was highly conflicted, but eventually agreed to drive me to the next Saturday meeting. The first time we made the forty-five-minute commute, we got terribly lost and both ended up red-faced and stressed out of our minds. It reminded me of a game I played when I was younger, where I would leave the radio on an annoying station and see how long before my mom couldn’t take it anymore. It was always a big joke to me, because eventually she would cave and turn the dial.

But on the way to Group, I was terrified she would just say “fuck it” and turn the car around. And it wasn’t because of some static-infused banjo riff on FM. We were sitting with my gender trouble, seeing how long we could both last before something had to give.

“I don’t know if I’m the best parent in the world or the worst,” she sighed as we parked across the street from the meeting location.

I didn’t think she was either; I just wanted to get the heck out of the car.

Down the block I saw Tony outside the meeting address, stocky, bearded, and tattooed, emanating this energetic warmth. I remember thinking, to quote Liz Lemon, “I want to go to there.”

I only attended Group for a couple of months, but knew the formula well. We went around and introduced ourselves with our name and pronouns, maybe a line about what we liked or where we were from. We shared highs and lows from our week, got words of encouragement from other members and the adult facilitators. Sometimes people cried, really cried, but the mood wasn’t always low. Group members mingled afterwards with a kind of ease that you can’t cultivate anywhere but a safe space.

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