The first family trip we took after Brooklyn started transitioning was in June 2023. This was 10 months after she told me she was experiencing gender dysphoria.
Our oldest son was graduating from high school, and we decided to celebrate by visiting Rome and taking a cruise of the Mediterranean. We had never been overseas or on a cruise. We were all super excited.
At this point our children knew Brooke was affirming her gender and Brooke was often presenting as herself at home. She wanted to spend more time as herself in public but we live in a smallish community so that was difficult.
Going so far away from home for our vacation gave us the freedom of people not recognizing us. However, all her documents were still in her old name and the gender was still listed as male.
Luckily, we found a way to allow Brooke to be herself during some of the trip while still exploring the wonderful areas we were visiting. When flying she had to present as male. Unfortunately, this was also a requirement getting on and off the cruise ship because we had to show ID. We tried reaching out to the cruise line ahead of time to see if we could make alternative arrangement but were not able to get any answers.
While on the ship though Brooke was able to have a lot more freedom. She spoke with customer service on the ship, and they were able to add the name Brooke to her file. She got to experience a lot of wonderful firsts. Each night at dinner she was able to be herself. She was able to use a female washroom for the first time and on the cruise day she was able to experience relaxing at the pool area like the women she truly is. During the evenings the four of us would often play cards at are bar and it was amazing to see her so happy and being herself.
It wasn’t all perfect of course. There was one waiter who kept misgendering her at dinner one night. I had to speak with him quite firming to prevent it from happening again.
Because I want to be open and transparent, I also want to mention some things I struggled with during this time. I had a strong emotional response to feeling the need to protect her. I would stare people down if I thought they were looking at her too long. The first time she came with me to a women’s washroom I was in total fight or flight mode. More on the side of fight, ready to defend if anything was said. This became a little exhausting, which then made me get resentful. I’m not proud of it but there were a couple times I choose not to go to the washroom at the same time or not join her to go somewhere; telling myself she had to stand on her own two feet and couldn’t always have me with her. Looking back, I wish I made some different decisions there. It must have been so scary and also exciting to be herself in public and instead of sharing that with her, I isolated her. There were times when I felt sad because there were also some “lasts” happening. The last time I would vacation with my husband. There are still moments of grieving through this journey.