At 6 years old, Olivia knew. She didn’t have the words to describe it — or the courage it would take to utter those words aloud — but she was certain all the same: “I’m a boy.” The feeling of alienation between mind and body persisted — “I don’t know what’s wrong, but something definitely is” — though it would be another five years before a clue emerged in the most contemporary of places.

Youtube. Specifically, a video about female-to-male transition that gave this fifth grader a new insight into these sensations and a new word to replace anxiety with identity.

“I’m transgender” was not a statement that Hunter (then still Olivia socially and biologically) could say to his mom until he had done extensive internet research to understand what he was going through and how the transition process may work.

Even then, it took a spark — what may have seemed like the typical flint-to-steel contact of a strong-willed 8th grader and parent over the length of a haircut and clothing options — to light the torch for Hunter’s journey.

Indeed, Roz and Richard, Hunter’s parents, had their own learning curve, along with a decade and a half of raising a pair of daughters in a world of gender norms.

“I don’t know that I knew he was struggling with something in particular. There were a lot of things kind of converging, but we certainly wouldn’t have put it all together and said, ‘Oh, there must be gender issues.’”

But they had many of the same data points to connect the dots with how Hunter had been feeling for years.

“Things started making sense. All of his game avatars were male figures. And the toys he preferred to play with were traditionally ‘boy toys.’ My husband initially was grasping, trying to find maybe some other reasons for why Hunter was feeling the way he was feeling.”

To understand what his lifelong “tomboy” was going through, Richard set out to educate himself on everything from terminology to therapy, including an “intense” two-day conference sponsored by Ferndale’s Affirmations.

As intrinsically personal and layered as Hunter’s transition was, the loving community around him scaffolded and supported the true architecture of his identity.

As Hunter worked to build his true self — name, voice, body — from blueprints that had always been present — that scaffolding mitigated the exceptional risks that transgender individuals face. More than 40% have attempted suicide — nine times higher than the national average.

“Even with the support, coming out and transitioning was still hard,” Hunter vividly recalls, but with “a strong support system at home, anyone could say anything to me and it would just bounce off my back … it was their problem, not mine.”

Roz fought for Hunter at every step of the process — documenting their journey and engaging other families through callhimhunter.wordpress.com. From the outset she sensed intuitively what another parent going through the process finally articulated: “I would rather have a live son than a dead daughter.” In a true testament to the love they have for their son and the support they feel the entire transexual community needs, Roz and Richard run Stand with Trans, an advocacy and support group that they founded. The group is growing nationwide and providing vital supports so that no transgender person will ever feel that suicide is the only option.

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