The courage was never in the loving.

People keep calling me brave.

For loving my son. For supporting him. For showing up the way I always believed a parent is supposed to show up. The word comes at me kindly, usually from people who mean it as a compliment, and for years I never knew what to do with it. I would nod and say thank you and feel something I could not name sitting just underneath.

Then I heard Anne Hathaway.

Back in 2018, she stood up to accept an award from the Human Rights Campaign. Someone handed her a note from a ten-year-old transgender girl named Ella, who had named herself after one of Hathaway’s films. In the note, Ella thanked her for the courage it took to be an ally.

Hathaway looked at that and answered the little girl directly.

“It takes zero courage to love you.”

I have not stopped thinking about it since. Because that one line named the thing I had been carrying underneath all those compliments.

When Daniel came out at eleven, the first word he had was nonbinary. Within a couple of months, he knew. He was my son. He was transgender.

I want to be honest about what that asked of us, because I think parents need to hear it. We did not have all the answers. We did not even know what nonbinary meant at first. Craig and I had to learn it. So instead of knowing, we asked questions, and we kept asking them, and we found the people and the support that could help him. A new therapist who affirmed him. A psychiatrist who gave us room to ask without making us feel like the questions themselves were a failure.

Daniel found his truth as quickly as he did because of the supports we put in place, not in spite of them. We had built a home where he knew his truth would be safe. That safety is what let him say it out loud, and then keep saying it, until the words fit.

And here is the part Hathaway named for me. Loving Daniel took zero courage. My first feeling, the night I understood what he was telling me, was not fear or grief or confusion. It was love. Instant and reflexive. The most natural thing I have ever felt. The not-knowing was real. The love never was in question. The love was the ground he stood on while he found himself.

The courage went somewhere else entirely.

It went into the year-long wait list for the gender clinic, the one we added our name to and then kept moving anyway, because we could not afford to just wait. It went into the search for a placement that would treat his mental health and affirm him as a transgender boy at the same time, because one without the other was not just insufficient, it was dangerous. It went into the rooms where I had to advocate louder than I ever wanted to, where I had to be the difficult one, because the alternative was my child going unseen. That is where every ounce of my courage went. Not the loving. The fighting to protect the loving.

This is something I wish more people understood, because the language we use matters. When we tell a parent they are brave for loving their transgender child, we are being kind, but we are also quietly saying something else. We are suggesting that loving that child is a hard thing. An act of will. A feat. And it is not. The hard thing is everything built around that child that makes the loving so difficult to protect.

I think about Ella sometimes. Ten years old, writing to a movie star, already absorbing the idea that the adults who love her are doing something brave by it. I want her to grow up in a world that does not require bravery to love her. I want that for Daniel. I want that for every kid whose existence somehow became a debate.

This is the heart of the book I have spent years writing. Two fights, running at the same time. There was the fight to keep my child alive and seen inside a system that kept failing us. And there was the world’s response to who my child is. Two distinct battles, both exhausting, both worth every minute. But the love underneath them was never one of those fights. The love was the easy part. The love was the ground I stood on while I fought.

So if you are a parent being called brave right now, for the simple act of loving your kid, I want you to hear what Hathaway told Ella. It takes zero courage to love your child. You already knew that.

Save your courage. You are going to need it, and not for the loving. You are going to need it for the rooms and the systems and the people who still have not figured out what you figured out a long time ago.

The loving was always free.

💚 Jen