Throwaway, obviously.
My situation: I transitioned, MTF. Somehow by some miracle, I have not been questioned or challenged about my gender for a long time. It's like my trans-ness is invisible to the rest of the world. This became obvious when my lesbian partner (who I met post-transition) and I decided to try to conceive with IVF and a donor, and her family and our friends - relationships I started post-transition and have had for over 3 years - always asked which one of us would be the gestational parent.
I never thought I would have a child and I never thought I would not be visibly trans to others. I will be having two more procedures in the next 6 months that will make me more passable still in that I won't need to be guarded about hiding these two "tells" about myself anymore. It seems conceivable that my child will not know I am trans unless they are told.
My partner is now pregnant. We have been discussing what would be the most loving thing we could do for our child - what would be the best environment for our child growing up.
I have read that coming out in any regard - as gay or trans etc. - when a child is between 8 and 22-ish, is associated with a higher risk of trauma/angst/family conflict. So I thought we either need to be completely open with everyone about me being trans and have that be the child's status quo growing up - having a trans parent - or we need to keep me stealth and not tell the child until they are in their 20s.
The first path would mean that our child would always be branded the kid with the lesbian parents, one of whom is actually a man(!) it would mean my child would frequently hear people saying nasty things about a parent they love, and would feel obligated to stand up to those people or be complicit by silence in ridiculing their parent. They would be subject to continuous stream of negativity about their family - worse so than they already will be for having lesbian parents and being an IVF baby (we have arranged for the donor to be known to the child from birth and are being totally open with the child about how they were conceived - they will have access to their biological roots this way and not feel like there is a hole in their identity). This seems to be a very hard thing to put on a kid during primary and high school when they have no choice as to the sorts of people and prejudices in their circles. In later life you can edit/manage your contact with assholes, but in school you are forced into contact with the same ones day after day for years. I expect initially it would be parents of other children who would be the culprits of nastiness , then in high school the attacks could be more direct. As I said, this will happen to some extent due to homophobia, however I feel transphobia in society is far more vicious and accepted as appropriate behavior .
The other path means that at best, my adult child may feel as though they did not "know" their parent all their life, which could cause anger and a sense of loss and betrayal (because both parents and several complicit relatives and family friends were in the know). My partner says that it does not matter who I was before the child was born, only who I am when the child is alive, and that my child will witness who I am during our life together, and knowing a medical fact from my past and details about my life before they were born is not important (I actually don't know much about my parent's identities before I was born so I see her point - parents get the luxury of editing their pre-child life when telling their child about it). The worst case scenario is that during the most delicate years - their teens - they find out I am trans through a distant relative they come into contact with on the Internet, or through some service like a family tree generation website due to some school project or personal interest in family roots. All my IDs are changed to female but I can't do anything about sites like ancestry.com that grabbed birth data and stored it years ago. Then the child's sense of identity stability - feeling like they know their parents and who they are - could be shaken, and they could be going through a really tough time with peer acceptance already and be terrified by this new fact that makes them distinct from others in a new way.
Neither choice seems to be ideal for my child. I don't care about morals, personal emotional cost, ethics, trans visibility etc. I just want my child to have the best chance at growing up feeling happy and secure.
What would you do?
TL:DR; when would you tell your child that before they were born you were known as a different gender, in order to make the child's life as good as possible?
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