Transitions: A Mother’s Journey

by KC Councilor

As trans people, we don’t always consider the transitions that those around us have to make because ours is so monumental, all-consuming. When our identities change, however, so do those of our loved ones—mothers of daughters who become sons, fathers of sons become daughters, sisters or brothers who become siblings to non-binary kin. Transitions: A Mother’s Journey offers a unique contribution to the genre of nonfiction work about trans lives—allowing readers to witness the long, often painful and confusing journey that a mother, Anne, embarks on when her child comes out to her as transgender man. The most important audience for this book is parents of trans children, who are likely to find support and companionship in Transitions, even if their own personal journey looks different.

Transitions is a book in translation from French, written and illustrated by Élodie Durand about the story of a family whose names are fictionalized. As Durand writes in an author’s note, “This story began when I met Anne Marbot and, later, her family. For three years, we traded readings, shared our feelings, and walked a bit of the same path together. From that exchange was born this graphic ‘diary.’ Between fiction and reality, the line is blurred [4].” While the line between fiction and reality may be blurred, it undoubtedly offers a truth.

The book starts with Alex’s coming out to his mother—a series of disorienting panels in and out of a therapist’s office. He tells her, “I am a boy. But hey, don’t worry! This doesn’t change anything. I’m not sick [13].” This sends Anne on her journey, and Durand’s drawings express that chaos and confusion graphically—on the following page, every other panel is solid black, jarring the narrative; instead of the typical quick flow between panels, the black panels interrupt, evoking heaviness and the visceral experience of shock. Durand uses Anne’s hair as imagery, repeating depictions where her face is obstructed, she grows monstrous, becoming a cloud of dark hair, her body disintegrating. In moving back and forth between comic panels and full-page drawings, Durand shows us the parts of Anne’s journey that are deeply felt and experienced beyond the realm of words.

Durand’s use of color in the book is highly symbolic. Many of the traditional comics spreads are done in black and white with accent colors—a hot pink denoting Anne, a light blue on Alex’s eyes. In moments where Anne is reminiscing, looking through photo albums from the past, there is no black even for linework; it’s all done in a multi-color pastel style. This visually shows a break from the present narrative, and the colors evoke childhood. The many shifts in color use throughout the book warrant attention, as they are signaling other kinds of shifts—in mental state, time period, or context.

Transitions is about a mother’s journey, but this is also, of course, entangled with the family as a whole: Anne’s husband, Marco, who is not Alex’s biological father, and their two younger children, Pierre and Malo. The book models a husband and father in partnership with his wife; he is supportive, gentle, and involved. We see how they talk to Alex’s younger brothers, how they navigate coming out to family, and the fears of judgment that come with them. Durand depicts intimate scenes between husband and wife, often in the bedroom at the beginning or end of the day.

In many ways, this collaboration between Anne and Durand produced the book that Anne wishes she had on her journey. She writes, “I had no role model. I was not prepared. I was unaware of anything about trans identity [29].” This book can be that role model for other parents. Early on in the book, the author offers some definitions, which is helpful for readers who are new to these conversations, and particularly helpful for parents who are hailed into this world and looking for a guide through their own process. Readers on similar journeys might recognize themselves in Anne’s, as she looks back through photo albums, trying to find answers in the archive, realizing that “unknowingly, I projected and imagined a future for my daughter [34].”

There are many moments in the book that are poignant and troubling. At one point, Anne says, “I look at my daughter. The two of us have always been close. Who is this? [20]” Because of how deeply engrained binary sex/gender is in Western society, a gender transition can create a stranger out of a beloved. It is doubly painful to read Anne’s suffering, because the flip side (largely missing from the story until the end) is Alex going through transition on his own, and knowing that it’s causing his mother such anguish. Later, Anne writes, “I feel an intense sense of loss: the loss of a past, a future, a present I thought was certain. I live in a sort of mourning [59].” Alex had hoped to assuage his mother’s fears early on by telling her nothing would change and that he wasn’t sick; yet the book is a testament to just how much has to change for Anne and their whole family. It is horrible to have to choose between living authentically and breaking your mother’s heart. It begs the questions: Do we not all change? Do we not all transition? What, exactly, is being grieved? Anne questions this too: “Why does this change cause such distress inside me? [60]”

Anne’s training as a university researcher and biologist is apparent here in the way she uses it to make sense of human behavior and the biological components of sex/gender. This is a particularly timely perspective, as opponents of trans-affirming medical care often claim “science.” Interspersed with her narrative are examples of gender variance in the animal kingdom and in other cultures, particularly gender roles for people born women as a way of existing in highly restrictive patriarchal cultures. The book tacks back and forth between Anne’s story and her education, and in doing so, gives the reader necessary emotional breaks—Durand marks these breaks with a canary yellow, invoking the color of a school handout.

While Transitions centers on human relationships more than medical care, interactions with therapists and Alex’s medical journey do play a role here. We see good and bad representations of mental health care–this is important to know and be able to distinguish for parents navigating their child’s transition. In fact, one of the early turning points in Anne’s journey is her enragement at a therapist whose trans-ignorant guidance would have led her down a harmful path. On the other hand, the therapist Alex brings his mother to interrupts Anne’s cycle of worry about her child’s marginalization in the world by pointing out how much worse it is for a kid to experience that in their own family.

Throughout the book, we see the trouble with language, names, pronouns, and the real struggle Anne has in accepting Alex’s transition. The narratives we most often see in public are more about a parent’s acceptance, their arrival, and not the messy, painful parts that are typically happening behind closed doors. The book might be a difficult read for trans people (who are someone’s child), but it’s not primarily for us. Durand’s and Anne’s commitment to showing the work and not just the correct answer to this impossibly complex equation is a gift to readers, particularly for parents who don’t have many blueprints to choose from. The incorporation of Alex’s perspective—a long email in his words—is really unique, and I held onto that during the parts of the book that were difficult to read, knowing that the outcome of the story was healing to the point that Alex was included in the book, that we would get to hear from him at the end.

What became increasingly clear to me was that the kind of suffering that Anne experiences throughout the book, and thus, that her child experiences, is not inevitable. If not for the rigid gender binary and its attendant expectations that society produces and reproduces, perhaps parents could experience something besides utter heartbreak when their child comes out as trans. This book seeks to interrupt those patterns, to disrupt the dogma of the gender binary and gesture toward liberation. The abstracted images of Anne at the beginning of the book transform from monstrous and chaotic to colorful and bird-like by the end, reflecting her transformation into a fierce protector and defender.

Ultimately, it is a generosity on the part of the real-life “Anne” to share her story so openly, especially the parts that must be extremely painful to look back on. As a parent now myself, I understand viscerally the kind of journey a parent of a trans child would need to go on. Sometimes we trans people wish for quick and easy acceptance as our authentic selves, but we have to remember that we’re asking people to fundamentally reorganize who we have been to them, to see us newly, and that takes effort and deep work. This book is a model for what that kind of journey might look like.

(Editor’s note: Élodie Durand won the first, 2022, Graphic Medicine International Collective Award for Parenthesis.)

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KC Councilor, PhD is a trans cartoonist and a communication professor at Southern Connecticut State University. You can see more of his work, including his book Between You and Me: Transitional Comics, at his website, www.kccouncilor.com.