36 The Times Magazine“I would love to start by saying I always
knew,” she says, “that she loved butterflies
and unicorns, or had a penchant for pink.” But
all she’d ever known for sure was that, since
infanthood, her child had been uneasy and
unhappy. So when, on one of those fractious
December evenings that often characterise
family Christmases, the person she thought
was her son said to her, “There’s something
I need to tell you,” Spencer says now, “I was
completely unprepared, in every way.”
To protect her identity and that of her
daughter, Spencer has changed both their
names, but otherwise their story remains
the same: four years after that unexpected
announcement, Miles has become Amelie,
known to everyone as Milly, 27 this year, and
the sadness that once seemed almost to define
who she was has lifted for the first time in her
life. What stands out most in this account is
her mother’s enormous relief. Notwithstanding
Spencer’s initial shock, her ambivalence
about what then unfolded and her subsequent
choice to stand by her child through full
gender assignment via surgery in Belgium
and Thailand. What has stunned her the
most is how completely changed her daughter
is emotionally.
“I always knew she suffered from
depression,” says Spencer. “It was bad; it was
upsetting. I did everything I could think of
to try to help her, and I could not penetrate
it. From a very young age, she would hang her
head; she would never look people in the face.
She was extremely withdrawn. The difference
in her now is that she is obviously happy. She
is successful; she has many friends; she’s open.
She’s comfortable in herself in a way that she
never was before. I see my child is glowing
with health and happiness. And hindsight is
a fine thing. I couldn’t have articulated those
things in the pre-transition phase. I couldn’t
have articulated exactly what was wrong
with my then son.”
Spencer’s book, The Road to My Daughter,
is the story of two people’s trajectories,
but written with the aim of conveying her
own difficult feelings along the way in thehope that her experiences might be of use to
other parents and family members who find
themselves in similar situations, with an adult
child who transitions. In her book, as in this
article, male pronouns are used to reflect
Spencer’s perspectives and assumptions in the
time before Amelie came out.
She comes across as an intelligent, calm,
reflective person. Kind. Behind her on the
Zoom screen there’s a half-empty room
with packing boxes in it. She’s moving from
Cambridge to France. Despite the disarray, her
mind is clear. She’s the parent who spent hours
in the university library researching gender
identity in history books after her daughter
came out; who called into question her
feminist beliefs; who read up on neuroscience;
who can now describe, in detail, the logistics
of gender reassignment surgery; who tries
always to hold up a mirror to herself. She
knows, for example, there will be people who
will object to her account as a sort of hijacking
of another person’s experience – that it’s
not her story to tell – but adds that her own
daughter does not agree, having edited the
manuscript, pushing her mother to be morehonest about her guilty feelings and what
Spencer calls her “missteps” along the way.
The decision to transition has an impact
on the family dynamic, whether or not
its members are supportive. In this sense,
Spencer’s extended family can be viewed as
a microcosm of the culture wars currently
playing themselves out in public debate. Her
ex-husband, Amelie’s father, disowned Amelie
when she told him. Amelie’s older brother
and only sibling, Lucas, also reacted badly
and they fell out. Spencer looks pained when
she talks about it. “My son, whom I have the
greatest respect for as an intellectual, struggles
with it because he approaches life in general
in an extremely rational way, and he finds it
difficult to accept the fluid interpretation of
what he would regard as reality.”
Her son lost a brother and gained a sister
is another way of seeing it, says Spencer. She
gained a daughter but lost a son. “And I very
much felt that I suffered a bereavement, that
I was losing my son, and I had to grapple a lot
with that.” She hopes that those who read her
book can learn to inhabit a difficult grey area,
a sort of cognitive dissonance – fully accepting
their trans son, daughter, parent, sibling,even if they disagree with the principle. The
alternative is trans people living “forcibly
hidden and in a state of great distress” for
much of their lives, as her daughter did.
Now she’d describe herself as her
daughter’s ally, “out and proud”. But, “It
is very raw emotionally. I didn’t censor myself.
I didn’t want to write a book that was a halo
of praise for how great I was at supporting my
daughter. You do need to work through it. You
can’t have this idea, ‘OK, I’ve fixed it now.’ ”
Spencer is a flautist and academic in middle
age. She moved to England from her native
Australia after finishing school to study at
the Royal Academy of Music. It was in the
UK that she met her first husband, a charming,
educated man whose abusive side only
asserted itself after the couple were married.
They had two boys, Lucas and, two years
after that, Miles. The marriage became tense
and then ended, with Spencer resuming her
musical and academic careers off the back of
a scholarship to Cambridge. She worked hard
and had to – she was the family’s sole financial
provider. She met Baz, the man who was to
become her second husband. This relationshipplayed out well and the new family unit was
harmonious, the four of them settling in a
Cambridgeshire village.
Miles was exceptionally good at music,
singing all the time. By the time he was six
he had taught himself to play the violin by ear.
As a young child, he seemed to his mother to
be “the most boyish of boys”, only interested
in standard boys’ clothes; he loved Thomas
the Tank Engine toys. But while Lucas was a
happy child, Miles was consistently withdrawn
and unhappy.
How can a mother fail to notice? She says
she’s thought about this a lot. The attempted
suicide rate among trans people (as she points
out in her book) is 40 per cent – doesn’t the
root of that unhappiness somehow make itself
known to the attuned parent? It’s one of the
things Spencer feels most guilty about, and yet
the signs were so subtle.
Looking back, there were three potential
clues, she thinks. The first, a preschool report
observing that Miles was happiest playing
“with dolls in the corner”. His mother put this
down to a mark of good socialisation. Miles
also preferred to grow his hair long. At seven
he adopted the nickname “Milly”, but remained‘I would love to say I always knew, that she
loved butterflies and unicorns. But I was
completely unprepared, in every way’
PREVIOUS AND THIS SPREAD: COURTESY OF ELISABETH SPENCERoes Elisabeth Spencer
even have the right to
tell her story? It’s the
question that hangs over
the book she’s spent the
past year apprehensively
writing, the story of her
experience as the mother
of a daughter whom she always
thought of as her son.