Making a transition

I think one of the hardest parts of finding out our little boy was actually a little girl was figuring out how to tell our kids. In our blended family we have eight kids between the two of us all five and under, so it was kind of tricky to explain what exactly "transgender" was. We pretty much devoted all of our time to searching all kinds of things on the internet to find out how to explain this to children. As you can imagine there wasn't many results, but we were able to find one book I am Jazz . Amazingly enough this book is actually written for children to explain what being transgender means! We picked it up from the library and read it to our children, they all loved it so much we read it multiple times before returning it. We allowed them to ask any question they could think of, but most of them were understanding probably because Callie was already a girl in their minds. After getting it through our kids we had to tell the rest of our family which was a lot harder when it came to some of the members of our family, we didn't spend too much time focusing on that though we had more people to tell. We told our friends, we told the gymnastics coach, we told the teachers-everyone who was a big part of Callie's day to day life was informed and not just because it was big news, they needed to know for her safety. The more research I did on raising a transgender child the more I found out about how unsafe the rest of their lives were if they didn't disclose certain information upfront and I wanted to make sure my child was as safe as possible and needed all the adults in her life on board. It seemed like it was going fine until one day in preschool when they did a "boy team" and a "girl team" and my four years all came home and told me Callie was addressed as "Noah" all day and stuck on the boy team. This had me furious, I went in and talked to the teacher who informed me I was in the wrong for letting my son live as a girl when he is biologically a boy. Because I'm a smart aleck I responded with "I don't have a son named Noah, I have a daughter named Callie though and she is a girl and should be free to live as one". It took us months to get this under control and we almost pulled her out of the preschool all together but it seems like the teacher either gave up or is accepting the fact she has a transgender child in her class. Regardless the transitioning period is the hardest and having people not accept her was making it that much harder and it was sad to know this might not even be the worst that will come for our girl.