Name: 【TEDx】Proud to call you my transgender son | Skip Pardee | TEDxReno
Uploaded: 2016-10-24T09:10:28.000Z
Duration: 21 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

my life, and the life of my wife, and my two children

rather suddenly and dramatically changed.

This is my wife Veronica, we've been married for 37 years.

For obvious reasons, I call her my glamor girl.

Both Rita and Dana are proud graduates of the University of Nevada-Reno,

and both of them were born when I was in my 40s,

making me old enough to be their grandfather.

Now, look at this picture of Dana closely,

because I am going to show you a picture of Dana nine years ago,

Dana transitioned her life to live it as a male

at an age when I was just seven months before turning 65,

And I thought the golden years were going to be boring.

It all started for me on February 13, 2011.

my 21-year-old daughter Dana came home from college

she had come to the conclusion that she was in fact a transgender male

and was going to begin the transition to live her life as a male.

She had read story after story on the Internet

abandoned, condemned, disowned their own child

ex-military officer dad, me, would react.

You know, we talked a lot that day, and one of the things I told Dana was,

"Dana, for heaven's sake, don't worry about mom and dad.

You are still our child, we'll still love you,

Dana says that it was the most anticlimactic moment of his life.

including front-page newspaper articles about Dana and our family

in the Carson Valley, the Reno' and the Las Vegas' newspapers.

We've learned a lot, and we are closer than ever as a family.

When we are created, we are given a body, a mind, and a spirit.

A transgender person is given the mind and the spirit of one gender,

- and I like to call it a gender spirit, in Dana's case it was male -

into the physical body of the opposite gender

and they live their lives with this constant emotional conflict

between who they feel that they are and who their physical body says they are.

And this emotional conflict can be so powerful

which partially explains why 41% of transgender people

at some point in their life attempt suicide.

I really don't think anybody really knows yet.

and I'm going to talk about some of the things we've learned,

that when I talk about Dana for the first 21 years,

before she made the transition to male, I refer to Dana as 'she' or 'her',

When I talk about Dana afterwards, today, I refer to Dana as 'he' or 'him',

you needed to be in my house for the last four and a half years.

First thing: a transgender person is born the way they are,

almost every account from a transgender person,

they say that for as far back as their memory takes them,

they knew that something wasn't right, they knew that their mind felt

that they were one gender, their body was the other.

In Dana's case, growing up -- it was rather interesting

because Dana not only felt like she was a boy,

Dana not only wanted to be a boy, Dana looked like a boy.

To the extent that everywhere where Dana and I went,

from the time Dana was just a little tike

to 16 years old, a fully developed female,

everybody said, "Dr. Pardee, is this your son?"

And they would blush and get all embarrassed.