A Mother's Story

Transcript of speech by Nguyễn Bích Hà, NQAPIA Conference 2015 - translated into English from the original text, written in Vietnamese

My name is Nguyễn Bích Hà. Like other women born and raised in Vietnam, when I was of age I married and then had children. My biggest wish was that my children would be healthy mentallyas well as physically, so that they could contribute to their family and society.

But I was unfortunate, with the word “unfortunate” in quotation marks. I had only one daughter and she was my unique treasure, the only thing I ever had. When she was 11 years old, she already knew that the physical body she carried didn’t contain her soul, and she started speaking about this dysphoria with me. We both felt that painful realization. I began to avoid approaching that hated topic with her, reasoning to myself that she was still young and fanciful. It was all in her imagination.

Since that day, my life has been filled with sorrows. I quietly bore my pain alone and kept the knowledge to myself. I feared that if my husband learned about it, the pain would be unbearable to him, since he was a conservative man and categorically strict. My mother-in-law was too old and feeble to be facing such news. What I was most afraid of was that both my and her father’s sides of the family would condemn our daughter and look down upon her. I struggled to face my daughter as each passing year, she would gently remind me on her birthday of her true identity, a fact that tortured and terrified me. She herself suffered as much if not much more, with countless difficulties she had to face at school from the rejection of her peers. Consequently, her grades plummeted, and she began to miss classes. I cried and begged her to keep up her grades— all else I temporarily accepted. When she reached the age of 17, she begged me to let her dress up according to her true gender and to let her live as the person she actually was born to live. I understood then that there was no use in continuing to deny her her existence and it was time to stop punishing one another needlessly. This time I truly opened up my heart and soul to accept this new member of our family, and in order to pay better attention to the changes in her, I asked her to find a religious counselor to help her complete her transition into a better person. We were fortunate to meet Hiếu, a social worker and professional psychologist who helped bring us out of our cycles of pain and loneliness.

Today, standing here on this podium to share with you my story, I am a brand-new mother with a different perspective of my beloved child. Our affection and love for one another has blossomed, with my child’s bubbling new confidence, as they were more comfortable in their different form in the acceptance of their loving parents.