When their child Ryland was 5 years old, Hillary and Jeff Whittington wrote their friends and family a letter. The letter was to inform their loved ones that Ryland, born biologically female, would be transitioning gender.
Around three years of age Ryland began to insist on being called a boy.
“At first we thought it was kind of cute and funny,” Hillary Whittington says. “Over time it got more and more apparent that something else was going on.”
The turning point for the Whittingtons came one evening when Ryland became very upset about a Christmas letter Hillary was sending out. The letter had a cartoon showing the family with Ryland in a dress. What Ryland told Hillary Whittington shocked her.
“He said to me ‘Mom, when the family dies I’ll cut my hair so I can become a boy,'” Whittington says. “The next morning after that he woke up and said ‘Mom, why did God make me this way?'”
After consulting with a number of doctors and psychotherapists the Whittingtons found the rare therapist that was up on research regarding transgender children. After getting more information about transgender kids, Hillary and her husband decided that Ryland wasn’t going through a “phase.”
Hillary Whittington discussed the challenges of “coming out” as a family with a transgender child to extended family, friend and Ryland’s school on The Steve Fast Show.
“There’s nothing written about how to do this and it was really scary,” Whittington says.
Hillary Whittington has written about her family in the book “Raising Ryland: Our Story of Parenting a Transgender Child with No Strings Attached.”
Listen to the interview: Hillary Whittington on The Steve Fast Show
Follow Steve Fast on Twitter @SteveFastShow
