In “One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman,” Abi Maxwell struggles to raise her daughter in a New Hampshire community that refuses to accept her.
ONE DAY I’LL GROW UP AND BE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: A Mother’s Story, by Abi Maxwell
Abi Maxwell’s “One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman” is a cluster bomb of a memoir lobbed from the front lines of the transgender rights movement right into the heart of the contemporary culture wars. The battleground is the “idyllic” lakeside town of Gilford, N.H., where the author and her husband have relocated from Montana to live in her late grandmother’s “somewhat shabby” house on a street of “large, expensive homes with professional lawn care.”
There’s more than a whiff of unease in paradise, but Maxwell keeps conspicuously silent about it. Besides the couple’s financial insecurity and longing for their life out west, Maxwell is disquieted by the casual homophobia at the town library where she works. “If it says L.G.B.-whatever, you can skip it,” a fellow librarian tells her. “People here don’t read that.” Maxwell thinks about her own gay brother, “but I didn’t say anything. I liked this woman, and I liked this job. I told myself that she didn’t mean any harm, and I kept quiet.” She stays at this job for a decade.
The book’s compelling casus belli is Maxwell’s daughter, Greta, who was declared a boy at birth and who comes out as transgender when she’s 6. Greta is also, by turns, the story’s human shield, weapon and target.
Greta’s early years are plagued by unusual tantrums, sleep troubles and physical aggression; she doesn’t speak until she’s 2. In kindergarten, Greta is diagnosed with autism. “Imagine that all this time she’s been trying to communicate with you,” a neurologist tells Maxwell, “but the two of you are speaking different languages.”
In time it becomes clear that what Greta is most desperate to communicate is her gender. “Why do you make me be a boy?” the child whispers to her mother at night. But Maxwell continues dressing her in blue plaid shirts and cutting her hair short, calling her by incorrect pronouns and a name Greta “complained about for some three years before I listened.” After the autism diagnosis, Maxwell admits, “we learned how to keep her safe, but we took so long to learn about her gender.”
When at last the Maxwells do allow their child to identify as a girl, the results are dramatic; “within 24 hours of a new name and pronoun,” Maxwell writes, “our child started reading independently, when previously she’d generally only looked at the pictures.” But the author’s joy is tempered by rage and terror: She learns that without any federal protections, half of trans youth in America seriously consider attempting suicide. At Gilford’s school board meeting, parents call pronoun changes “a violation of the First Amendment” and hallucinate unanswerably bizarre bathroom scenarios.
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