Speak Honest Podcast: Real Talk on Relationships, Attachment Styles & the Work of Healing Childhood Trauma
Are you ready to heal your attachment style, master healthy communication, and create secure, fulfilling relationships? Subscribe now to uncover the secrets of secure attachment, navigate the challenges of trauma recovery, and improve your communication skills in love and life. In each episode of the Speak Honest podcast, we’ll dive into attachment styles, emotional healing, and proven strategies for deeper connection. It’s time to break free from the cycle of heartbreak and start building the relationships you deserve.
Speak Honest Podcast: Real Talk on Relationships, Attachment Styles & the Work of Healing Childhood Trauma
72. When Pride Became Personal: My Story as a Mom and an Ally
What if exploring your identity wasn’t just allowed, it was celebrated?
In this episode, I’m opening up about my own pride story, not as a coach, but as a mom. I share what it’s been like raising my trans son, from his first coming out moment at nine years old to the joy of watching him grow into who he is today. You’ll hear how learning about pronouns rewired my brain, why phases aren’t something to be feared, and how creating space for identity exploration is one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids, and ourselves.
You might want to listen if:
- You’re raising or supporting a queer or trans child and want to show up with love
- You’re curious about how to navigate pronouns and evolving identities with respect
- You’ve been told something’s “just a phase,” and it stuck with you
- You want to break free from rigid expectations around gender and identity
- You believe in making space for people to grow, change, and be fully themselves
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- Schedule your Free 30 min Attachment Assessment with Jenn Today!
- Watch Jenn on the 🔴 TEDx Stage!
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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health ...
Hello and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal what's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve. Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you have found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths and honest conversations. Now let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I am Jen Noble, your go-to relationship coach, and on today's episode, I wanted to talk about something a little bit more personal. I wanted to actually share a little bit about my own pride story. So, as we know, june is pride month. Happy pride month. Everyone Yay rainbows and color and glitter everywhere. But pride is also so much more, and so I wanted to share a little bit about my own story and why pride is so important to me. But before I do dive in, I just wanted to say that if you are someone that is looking for a community, maybe for you Pride Month is a time that feels very important and special to you, but at the same time, you just feel like you don't have a lot of people to share that with. I just want you to know that the Speak Honest community in Facebook is an incredibly supportive and affirming community. We are a group of women all trying to heal our relationships and just live a happier, more fulfilling life and, as a result, we all have different lived experiences, but in this community we are incredibly safe and incredibly supportive, even when we don't necessarily have the same opinions or the same ideals. What we do is we allow and hold space for all of those. So if you've been looking for a community of women where you can just come and express yourself, then please come and join us on our free Facebook community. You can just scroll on down to the show notes and find the link for our free Facebook community, speak Honest or just go ahead and go to Facebook. Go into the little search engine right there in Facebook and start typing in Speak Honest Secure Communication for Women, and it will totally just pop up for you. You'll see it. It has two little orange hearts to try to make us stand out, so you should be able to find us no problem, but we hope to see you over there.
Speaker 1:But now let's get on with the episode. All right, so today I really wanted to talk about something a little bit more personal. Now I'm kind of just speaking about this off the cuff, so my apologies if I'm all over the place and I'm very scattered, but I recently did a guest article for a Substack and it got me thinking about my own pride story. And so here's the thing, and now a lot of you probably know this about me already, but at the same time I wanted to share it again. Here's the thing, and now a lot of you probably know this about me already, but at the same time I wanted to share it again. I am the incredibly proud mother to an amazing trans son, so my son first came out when he was nine years old. And also, just to be clear, I do have his permission to share this story, but based on my perspective of the story. So let me start there. Let me just say that I did ask him can I share this story on my podcast and just kind of generally in my life, is it okay if I write the article? You know, can I post the picture of you? And I always ask him permission before I do anything of this, and then we talk about what it is for a person to have their lived experience. So this is my lived experience as the parent of a trans child, and what this looked like was back in the fall of 2020, I remember sitting down and we were watching the live action movie of Mulan, and at the time, there was a lot of, you know, discourse going on in the world.
Speaker 1:At that point in time, there was a lot of the George Floyd situation going on and the Black Lives Matter situation. We had just been to a protest. I'm quite a little bit of a social activist at heart in general, and so we're watching Mulan, and Mulan's always been one of my favorite movies since I was a little girl. It's just she's so badass, isn't she just amazing? And I have always just really resonated with her, because I've always been the type of person that wants to fight and stand up for the beliefs of things, and I'm tired of social constructs. You know I'm quite a feminist in that way, and so we're watching it and I turn to my child and I'm just like, see, this is why women are amazing and great, and you're going to grow up to be just like such a powerful young woman.
Speaker 1:And then he looks at me and he says, mom, I don't think I'm a girl and I was a little bit prepared for this to some extent, just because, again, as much as I have this background of Midwestern religious, christian, evangelical life, I've always really been outside of that. I've always been the type of person to question it and look up the Bible verses that support the LGBTQ community and I fought for them and all these things. So when they said that, I was like, okay, yeah, tell me more about it. But this is the interesting part is, at the point they said I'm non-binary. And I remember thinking what the fuck is that? And I mean, this is 2020, so it's a little bit new and I was ready. You know, if he was going to be a lesbian, if he was going to be even like a trans boy, masculine, completely I was ready for all of that, but I had no idea what non-binary was. So, even in this moment, he just completely helped me open up my mind even more, and that's my favorite part about the story is how much he has grown me as my child and it makes me so happy. So that's how we started.
Speaker 1:His journey started off as being non-binary and he went by them for quite a while and this was a really difficult thing. In fact, I think it might've been easier if he had just been straight you know not straight straight what I mean Like a straight masculine, like just had completely transitioned to male in the beginning. But this they them thing, oh my gosh, did it just really mess with people and it messed with me. I didn't know how to say they them for the longest time and I did all this research and I started looking into it more and thankfully there was a beautiful community of people who took me in and helped me and taught me how to use they them in the singular and in the end I was like this actually isn't that difficult. I had a really beautiful friend who taught me this. So if anyone out there has a beautiful non-binary person in their life or anyone that goes by the pronouns they them non-binary person in their life or anyone that goes by the pronouns they them, think about it this way.
Speaker 1:My friend helped me see think about your loved one with a little mouse in their pocket. So they just have this little mouse in their pocket and so when you speak about them, you're speaking about them and the mouse, and this helped me substantially in my life with my child and that helped me. I just always pictured this cute little mouse with them and that's what I would say and I'd say, okay, you know, they're over there and they're over there, and so it's them with this little friend and it just helped my brain slowly kind of rewire itself to learn how to do that. And the coolest part about this is what we teach in Speak Honest is literally how to rewire our brains, how to heal our attachment wounds. And the cool part about this was I started learning about rewiring our minds through learning how to speak they them pronouns and understanding that our brains can actually learn new things.
Speaker 1:So even though we are specifically built to use they them in a plural sense, it does work in the singular and I started reworking that. And the next thing you know, it's so natural. It comes out completely natural to me now, and so did their new name and I thought I was never, ever going to be able to understand their new name. I mean, I want to speak candidly here. As the mother of this beautiful child, I searched for this name for eons. I had thought about their name for ages and I was so in my tummy, you know, when they were growing inside of me and I got to name them this name, I was so excited I had their name put on everything in their room. It was everywhere. So when they didn't want to be called that name anymore, it definitely broke my heart.
Speaker 1:And I think that it's hard as a parent to talk about that stuff sometimes, because here's the thing there's a lot of really shitty parents out there that don't support their children and don't support what they're doing, and so as a result, it's like it means when you do have someone in your life who is this way, and then they're heartbroken, all of a sudden it's no longer about the child, it's about the parent, and so that's why I push it down. And so all I'm saying here is a lot of times we say it's not about the parents, about the child, like, forget about the parent. But I just I want to kind of shake that a little bit. I want to shake that rhetoric and say, listen, if you're out there and you have someone in your life and they are transitioning, you will experience some grief, and that's okay, and I understand that we don't want to put that grief onto our children. So if that is something that you're struggling with, please reach out with me. I would love to talk you through that because I understand what that goes. I understand how that feels, understand how that feels and I understand. That's like okay, that name is gone. It's forever, in fact. I mean it's okay to even say this. But like I had to mourn the loss of my daughter this is my little baby girl and I don't have that anymore.
Speaker 1:But what also happened throughout all this was this experience of having a child who is fully and completely themselves and that is unlike anything you can even imagine. Just the joy of watching your child come into their own is stunning. So holding space for both of those things that's the story I want to share. That's my pride story is learning how to be a completely supportive. I mean I would literally die for my child. I was so proud of him when he came out and still I grieved the loss of what was, and I want to hold space for both of those things. And so throughout this time and he's non-binary and he's going by a different name and he's figuring all of himself out he kind of slowly started realizing he's a little bit more masculine and he started going they, he, and then he I think it was like a fem boy for a little while and he's just figuring himself out and through all of this I'm I'm like, yeah, whatever it is you want to do, hon, because I'm here to support you and this is what life is all about. And then eventually and that's where we're at right now, and he's 14 is he is a trans boy, completely and utterly, and we will look into figuring out how to make that more permanent in the future, but for right now, this is where we are.
Speaker 1:And so I want to also talk about this concept of phases. What an amazing privilege it is to be able to go through phases. So a lot of times people will be like oh, you know, my kid's not actually gay, they're not lesbian, they're not trans, they're not non-binary. This is just a phase. This is just a phase. And you know what? Sometimes that is true, that is true. That is what I want to do here. I just want to kind of really push through some of this rhetoric of, hey, if you have a trans child, you can't grieve who they were, you have to only be happy. Nope, not true. And also, hey, nothing should be a phase. If you say you're gay, then that's what you have to say you are. But here's the thing Back in the day, children weren't allowed to explore who they were. So by the time they came out as adults, they had already explored all of this inside of their hearts, and so then they came out. So what an amazing opportunity it is for us to give our children the possibility of phases.
Speaker 1:I'm so proud of him for all the phases he's been through. I mean, he didn't just go through non-binary phases, he also went through anime phases and emo phases and my Chemical Romance phases. You know what I mean. Like, how many of us here have went through an emo phase? Right, we've all been through it. Or maybe we went through like a Barbie doll phase or a Spice Girls phase. Or I went through a massive Titanic phase where I was obsessed with the Titanic all the time. Does that mean that just because I don't really care for Leonardo DiCaprio now, or Titanic now, I never really was a fan? No, that's not how phases work, that's not how life works. And so, allowing our children the opportunity to explore themselves, and it's okay if it is a phase and it's okay if it sticks. That's the power. So that's the other part I just wanted to talk about. Part of my pride story is just really allowing for the phases to happen. And even if this masculine is a phase and he starts going back to non-binary whatever it is he lands on and he can keep exploring and keep figuring it out for himself. That's the goal and that's not a phase.
Speaker 1:Knowing and learning who you are is never a phase. It's a process. How many times in here do I say that healing is a journey, not a destination, and so is identity. Identity is a journey and your identity is a journey. If you're out there right now and you're still exploring your identity maybe you're a 40-year-old woman that's never really quite felt like woman fit you Then maybe now is a time for you to start exploring.
Speaker 1:Maybe for you, just being a woman was a phase. Heck, I went through a phase where I had extensions for quite a while and I loved getting my nails done, and now I'm a little bit more neutral or natural, but maybe I'll go back to getting extensions and nails again. Does that mean again that, oh, I was never an extension type of woman? No, it just means that I get to explore my identity and what a privilege to have that. How many of us went through like a brunette phase? If we're blondes, or maybe you're a redhead and and you've got curly red hair and you like straightening your hair and dying it blonde, does that mean that that's just a phase? Okay, so let's really just try to cut that out of our conversations, if we can, and really own and honor the phases.
Speaker 1:So, with all of that said, I just wanted to share a little bit of my story in that I am so, so proud of my son. I can't wait to see how he continues to grow and continues to be. I am so honored to have been given the opportunity to parent him. I am a cis, straight, white, blonde woman with blue eyes from the Midwest. I am not at all any of this, and yet I get this privilege to get to parent him and see this world for what it is. And we are going out to go do a protest this weekend and I'm so proud of him for wanting to stand up for himself and his people and for just wanting to use his voice, because that's all we do here, right? That's why I named my business what it is.
Speaker 1:That's why my coaching business is called Speak Honest, because the goal here is for you to use your voice to speak up, to speak honest, to say what's on your heart and not be afraid of the backlash that comes from that. All right, ladies, thank you so much for coming along on this journey with me today. Thank you for hearing my story. I hope you have a beautiful Pride Month. For the rest of the month of June, I hope that you are able to be authentically yourself, to speak up, to speak honest, to be who you are and to support and honor anyone in your life that needs that help as well.
Speaker 1:And remember, if you are looking for a safe community to be authentically yourself, then I would invite you to come and join our free Facebook community. You can scroll on down to the show notes and click on the link, or go ahead and just go to Facebook. Maybe you're on your phone right now, maybe you're on a walk and you're looking at something. Just go to a little search engine type in Speak Honest. You're going to see a pop-up with two little orange hearts on the sides. And come and join us. I would love to have you in the community so you can be fully and completely yourself.
Speaker 1:Well, I will speak with you all next week. Take care, as we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination, and it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today, be sure to head over to our show notes, where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode right there. And please remember to rate, review and subscribe if you enjoyed today's podcast. Your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast. Until next time, remember to speak up and speak honest.
