What 'Sort Of' taught me about loving my trans kid

It is still very hard to be openly trans — especially in junior high.

And you probably won't be surprised to hear that returning to school this fall was a struggle for my son, Jasper.

My partner and I spend our mornings trying to show Jasper as much care and encouragement and compassion as possible as he prepares for his day at school. Parents want their kids to be set up for success, and like any other dad, I want to give him everything I can.

However, when I was watching Sort Of —a CBC comedy series about a gender-fluid millennial babysitter navigating big life choices, their identity, and how it all impacts their own flesh-and-blood family — I found myself reflecting on how easy it is, as a parent of a trans kid, to fall short.

The show challenges caregivers to consider the emotional labour that kids, and especially gender-nonconforming kids, often have to do to support their parents. Through gentle humour, it shows that we can begin to fully see others when we combine humility and self-awareness with love.

In the first Peabody and Canadian Screen Award-winning season, Sabi (Co-creator and star Bilal Baig) negotiates a new sort of relationship with their mother Raffo (deftly played by Ellora Patnaik), who reveals a sincere openness to rethinking her traditional assumptions about gender.

Season 2 (Now on CBC and CBC Gem) gets complicated, as Sabi's father Imran (Dhirendra) returns to Canada to confront Sabi's identity… and to investigate his wife's extreme makeover of their home (she knocked a giant hole in the living room wall in Season 1). Raffo's frenzied efforts to create an "open concept" family home is a lovely visual metaphor for the removal of barriers to comfortable personhood.

Accommodating the parents

As a white, cisgender, hetero dad, I feel most seen (or, maybe more specifically, implicated) by the depiction of the often hapless father Paul, who, alongside partner Bessy (Grace Lynn Kung), employs Sabi as nanny for his two kids, Violet and Henry. Despite being a therapist, he has a hard time seeing the struggles happening under his own roof. 

Co-creator and director Fab Filippo has spoken before about how developing the character of Paul (played by Gray Powell) was crucial to honing the show's voice and direction. As Filippo presented Baig with the idea of making the series "really intersectional" and "about how we're all in transitions," Paul coalesced as a character, and their vision for Sort Of as we know it began to form.

So what about those parents who demand accommodation? In the series, Sabi's closest friend 7ven (the radically underappreciated Amanda Cordner) is a source of unapologetic advice to Sabi and the kids in their care. 7ven rejects the idea that Paul's children should have to care for their dad when their own world is also in turmoil.

7ven is equally committed to convincing Sabi that they are wasting "precious alive time" worrying about how to accommodate their own father Imran.

Maybe the most progressive part of the show is its embrace of the idea that trans and gender nonconforming people deserve so much more than just 'inclusion.' They are demonstrating an inclusive model of freedom, fluidity, and mutual care for us all!

What 7ven says in these scenes really resonates with me.

If I want to help my son become the person he wants to be, it starts by remembering that my expectations are secondary to what he hopes to get out of life. Fathers aren't owed reverence, especially if we can't recognize our kids' specific sense of self.

"You can't engineer your child," says Filippo. Instead, what if we considered the health of a family in terms of how much room we gave each other to be "new"?

Sociologist Tey Meadow, an expert in family diversity and the author of Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century, points out that reaching "beyond the family, to someone with expertise in gender" can transform the process of finding a working identity in the world.

Watching Sort Of as the father of both a nonbinary teenager and a transgender tween, I've admired the show's deep understanding of how transition and growth happen in the context of a community. Our children's search for a sometimes elusive self-love has not taken place in a vacuum, it is backed by the gender-affirming care of a whole network of friends and experts.

Maybe the most progressive part of the show is its embrace of the idea that trans and gender-nonconforming people deserve so much more than just "inclusion." They are demonstrating an inclusive model of freedom, fluidity, and mutual care for us all!

In other words, Sort Of is not interested in celebrating tolerance, which puts the normative person in the position of giving or denying validation; it wants the whole thing, or what Sabi calls that "Rachel McAdams love" — a radical love of others in their uniqueness, awkwardness, and self-discovery.

Powell knows that his character Paul "comes at life with a fairly binary sensibility," but told me that, from his perspective, it's a "long game." Powell hopes that the audience can "stay with" the plot as it unfolds, because there are "lots of different openings and breaking opens" with how characters like Paul "respond to the various transitions in their lives."

To be clear, I am not suggesting that I've cured myself of the sort of paternal narcissism that Paul embodies at specific moments in the show. Sort Of is important to me as the parent of a trans kid in the 21st century because it challenges me to keep thinking about what "caring" really means, because it's a lesson in the importance of intersectionality, and because it talks about the work of figuring this stuff out together.