Transgender Parents Speak Out About What Makes a Family
Photo of Nick, left, and Bianca Bowser, with their sons, Kai and Pax, courtesy of the Bowser family.
The transgender parents of two young children living in Kentucky are raising consciousness about family, honesty, and love this week after some splashy media coverage in the British tabloids stemming from an appearance on “The Ricki Lake Show” in 2013. “It’s good, because our goal was to have our story appear here in the States,” mom Bianca Bowser told Yahoo Health. “Our main point is to express our similarities [to everyone else] and to advocate for the transgender community.”
Bianca, 32, was born a boy named Jason, while her husband, Nick Bowser, 27, was born a girl named Nicole. They met and fell in love in 2009, before Nick’s gender transition, in Atlanta. Eventually, they decided to start a family, and Nick, still physically female (though he would eventually undergo breast-removal surgery), decided to carry Bianca’s babies — something he described to the Mirror as being “an absolutely horrible experience for me” because he already identifed as male.
“We have the parts so we will use them,” Bianca told the Mirror. “If we could change them we would, and they would be the other way around,” she said, referring to sex-reassignment surgeries that they both hope to undergo someday, “but we cannot afford it and the children come first.”
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Bianca and Nick. Photo courtesy of the Bowser family.
Now that their boys, Kai and Pax, are 3 and 1 respectively, the couple is beginning to grapple with how to explain that Mom was technically Dad and Dad was technically Mom. But, Bianca told Yahoo Health, “Our guts have always led us in the right direction.” She added that there hasn’t been much in the way of guidance out there that’s specific to their situation, as even the stories that do involve transgender parents — like that of activist and author Jenny Boylan, who described transitioning from dad to mom in her 2013 memoir, “Stuck in the Middle With You” — have involved older children who were cognizant of the parent’s gender transition from the get-go. Yahoo