Transgender issues will always remain difficult for much of the world to understand, especially when it comes to the experiences of transgender children. The story of 9-year-old named Q Daily, was recently told in a three-part series on NPR affiliate WNYC, according to Yahoo News! Q recently finished third grade, which represents his first full year of school as a boy. And on the way he now feels, he says:
“It feels like, instead of a dead flower, a growing flower.”
Q Daily who lives in Brooklyn was born a girl, but began questioning his gender at around age 3 or 4, said his parents, and he began making his outward gender transition during second grade by dressing in boys’ clothes, asking to be identified with the pronoun “he,” and using Q instead of his given name of Qwanaia.
“Occasionally, there are still kids that will say ‘Qwanaia,’” said Katherine Sorel, his teacher at the public Brooklyn New School. “And still occasionally, they’ll say, ‘She … I mean he.’” Sorel said Q was not the only transgender kid in his class, but one of two, making it even easier for his peers to accept. “I don’t know what their experience is going to be, and I imagine it’s going to become more difficult for them,” Sorel said. “But right now it’s not really difficult. Right now it’s sort of irrelevant.”
An even bigger issue than the nonchalant reaction of Q’s friends was whether he could use the boys’ bathroom while at school. And, according to school principal Anna Allanbrook, who told WNYC that she looked into the legal angles, “It is not the place of the school to tell the child which bathroom to use.” She explained that, according to New York City’s transgender-student guidelines, students should be free to use the bathroom that best aligns with their gender identity, according to the report.
But Q has also had freedom where it’s most important — at home, where mom Francisca Montana and dad Avery Daily (who are separated) have been fully supportive, though they admit it hasn’t always been easy.
“For me, in the beginning, I was finding it hard to accept,” Daily said, recalling that he kept thinking, “This is my girl” at the beginning of his child’s process. But he soon understood it was not a phase. “This is something deep inside of him,” Daily told NPR. “I was like, this is his soul.”
To read more about Q, CLICK HERE!
