The Bee Whisperer

Tonight, I'd like to introduce you to my daughter, the Bee Whisperer.

From the moment I first met B last fall, I admired her. I loved her spirit and her innate confidence as she moves through the world, absolutely sure that what she is offering the world is enough.

One of the first things I learned about B was that she loved Bees. Her great-uncle has a bee-farm where he collects honey. Last summer, she helped collect the honey. She told me proudly that she was only stung a few times. This did not in any way make her afraid of bees and did not mar the experience for her. She still loves bees.

The weekend we were in Tucson, on our fateful road-trip that ended in a flight to Canada, B helped me clean out the van. It was a bit of a disaster. (Kids and road trips, am I right?) Already, despite it only being February, it was 80F in southern AZ, so we had all the windows and doors open as we emptied out the garbage. At one point, I was in the back seat and she said "there's a bee in here." I looked up to see her watching a bee flying around the car. I calmly told her to leave it alone and keep working, that it would get bored and fly away. She didn't protest, so I thought she agreed and I kept working. A minute later, I looked up to see the most amazing thing.

There was my daughter, all 8 years of age, with a singular finger pointed up and a bee perched on top. She just watched calmly as the bee crawled over her finger, exploring it as if it were the most normal thing in the world to land on a child's finger. I don't really know how long the bee stayed there. This memory has a drawn-out quality attached in my brain, where it could have been 30 seconds or several minutes. Time almost stood still as I watched in awe. Eventually, my prediction proved correct. Once the bee got bored, it flew away and we resumed cleaning the car.

(Asking for a friend: what kind of Princess are you if instead of luring animals to you, you lure bees?)

B also loves mushrooms. I got her a pink oyster mushroom grow kit for Christmas and she lovingly watered it every single day. The mushrooms it grew were beautiful and tasted good too. The problem is she's 8 and took the "keep it moist" to mean "keep it drenched in water at all times" so once the mushrooms were harvested, we had to throw away the rest of the kit because it was covered in mold. She has been begging to go mushroom hunting at least once a week since then. (If anyone knows a fungi-expert in the Vancouver area, I'd love to talk. Or rather. I'd love to let her talk with them. She will never stop asking me questions and I do not have the answers. Do you have any idea how much I've learned about mushrooms in the last 3 months? A lot. I've learned a lot about mushrooms.)

She's also obsessed with Legends of Zelda. The things she does in that game are... a bit unconventional. In breath of the wild or tears of the kingdom (I don't remember which one she was playing and I've never played either enough to know the difference beyond one comes after the other), there's this ability to build things. So she built a driver-less wagon (essentially a box on wheels). Into this wagon, she put a chicken. And then she drove the chicken all around the map. That was the whole goal. Drive the chicken around the map. She spent at least 30 minutes doing this while laughing her head off.

I have heard her say she wants to be so many things when she grows up. My favorite (though I'm not sure it will stick) is she wants to be a Rocket Engineer. She wants to build a rocket that can travel in space without people dying. We had a good 20 minute discussion about how we currently can't travel very far in space, not just because we don't have a way to get the fuel to last that long or because food would run out, but also because we currently don't have a way to keep humans alive in space indefinitely. The radiation damages our cells and until we solve that problem, we can't have long-term space exploration. So for the next week, she talked anyone who would listen's ear off about how she's going to solve that problem. I don't care if she does or doesn't. I love that she's ambitious and wants to do Big Things.

At church (we're currently attending a Unitarian church), B has garnered the admiration of an elderly woman. Every week, the woman comments on B's boots. I swear, those boots were a gift from the Universe. We went into the goodwill to buy her cheap shoes on our road trip because hers weren't working and sitting on the shelf were bright pink boots, that looked like little kid doc-martins, and they were in exactly her size. She loves those boots. She prances around in her dress and those boots, swinging sticks at her brother and playing in the mud. She's so vibrant and full of life.

I adore this kid so much. She is everything I could never be in a little girl and I would do anything to protect her and keep her safe. Yes, we fled the USA for her brother, E. But we also fled the country for B.

Because my daughter, the Bee Whisperer, is trans.

Before anyone says me or my husband somehow influenced her into being trans, this is a moment to stop spewing ignorance. We didn't. I couldn't have - I didn't exist in her life when she came out. My husband wasn't out yet either. Neither was her brother. B, my little 8 year old warrior princess, was the first person in her family to come out as trans.

She was 5 when she came out. She'd always liked pretty things and Tommy has a photo of her in a costume dress that she'd stolen from her big brother (who hadn't come out himself yet) and grinning her ears off. But no one knew she was trans until she was 5. That year, through a series of heart-breaking conversations, she relayed to Tommy that she didn't want to be a boy. That she would do anything to be a little girl.

This is actually pretty huge. B had been diagnosed with selective mutism. She almost never spoke. It wasn't that she was shy. She just did not feel like her internal understanding of herself matched her external reality so she did not speak. So for her to communicate that she wanted to be a little girl was a big task for her. Thankfully, her father was Tommy. Once Tommy realized that she wanted to be a little girl, he let her socially transition.

Socially transitioning isn't "mutilation" or "chemical castration" or whatever bullshit nonsense you've heard from "gender critical" transphobes and right-wing propaganda. Socially transitioning means that she got to grow her hair out, wear "girl" clothes, use a girl's name, and she/her pronouns. That's it. Every step of the way, this was her choice and she could have changed her mind and still had equal love, support, and acceptance. She never has. In 3 years, not once has her identity as a little girl wavered.

Even more stark: we cannot get her to shut up. She went from barely saying a word to constantly talking.

She cannot watch a TV show or movie without asking a million questions. She cannot play the Switch without narrating what she's doing. She cannot be alone for more than 5 minutes before she finds someone to talk to. Tonight, I asked her no less than 5 times to give me 5 minutes to finish a task. It took an hour because I would finish asking her to be quiet, start the task, and then she'd start talking to me again.

She had been in speech therapy since she was little because of her selective mutism. Her speech therapist had initially been very against her transition. That woman sang a different tune almost immediately because the child that could not or would not talk was now spouting off so much information. Just being seen and accepted as herself changed everything for B.

The reason I'm sharing this story isn't because I'm going to be doing a series introducing my kids.

It's because B asked me to.

Earlier tonight, she had a full-on meltdown. These are pretty regular right now. Ever since we got to Canada, we've had a regression in behaviors with the kids, so I wasn't surprised per se. It was frustrating, but I understand that even as she was yelling at me that I was the worst dad and she hated me, I knew it wasn't about me. Eventually, I got her to tell me the root of her feelings. Then, instead of tears of anger, they were tears of fear and sorrow.

I held my daughter in my arms as she sobbed. She wanted to hurt the current US administration. I told her we can't do that, but what I can do is I can use my voice to talk about what is happening to trans people in the US. I can make videos and I can write on this website. She begged me to tell her story. It was only after I promised to write this post that she finally calmed down.

I asked her, if she could tell the world one thing, what would she want to say. The one thing she wanted to say was how scary it is to be a trans kid in the USA today. She was so scared before we left, and now that we are safe, she's worried about the "rainbow kids" who are still in the USA.

She asked me if she can go to the Canadian Government and ask them to fight for the rainbow kids. I think it would do the Canadian Government some good to hear what it's like to be an 8 year old trans girl who had to flee her home. I think it would do the world a lot of good to hear her story.

So many of the anti-trans bills are framed as "protecting the children".

Is B protected yet?

Was it protecting my daughter when the Utah state legislature passed a bill banning her from using the little girls' room at school?

She received death threats from boys at our apartment complex at the end of January. According to E, some of those boys were in elementary school. The same school she was forced to use the boys' room at. They knew she was trans because the school outed her by forcing her to use the boys' room. Every day, she had to make the choice to either go to the bathroom at school and risk harassment or have an accident. Most days she chose to have an accident.

I do not hold the school at fault for this piece. Their hands were tied by an impossible situation created by the state legislature. Her teacher actually let her use the little girls' room initially but it was shut down by the school principle. The reason he did so probably doesn't stem from his own transphobia (probably). If the school was reported for allowing her to use the little girls' room, it would be fined $10,000 per day it allowed her to do so. In a single week, the school would be fined more than it pays some of its teachers in a year. The school was in an impossible situation.

No, the blame for this lies squarely on the shoulders of the Utah state legislature which has, consistently, for the last 5 years, limited the rights of trans folk every single legislative session, despite evidence that they are actively harming trans children and adults. They cry "protect the children" and then watch as trans children kill themselves. They do not care about the children.

In 2022 when Utah passed a law banning trans students from being in sports with their lived identities, Gov Cox, the same gov Utah has now, vetoed the bill because, as he said,

"Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what [trans youth] are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly."

The legislature overruled his veto.

The next year, in 2023, the Utah Legislature issued a moratorium, pausing access to all medical gender affirming care for any child not already on it in order to make sure the science was sound about whether gender affirming care was good for trans kids. The University of Utah was commissioned to do the study.

In 2025, the University of Utah, issued their report. The report was over 1000 pages. The findings were clear. Gender Affirming Care, ranging from puberty blockers to Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy (GAHT) benefit trans kids experiencing Gender Dysphoria (GD). Speaking directly to the proposed ban on GAHT, the report said:

"Policies to prevent access to and use of GAHT for treatment of GD in pediatric patients cannot be justified based on the quantity or quality of medical science findings."

Want to guess what the Utah State Legislature did?

If you guessed they passed a law permanently banning all trans kids from accessing any Gender-Affirming medical care, you are correct.

Strikingly, Gov Cox, who so passionately defended the 4 trans athletes in 2022, responded to the U of U's report by saying that the ban on care was "probably in the right place right now...There doesn't seem to be an appetite to readdress it. I think things have shifted significantly over the past couple years." He then signed the bill in 2026 with no complaint.

Do you know who things have shifted for most in the last few years? Trans kids, like my daughter B.

If we stayed in Utah, she would not be able to play on a sports team. She would be forced to go through the wrong puberty and be unable to access medical care until she was 18 despite evidence saying it could save her life. She would be forced to continue to use the boys restroom, with children who were actively threatening her life.

"Protect the children" sounds great until you see the effects these laws are having on actual children.

The laws are bad, yes. They are enough to leave over. But the reason those kids were threatening her life wasn't because of laws. They were threatening her life because of a culture of hatred directed at trans folk simply for daring to exist. The laws, the public debates about the "validity" of scientific evidence, the bickering about what treatments go too far, all combine together to create a breeding ground of hatred that is poisoning the notion of compassion. All under the guise of "protect the children."

I would pose this simple question: who is my 8 year old daughter hurting?

She just wants to be a Bee Whisperer and go mushroom hunting.

She wants to wear her bright pink boots and her rainbow dress and sword fight her brother with sticks.

She wants to drive a chicken around a video game for 30 minutes while laughing her head off.

Who does any of this hurt?

Why do I have to hold my daughter in my arms while she sobs that she was so scared in the United States?

Why does she have to know that fear?

I have yet to find a parenting book that tells me the best way to tell your child she can't go play outside because there are kids who want to kill her for being trans.

Or one that teaches me how to tell my daughter that her brother was physically assaulted in a hospital for being trans and that we are now flying to Canada instead of driving because we aren't sure we can keep him alive on the road.

I had no road-map of how to handle any of these outbursts and meltdowns that are on the surface about things like a shoe not actually being her shoe but are really her deep fears of what will happen to her friends and the "rainbow kids" still in the US.

She needs therapy, and at the same time, is a therapist even equipped to deal with this?

Is anyone equipped to help?

Someday, I'll help B tell her own story in her own words. But in the meantime, I'm going to keep fighting for her. She deserves to be the little girl that I could never be, wild and brave and so goddamn full of life.

I'm so proud of my little Bee Whisperer.

Funds are tight right now. If you can help us out by donating to our GoFundMe or on PayPal, that would make a huge difference. We're trying to coordinate medical care for B so she can remain on medications right now and she does not yet qualify for Canadian medical plans. (You can also DM me on Instagram for other ways to help).