LOUISVILLE, Ky. — When Heather Green’s son told her he is transgender, she wanted him to know she supported him.
She told friends and family to use his new name, Adrian, and to switch to male pronouns.
“And then we got kind-of sloppy, I guess,” she laughed. She said some of her friends and acquaintances had not been privy to the message and got confused.
“People started thinking I had three children,” she said. “Then people started to think I’d lost a child somewhere along the way, and it became clear to me it was time to make a statement.”
She wasn’t sure how exactly to do that until she had a realization.
“Then I was thinking about it, when you see a gender reveal pictures, everybody knows that the correct response is congratulations,” she said.
She had a friend’s 14-year-old daughter take the funny and heartwarming photos and posted it to Facebook.
Immediately, she got a ton of responses. Green said she knew her friends would be accepting, but when they started asking her to make the post public, she gave it some thought.
“Once it starts getting shared, it can go everywhere and it’s forever,” she explained. After talking it over with her son, they decided to go for it.
“I was like, my instinct tells me that people are going to support it,” she said.
Green said the response has overwhelmingly been positive, and within hours there were hundreds of shares, then thousands and tens of thousands.
She’s done interviews with NPR and Good Morning America, and her one Facebook post ballooned into something bigger.
“Being the kind of mom that I am, it’s surprising to me that it got big initially and that people were celebrating a mom’s unconditional love for her child,” she said. “And that seems ridiculous that in 2019 we’re doing that.”
