Transgender at the Reunion.

• Author: White, Jacqueline

It sounds like a great set-up for drama: my spouse, Marcus, who used to be Margery, goes back to the college he attended as a woman, which happens to be a women's college, Mount Holyoke. How in the world will the alumnae respond when one of their own shows up at their twenty-fifth reunion as a man?

The drama turned out to be a nonstory. Of course some Mount Holyokers did initially--understandably--look to me as the presumed alumna. The worst thing to happen was that a woman staffing the registration table laughed when Marcus presented himself as a graduate. But he still got a registration packet.

When he took his turn saying a few words about what he'd been up to since he graduated, his classmates responded with hearty applause. And guess what? Other than his gender transition, what Marcus had been up to was not all that different from what his classmates had been up to: He got established in his career, bought a house, served on some nonprofit boards, got married, and adopted our daughter.

Not all transgender people are so fortunate--in fact, most aren't. As the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey reports, 63 percent of transgender people have experienced serious discrimination: They've been physically or sexually assaulted, lost a job, been evicted, had to drop out of school, experienced homelessness or some other calamitous event because of bias.

The one bright spot in the survey is that transgender people who are accepted by their families fare far better on nearly every measure. The lesson here is a big one, even for those who are not family members: Maintaining a relationship with someone transgender can help that person have a productive life.

I know the support Marcus received from his parents, as well as friends and co-workers, paved the way for an uneventful transition. Such support does not, actually, turn out to be uncommon: 43 percent of transgender people maintain family bonds.

My spouse was almost forty and still known as Margery when she sat her parents down and told them she was transgender. They asked a couple of questions: Are you sure? And when did you first know? Margery told them, yes, she was sure. She'd had a sense since she was very small--three of four years old--that her body was supposed to be different.

Once her folks understood that being transgender was something innate in their kid, they stood by her, their concerns touchingly parental. Would Margery lose her friends? Would she have to move away...