Do not you think, shift in one parent’s identity can welcome challenges in the life of a child?
In by Dr. Christopher King, the reader is taken into the intimate, vulnerable recesses of a child’s psyche as he tries to process an unspoken transformation unfolding before his eyes. It’s not merely a story about gender or family—it is about betrayal, confusion, and the quiet unraveling of what a child believes to be unshakable truths.
Dr. King narrates the shock and disorientation he experienced as a boy when he realised his father, the man who once represented strength, protection, and familiarity, was now stepping into public spaces dressed as a woman. At first, it was a question. A whisper of disbelief. “Why is my dad wearing women’s clothes?” But that question lingered and grew heavier each day. The man he once called ‘Dad’ was morphing into someone else—someone who asked to be called ‘Mom.’
It wasn’t just a matter of outward appearance—it was a deep emotional wound forming in the child’s identity. Public outings became battlegrounds of internal panic. “Do my classmates see this? Do they know he’s my dad? Are they laughing?” The confusion grew into humiliation. The admiration he once held for his father became tangled in a web of shame and resentment.
Dr. King paints this shift not as a political statement, nor as a critique of gender identity. Instead, he writes from the raw lens of a son whose emotional needs were lost in the wake of a drastic personal change in a parent. The heartbreak wasn’t that his father wanted to live differently, but that this transformation came without conversation, without empathy for what it meant for those who loved him as he was.
To a young boy, identity is inherited. A father’s image is imprinted upon his son like a watermark—one that defines early ideas of masculinity, normalcy, and self-worth. When that image is upended without explanation, without room for emotional processing, the result is trauma. And this trauma, Dr. King suggests, is not due to gender variance but due to emotional abandonment.
There is also a sense of mockery embedded in the recollection. The father, immersed in his transition, seemed to carry himself with the flamboyance of a character—“like a Disney princess”—while his family was left scrambling to understand, interpret, and survive the fallout. The cost of becoming who he wanted to be was paid in full by those who had no say in the matter.
In telling this story, Dr. King doesn’t attempt to negate his father’s journey, but he demands space for his own. He insists that children of transitioning parents often carry unseen burdens, and that the world’s rush to affirm one identity should not eclipse the silent suffering of those trying to comprehend what they’ve lost.
Call Me Mom is, at its core, a plea for compassion—not just for those choosing new paths, but for the loved ones left behind, piecing together meaning from fragments of a past that no longer exists.
