Source: npr.org<\/p>\n
When Elizabeth Coffey-Williams first came out to her family as transgender in the late 1960s, the language of gender identity wasn’t what it is today.<\/p>\n
“A lot of the words that they have today, like transgender and non-binary, they didn’t have them,” Elizabeth, who was in her early 20s at the time, told her niece Jennifer Coffey in a recent StoryCorps interview.<\/p>\n
“All the fruits and nuts were already on the tree, they just hadn’t been assigned names,” said Elizabeth, now 71. “So, attempting to tell your extraordinarily loving blue-collar parents that you were transgender was tantamount to telling them I was from Jupiter.”<\/p>\n
Her family lived in Philadelphia, and her parents sent her across town to live with a relative.<\/p>\n
“My parents were afraid, well, you know,\u00a0this might be contagious<\/em>,” Elizabeth said. “And, at that point, my parents were telling the rest of the family that I had just gone.”<\/p>\n “That’s got to be traumatizing,” 42-year-old Jennifer said.<\/p>\n Elizabeth said she didn’t see her younger brothers or sister for about five\u00a0<\/strong>years. “I would call, my mother would let me talk to them on the telephone, but I couldn’t come home,” she said.<\/p>\n