'Inspiring' mother's regret at transgender son's story going viral

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In 2014 Yolanda Bogert placed a birth announcement retraction in a newspaper introducing their 19-year-old transgender son. It was a loving act that she later came to question.

It's 1995.

A tiny baby, two weeks overdue, is placed onto the stomach of 16-year-old Yolanda.

A teen mum who had grown up in foster care and experienced issues with homelessness, self-harm and substance abuse, the birth of her baby was not widely celebrated.

In fact people were forthright with their disapproval.

"Someone at the hospital dropped me off pamphlets about adoption and told me I was selfish for keeping him," she said.

A couple of days later Yolanda walks out of the hospital carrying a capsule.

She waits for a tap on the shoulder - someone telling her that there'd been a mistake, that someone like her would not possibly be able to take a baby home.

Like most proud parents at the time, she places a notice in the local paper announcing the arrival of her daughter, Elizabeth Anne, and throws herself into loving her newborn baby.

Seventeen years later she placed another birth notice in a Queensland paper, this time a retraction, introducing her son Kai.

"He informs us that we were mistaken. Oops! Our bad," it read. "We would now like to present, our wonderful son - Kai Bogert. Loving you is the easiest thing in the world. Tidy your room."

Within days the ad, a joke between mother and son, became the centre of an international media storm sparking a flow of comments about Yolanda's great parenting and raising positive awareness of transgender issues.

More than a year on, as she reflects in her new book, How I Met My Son: A Story That Transcends Gender, she questions whether or not she made the right decision.

Growing up

As a young and vulnerable mum, Yolanda threw herself into loving her small child.

A couple of years later came her second son, Myk'l.

A tight-knit family unit, they played haunted houses, embarked on adventures to paddocks of unicorns and went dragon hunting.

She related to her two children in a way that she hadn't related to anyone else before.

"I never felt grown up. I still don't," she says with a chuckle.

After spending their earlier family years in Newcastle, they moved to rural Queensland on a horse and cattle stud with Yolanda's partner Guy, where Kai became besotted with horses.

"He was bright and vivacious with a great sense of fun," she said.

After the big dry they moved to a larger regional Queensland town where Kai went to high school.

Here, Yolanda watched her outgoing child turn into a sullen, silent teenager.

He didn't fit into the typical boxes that seemed to be expected.

A battle with the school started about uniform. Kai didn't like wearing skirts, the only option available year-round other than long winter pants.

He was also warned about his haircut.

Kai was bullied by peers for being different.

And on top of that he faced religious school programs that made him feel abornmal.

"They want to plant a flag that heterosexual, monogamous, cisgender relationships as the default and have everything else be different," she said.

Meanwhile, Yolanda opened a book store tucked away in one of the town's arcades, a place that became a hub for gender-diverse teens who didn't feel accepted in their home town.

Before she knew it she had a rainbow flag in the window and was hosting an LGBT support group.

"There was a lot of open hostility, there were some kids that would be yelled at from cars and stuff thrown at them," she said.

A self-declared anti-conformist, she challenged the town's norm, writing a letter to the editor when a gay teenager was sacked from a local supermarket.

"The response led to a saga of letter exchanges via the editorial column from local clergy anxious to reassure the public that it's not homophobic bigotry to hate on gay people, it's just because they're dirty sinners and they're lovingly trying to save souls," she said.

Coming out

When Yolanda and Kai initially talked about the idea of publishing their story in a book, Kai cringed at the thought of recollecting his high school days.

"School felt like a war zone for me," he wrote.

"I hid being transgender at school because I could see how hard it was just to be Beth there. Kai would probably have withered and died, or reached critical mass and exploded. I don't really know which."

It was in Kai's final school year that Yolanda found out that he was cutting himself.

It resurfaced some of her own scars - her father's suicide when she was a child and her own cutting as a teenager.

She felt cursed.

"We've always thought that there was some genetic link," she said.

"I would have fought the whole world to protect him but I had no idea how to protect him on my own."

Kai began speaking to a counsellor and slowly they pieced his life together and began working on coping strategies.

Coming out was the most important decision of his life.

In one way, the coming out conversation with his mum was a bit of an anti-climax.

Kai: "So you know how you've always thought that you had a son and a daughter? Well, you actually have two sons."

Yolanda: "Oh. You're trans?"

Kai: "Yeah."

Yolanda: "OK. It's cool. Love you."

Kai: "Love you too."

Media storm

For Yolanda, Kai's coming out changed very little about the way she looked at him.

He was still the quiet teenager who refused to clean his room like the day before.

To make that clear she decided to buy a $50 spot in the Courier Mail birth notices.

Little did she know someone would think it was sweet, and share it with the world in a tweet.

As the world labelled her "inspiring" and "an absolute legend" mother, she was baffled at the fuss.

"It should be that the world goes crazy and wants to know why a parent has shunned their kid, not why a parent accepts it," she said.



"It just made no sense to us."

Soon, media outlets like the New York Times and BBC were phoning with interview requests.

Kai did stints on The Project and Today.

The regional Queensland mother quickly came to realise that once something's out there, it's out there for the whole world to see.

"It was quite frightening," she said.

Along with a flow of support, there were insidious messages on social media streams.

One of her biggest regrets is that a quick search online returns dozens of stories about her transgender teen, which ultimately means Kai will never "pass" as being born male.

"He's got nothing to be ashamed of, it's a good thing to go viral for if you're ever going to go viral," she said.

"I think anyone who googles and then has a problem with that, that's their loss, not Kai's.

"I would hope that future employers don't have a problem with it and things like that. You worry about that too.

"I just feel like he doesn't get to be private anymore."

Kai is still dumbfounded about why the story went viral in the first place, and why exactly you would be reading this story about his life right now.

But he doesn't blame his mum for putting his story out there.

"Why is this such a big deal? I'm not that interesting," he said.

"I know that mum beats herself up about outing me to the world and I know that she would probably like to turn back time, but I'm OK with it.

"Even though being thrust into the spotlight isn't really the funnest thing I can think of, so much good has come from it, that I can't bring myself to regret it."

Lessons learnt

Yolanda has finally made peace with their viral story.

But she isn't positive that she would do the same thing over.

With the beauty of hindsight, she would make sure their address and phone number wasn't in the White Pages.

However both of them recognise the power of Kai's public coming out journey in making a difference in the lives of other transgender children and parents.

"There's been a lot of positive things that have come out from it," Yolanda said.

"I've had some really lovely messages from other trans parents and other kids that have said that my parents have read your story, and now they're sort of looking to understand a bit better.

"There was one mother that Facebook-messaged that her trans daughter, they were estranged and she was now going to seek her out because she realised it wasn't quite the scary thing that she'd imagined.

"That kind of thing, that's awe-inspiring."

At just 20, Kai's journey is far from over.

One night when he was at a Brisbane nightclub men's bathroom, he was punched in the stomach.

He often doesn't feel safe, and avoids walking past groups of people.

"I know that all I have to do is correct the wrong person when they use female pronouns and I could end up in hospital or worse," he said.

In the book, he has a message for other people who may be at their ultimate low.

"I want to say that if there is anybody out there in the same position, please don't give up," he said.

"I won't lie, you'll be battered and bruised a lot when you come out the other side, but just hang in there. For five more minutes. Then for five minutes more. Five turns into thirty and even in that short amount of time, things can look different."

Both Yolanda and Kai hope that sharing their story helps to encourage a sense of normalcy around transgender people.

Kai's advice for parents who read the book is to put it down and talk to their children.

And Yolanda's advice?

Simply to hug their child and tell them that they love them. All the time.

Topics: youth, parenting, family-and-children, books-literature, qld

First posted