In his senior year of high school, Emmett Chen-Ran decided to tell his parents he was transgender. He was grappling with a lot: Would they accept him? Would they be upset? Would they understand?
But there was another challenge too. Which language should he use to tell them — English or Chinese?
Now 24 years old and living in San Francisco, Chen-Ran was born in China. When he was 5 years old, his family moved to New York. As a kid, he learned some Mandarin. One summer in elementary school, he and his mom, Yanfei Ran, spent almost every day watching cartoons, playing badminton and practicing Chinese. But as he got older, he mostly just retained enough of the language to do things like order food at a restaurant.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been prepared my entire life to give a soliloquy about my feelings in Chinese,” Chen-Ran said.
The situation was reversed for his parents. They’re both lawyers, and according to Chen-Ran, they mostly use English in the workplace. But they were much more comfortable speaking Chinese.
As a way to find community when they got to the U.S., Chen-Ran’s parents immersed themselves in Christianity. And around the time Chen-Ran was in middle school, his parents sent him to summer Bible camp. One summer when he was there, Chen-Ran developed a crush on a fellow camper who was “super butch” and “super confident in being masculine.” But he was a bit perplexed — did he want to date them or be them?
He explored this question throughout high school, and by the beginning of his senior year, he was seriously considering hormone therapy.
When it came time to talk to his parents about his gender, Chen-Ran was torn. He wanted to tell them in their native language, but he wasn’t sure he could find the right words. So he went with English — except for one word.
Before he descended the stairs of his Long Island home, Chen-Ran pulled up the Google translation of “transgender” (biàn xìng, at the time) in Chinese, “just so I could ground that term in their cultural understanding of what it was.” The translation that shows up today is “Kuà xìngbié,” which directly translates to “transgender” — but at the time it was “biàn xìng,” which is more akin to the derogatory “transsexual.”
“There was a single light on the dining room table lit, and the rest of the living room and dining room were dark,” he said. “And we were just sitting in the living room in the dark.”
Chen-Ran told his parents, “I am biàn xìng,” adding, “I want to be a man.” (Chen-Ran knew that terminology wasn’t quite right, he said, but again — he wanted to “put it in terms of their understanding.”) Chen-Ran was trembling the entire time. “Not because I was scared to tell them, but because just the act of voicing these things was so uncomfortable for me,” he said.
“For dramatic effect, I was sort of like, ‘I might kill myself if I don’t transition,’” he said. “It wasn’t too much of a stretch to think my quality of life definitely would’ve been severely impacted if I wasn’t allowed to transition.”
Even though Chen-Ran had been having some doubts about his identity (researching online “How do I know that I’m trans for sure?”), he felt a sense of urgency when he came out to his parents. He worried that bringing up any of that doubt would give his parents an opportunity to delay his transition or stand in the way.
