When Heather Lundberg Green’s eldest son Adrian came out as transgender ahead of his 20th birthday, his mother realized they needed a new family photo.
So Lundberg Green stocked up on supplies at her local dollar store and she staged a twist on the traditional gender reveal photo shoot. She asked her boyfriend’s daughter to take the photos.
“I wanted a new family photo with Adrian as his true gender,” Lundberg Green told Global News. “Normally when you announce you have a new son or daughter it’s through these gender reveal photos that you see all the time.”
Her son Adrian Brown says growing up as a girl, he’d never felt comfortable and called the decision to finally transition “a long time coming.”
“I had always really disliked the way I looked,” he recalled.
“I had always known something was different, I just didn’t have a word for it. I just thought it was because I was weird or quirky.”
Brown said that after making the decision to transition it only took him two weeks to finally share his decision with his mother and younger brother.
“It was like finding the last piece to a puzzle I had been searching for, for 19 years,” he told Global News.
Lundberg Green told Global News she initially posted the photos privately so that only close friends and family could see them, but when a friend told her they believed others could benefit from seeing the photos she decided to make them visible to a larger audience.
The Louisville, Ky., mother says she had always realized her son was different and that he’d never fit in or “associated with other girls, or the things girls did.”
But she says she had never understood that he wasn’t comfortable with his own gender.
“It kind of broke my heart because, as accepting as I’ve always been of the LGBTQ community, this didn’t occur to me.”
Lundberg Green said she is buoyed by the support the photographs have received online.
“When this post started to take off, everyone was celebrating a mother’s unconditional love — and the fact that that’s not the norm right now is terrifying to me,” she said.
“I have my hope renewed by how much support we’ve received.
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