Hunter Schafer’s parents had a hard time accepting that she identified as a girl. Her mother, Katy, revealed in an interview with North Carolina Public Radio that she had her doubts at first. “I remember saying to Hunter, ‘Well just because you’re an artist and just because you like pretty things, that doesn’t mean you’re transgender. It doesn’t mean you’re a girl.'”
Her father, Mac, found it hard to accept that Hunter’s appearance would change. Eventually, Schafer’s anxiety is what alerted her parents to the truth. Her mother saw her internal struggle and realized that it was not a phase. “I remember there were lots of tears. It was kind of just this reality of we were going to have to let go of who we thought our kid was going to be,” she said in the interview. For Schafer’s father, the truth hit home when she asked him if she could wear heels to a fashion show for summer camp. “Inside everything in me was going ‘no, no, no,’ … but outside I said, ‘Yes, you can.’ … I think that’s when everything became real,” he said.
In the beginning, Schafer’s parents found it a bit challenging to use female pronouns, but thanks to Schafer’s friends who did so without batting an eye, her parents started to become more comfortable with it too, and now they don’t think twice about it.
