Mother’s Day takes new dimension for transgender parents and their children

By Steve Rothaus

[email protected] MAY 04, 2015 09:00 AM, UPDATED MAY 04, 2015 05:13 PM

This Mother’s Day, Jesus Lam Jr. will honor parent Jessica Lam with “the love she deserves and the respect that she deserves.”

“She’s great. She’s amazing. She still takes care of us to this day. She’s the one who helped me understand the world, without any ignorance. She’s the one who helped me see the good in people and not just the surface. She really taught me to be an individual and a very understanding person. That’s the best you can do being a parent,” says Jesus, 26, who still calls Jessica “daddy.”

“It feels kind of weird because I’m calling a female ‘daddy,’ but it’s who I identify her as,” Jesus said. “She’s always going to be my dad.”

Jessica — formerly Jesus Lam Sr. — identified as a girl from early childhood, according to her mother, Yolanda Lam.

“I noticed she was struggling as a baby. She wanted her hair long all the time. Every time I took her to the barber, she was screaming, ‘I hate my hair!’ from when she was a year old,” said Yolanda, who back then had no idea why young Jesus rejected his male appearance. “I was very young and didn’t have experience, brought up by old-fashioned Cuban parents. It didn’t occur to me what was happening to her.”

One day, Jesus announced: “I feel like I’m in the wrong body.”

“I didn’t know what it was,” recalled Yolanda, 62, of Aventura. “I said are you gay? She said, ‘No, I like girls. I go out with girls.’ I said it was a phase. I said, ‘You’re a boy and going to be a young man. Don’t think of those things anymore.’”

Jesus got married at 19. Within two years, he was father of two boys and cross-dressing at home. In the mid 1990s, he divorced his wife and began gender transition. Jesus legally became Jessica in 1999 and had sexual reassignment surgery in 2003.

Jessica Lam, now a Hialeah DJ who owns a children’s party service, has spent much of the past decade as a transgender activist. She is vice president of the International Transgender Certification Association, a group that trains nonprofit workers, health professionals, “anybody who wants to work with the transgender community.”

Lam, who has a 16-month-old granddaughter by younger son Christopher, said that when she came out as transgender a generation ago, there were few resources available and no one talked about the subject. Today, younger people are much more comfortable discussing LGBT issues, including the “T.”

“They’ve seen it on television, they’ve learned about it in school, they’re YouTube fanatics so they’ve heard about this for a while — social media,” said Lam, 44. “Forget the fact that I’m not just transgender, I’m a lesbian. What’s fascinating to me right now, is for the last five years I’ve seen the Spanish community really open its arms to the transgender community. All the media exposure on American TV the last 10 years, with television programs like Glee, programs that feature individuals from the LGBT community, it’s becoming something that’s undeniable.. It’s the modern civil rights movement, if you will.”

SPOTLIGHT ON BRUCE JENNER

Public attention culminated April 24 when 1970s Olympic icon Bruce Jenner came out to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer as transgender.

“What we saw on the Bruce Jenner interview are things we’ve been hearing for the last decade or so,” Lam said. “But Bruce Jenner being who he is — the Olympic champion and his connection to the Kardashians — he’s covering the generations, both my generation and the current generation.”