Cynthia Nixon has a simple but effective message for parents of transgender kids: Just listen to what they have to say.
The former “Sex and the City” star, and 2018 Democratic New York gubernatorial candidate, was featured on this week’s episode of the popular “Homo Sapiens” podcast.
The long-running LGBTQ-focused show hosted by Alan Cumming and Chris Sweeney, is a weekly chat with “inspirational people over tea and biscuits” about topics that speak to “the interests of LGBTQ+ people around the world.”
In the episode released Thursday — which, according to a tweet by Nixon, was recorded last year — the 54-year-old actor, politician and activist, talked about her son Samuel, who came out as transgender to her as he was starting college.
“Before I ever had an inkling my kid might be trans I read a really extensive article… [about] all of these parents of pre-pubescent kids who were really struggling with this. There was one dad who said ‘At a certain point, the decision seemed to me I could have a dead son or a live daughter,'” she said.
“After you say that, what more is there to say?” she added.
Nixon continued, stating matter-of-factly: “you can make all the arguments that you want … but the fact is, as a parent, as a human, you should listen to what people tell you about themselves.”
If people decide that that’s the direction they want to go, they “are not going to do this lightly,” she said.
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Nixon, who married education activist Christine Marinoni in 2012, compared the arguments used by some people to justify an idea that kids might be too young to identify as transgender, to similar arguments that were used against gay people a few decades past.
“When you think about 30 or 40 years ago and more, the arguments that were given to gay people were like, ‘This is just a phase,’ [or] ‘You’re gonna grow out of this.'”
Those arguments, Nixon concludes, don’t work anymore.