Tina Bejarano Gardere stood with her husband at the airport, waiting for the child she had long thought was dead. “I was just hugging her and kissing her and hugging him — I couldn’t stop hugging him,” Bejarano Gardere said. Kristin Cooke with his daughter Scarlet, as his birth mother looks on, at San Francisco’s Musee Mecanique. Bejarano Gardere and her husband approached the subject of Cooke’s gender identity cautiously, for fear of misgendering him. Growing up, he didn’t feel a need to search for his birth mother, Cooke said.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 28, 2019 13:52 UTC