For the past two decades, I’ve worked as a Professional Dominatrix. In that time I have raised three boys and five years ago gave birth to a fourth. At least that’s what the sonogram showed and that’s what we were presented with when he was born, a beautiful baby boy.

I believe gender is a spectrum, like the Kinsey scale, and that some people are all the way to one side or the other, but many are in the middle. So when my son decided he wanted to occasionally play with “girl” toys or wear “girl” clothes, I felt he just fell towards the middle.

Then last week she asked if we would start calling her our daughter.

We weren't terribly surprised. She had picked a new feminine name a month or so before. It was just making something official that had been unspoken. This brings up so many questions. Some are questions that every parent has when navigating life with a transgender child. How do we explain to friends, family, neighbors or her school? Is there something else wrong? Is this “Just a phase?” Do I go ahead and get more girls clothes for her, or make due with what we have? Is it just the clothes she wants? Or is it more? What is her future going to be like?

But when you are a Dominatrix, and you have spent nearly your entire adult life helping people work through these types of desires, you wonder how you didn’t notice earlier. You obsess over all the things that happened that should have been a sign that this wasn’t a passing fancy. Things that I should have reacted differently to, had I realized the depth of her desire for feminine things. So many times I turned her down—not because I didn’t want her to have them, but because I worried about wasting money on a dress that might simply be a novelty and would sit in her growing pile of dress up clothes. Now I wonder how I couldn’t have been more observant.

I also worry that someone is going to accuse me of horrible things; of wanting a daughter and coercing her into wearing dresses. Or making her my twisted experiment—basically, of bringing my work home with me. A friend recently told me that we need to set up a Safe Folder—an easily accessible collection of documents that protect our family, notes from the child’s doctor, psychologist, etc. that prove that this is her true self and that I’m not an unfit parent. I can’t even imagine what I, as a Dominatrix, would have to put in that folder to prove that I didn’t do something to influence her. I may not be a perfect mother, but I am in no way, an unfit mother.

Working as a Dominatrix has taught me to be open and understanding of people’s individuality. I hope that polite society can learn to have the compassion that comes so naturally to those in its dark underbelly.

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About the Author

Mona Darling

Mona Darling spent close to twenty years as an A-list professional dominatrix before becoming a D-list mommy blogger. After spending many years traveling the world being told that she is fabulous, she now spends her days being told she doesn't drive fast enough by her five-year-old son. Scratch that. Her five-year-old daughter. Gender aside, the point is, she doesn't drive fast enough. She writes, sporadically, about sex and parenting at .