However she may have felt about it, Allison's mom rolled with the punches. It turns out a bit of family history might've tipped her off. Allison thinks, "Her mother [Allison's grandmother] may have been transmasculine, it's hard to say. Her mother always presented as male. And we're talking the 1920s, when her mother actually wore a suit and tie to go to engineering school. In the 1920s, if you can believe this!"
Trans people in the modern age still face extreme adversity. It's hard to imagine a trans man going to college in the goddamn '20s, when just being Irish was basically considered blasphemy. But that's America: In Europe, the '20s were a golden age of trans research and study. In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld had established the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Hirschfeld, a standard physicist/sexologist, created the first gay/lesbian/transgender rights organization in the world. And then Nazis happened. Isn't that always the way? In fact, this infamous picture of a Nazi book-burning ...
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
A pastime that's just always looked back on as a good idea.
... is actually a picture of Nazis burning the library of Hirschfeld's Institute For Sexual Science. Many of those books were filled with irreplaceable interviews and research on trans men and women. The Nazis put an end to an early "golden age" for trans activism, and pushed transgender folks back into a "dark age" that's only now starting to clear.