Longtime reader, first time caller. I never thought I'd have to write you, being in a monogamous, committed LTR with reasonably good heads on the shoulders of both partners, and plenty of good and very appreciated advice from the likes of you over the years.

Well, recent events have called into question the goodness of the head on my shoulders. Put simply, I fucked up in a major way. I want to apologize for the length of the following story. Here's the TL;DR version: My gender-questioning bio-boy seven-year-old child accidentally saw some porn of a penis-having trans lady masturbating in a chair. Assuming my wife and I have been decently good, loving, supportive parents so far, WTF do we do/say now to minimize potential damage for him and us?

Act I

I'm a hetero-ish male. Call me a Kinsey 1.5, with a bit more than incidental attraction to the right kind of dudes and a pretty strong streak of phallophilia. I am sexually attracted predominantly to ladies with either set of genitals, and because I have a pretty awesome vagina-having one as my partner in life, my porn use tends to focus on the other.

My wife and I have what I would call a perfectly satisfying sex life considering we're the parents of three young kids. But two or three times a week, when my wife is sleeping soundly, I'll pull out the phone for a bit of "me time," surfing to various well-traveled sites in an incognito window for a few minutes of stimulation.

One time about two weeks ago, I was more tired than normal, and my finger lingered on the screen long enough to cause the phone to download the video I was watching, in which a young adult lady was stroking her cock while sitting in a chair; just masturbation with the occasional, "Yeah." Once I realized it had saved to my phone, I navigated to the download folder and deleted the video, but not before (as I later learned) the video was backed-up by Google Photos. And like Chekhov's fucking gun, this one's gonna go off in Act III.

Act II

Back to my kids. The oldest one—let's call him Alan—is seven, and is a bright, creative, engaged, but often angsty little first grader. He's been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but he's been doing better and better with help from OTs and school counselors since the symptoms kicked in a few years ago. He has lots of friends and gets in the usual squabbles with his younger siblings. Mostly, things are pretty good.

He's also spent the past few years exploring his gender identity, for a while telling us he felt like he was a girl. For a time, we referred to him by a girl name, bought him exclusively girl clothes, etc. We read "I Am Jazz" with him and other books that communicated at his level about gender. We told him how some people are assigned boy or girl gender based on their parts, but they don't feel right about being that gender from a young age. And we told him that although most boys have penises and most girls have vaginas, sometimes a boy can have a vagina or a girl can have a penis.

These days, he's choosing to simply identify as "Alan." Just a kid, without labels. He doesn't mind at all when people refer to him as a boy or girl in public, but mostly uses boy pronouns. We know that trans kids have a horribly high rate of suicide attempts. We know how hard the world can be to any kid who is different. We also know the power of loving, accepting parents in the lives of trans kids. For now, we're letting Alan grow up free from worry about that stuff. When he's ready to tackle his gender in a personal, meaningful way, we'll be just as supportive and loving as we've always been, and we're blessed with a community of friends and school workers that will help make it the best it can be.

My worst fear has been that someday Alan will grow up and get savvy enough about computers to stumble upon something that indicated his dad fetishizes other people who may share his identity. I didn't think that my own negligence would cause him to find out much sooner. I hope it doesn't need to be said that I'm not a pervert who fetishizes his kid.

Act III

The other day, my wife and Alan were going through photos he'd recently taken on one of my old phones. We let him use the phone to play games and take pictures, and it's synced with my account so I can see the pictures he's taking. As Alan was swiping past photos of a recent trip, my wife was reading an article on her phone. All of a sudden, she hears him say, "I don't know what this video is."

She nabbed the phone out of his hands, and upon looking down was presented with a big ol' ladycock. She sent him out of the room, called me over and promptly shouted at me and smacked me in the face, and told me she wanted a divorce. I was dumbfounded, and ashamed. I felt my world crumbling. I deserved to be hit in the face. And worse.

Later that night, we decided to have her put Alan to bed in our bedroom, while I put the little one down in the kids' room. They got to talking about his day, and she let him lead the conversation. The talk was largely about penises. He told her about a couple classmates who have gone into the bathroom to compare butts and privates. He asked her how women have babies come out, and asked if the babies come out of their butts (he's been told many times that babies come out of vaginas). And if not, how small is the opening they come out of.

Then she brought up the video. She asked, "Do you remember that video you saw earlier? What was in it?" He replied that he saw a lady, sitting in a chair, but that he didn't know who she was. My wife asked what the lady was doing, and Alan lied and said, "Drinking coffee." "Are you sure that's all she was doing, honey? Drinking coffee?" "Yes."

She let him drift off to sleep, and we exchanged some angry/guilty words later that evening, but we were both too tired to work through all the issues and fell asleep. The next two days were supremely busy, including celebrating Mother's Day.

Now it's been a few days, and Alan's been the same as ever; full of life and love and creative energy, while occasionally angsty. maybe a little extra cuddly and lovey-dovey, if ever so subtly. My wife and I have mostly worked out our feelings; We are partners who love each other. One of us fucked up majorly. It's going to take both of us to fix it.

Denouement

In the days since, I've added crippling doubt and anxiety to the guilt, and I have a million worries for the future with a kid who's been exposed to this facet of the adult world. I have had countless imagined conversations in my head with my kid, which go something like this:

"I watched that video you saw on the phone the other day. I saw the lady sitting in the chair, but she wasn't drinking coffee like you said. You aren't in trouble for seeing what you saw, and you aren't in trouble for lying about it, but I want to talk to you about it. There was a lady in it who had a penis, and she was touching it. She must have been born in a body that was assigned 'boy' gender at birth. You know how we tell you that if you want to touch your penis, that's okay, but you have to be alone in your room when you do it? That's what she was doing. And we tell you that your penis is your private part, and the only people who should ever touch it are you and your doctor, or your parents if they're helping you get clean? Well, sometimes when you're a grown up, you can choose to share your private parts with someone else."

And that's where I freeze up. The existence of the video implies the lady was "sharing" her private parts, even though another person is never seen, but is that TMI? Does knowledge that porn exists at such a young age completely doom my kid to a lifetime of looking for it? I want to tell him that this video was meant for grown-ups, and that he shouldn't tell his friends at school about it. Is that the right thing to do?

My wife is terrified that if word gets out to his friends, we'll get CPS called on us and our kids will get taken away. She also worries that people in Alan's situation find themselves marginalized by society, and feel like sex work is one of their only viable options. She doesn't want this early exposure to add to that. I'm more terrified that he's now confused about male/female anatomy, or that he'll always remember this and it will change his perceptions of gender and sexuality for the worse going forward, or that he'll develop his own sexual proclivities and fetishes about this, without a natural progression of his own. And if he doesn't already know or suspect, I never want him to find out that it was dad's video he saw.

Part of me worries that by engaging in this conversation, I'll end up making this into a Big Thing. Another part of me is worried that if I don't engage him, the visual memory and his imagination will snowball into a different kind of Big Thing. Which do I worry about more?

Dan, what do we do? Is it wrong to tell him that the video was for grown-ups only, and though he isn't in trouble for seeing it, he should not tell any of his friends about it? Help us, please. Without the money for years of therapy, what do we do? How do we cause the least harm?

Sign me...

Idiot Did Idiotic Oafish Thing

I don’t remember a single thing I saw when I was seven years old. (I didn't see a video clip on a phone of a trans woman stroking her cock, of course, but still.) So my hunch is that your bio-boy won't remember what he saw on that phone. It sounds like he was confused, he passed the phone to his mom, and quickly moved the fuck on, e.g. he resumed being the kid you know and love—a kid full of life and love and creative energy, a kid who is occasionally angsty.

Hm, angst—wonder where he gets that. Anyway, IDIOT, "move the fuck on" pretty much sums up my advice for you.

It's possible Alan didn't look at the video long enough to figure out what was going on—besides "hey, this person is doing something adults do." Hence his "drinking coffee" interpretation. The video clip featured an adult doing something adults do, drinking coffee is something adults do, he filed it under "drinking coffee." It's kid logic—the kind of logic that allows a kid to file something away that they don't quite understand. In most cases, IDIOT, this filing process results in the kid forgetting about whatever it was they didn't understand.

But your kid can't forget about that video if you and your wife won't shut the fuck up about it. So shut the fuck up about it. Keep an eye on Alan for any signs of distress; find a moment to emphasize to Alan that he can ask you about anything, anytime; disable the automatic backup feature on Google Photos; and be careful not to allow your finger "linger" on your phone's screen long enough to "accidentally" download a porn clip ever again (how'd that happen?!?).

Stop beating yourselves up about this. Your cringing, self-loathing panic and your wife’s rage is probably doing more to unnerve your son than that brief glimpse a trans lady touching her cock. And if your son grows ups to be trans (which most gender-questioning/gender-non-conforming do not) and if she realizes her dad is attracted to people with bodies like hers, IDIOT, that realization won’t be unique to her and it shouldn't be uniquely devastating. Cis girls grow up knowing their straight dads (cis or not) are attracted to people with bodies like theirs; cis boys grow up knowing their straight moms (cis or not) are attracted to people with bodies like theirs; cis boys and cis girls grow up knowing their bi parents are attracted to people with bodies like theirs; cis boys with gay dads (cis or not) grow up knowing their dads are attracted to people with bodies like theirs; cis girls with lesbian moms (cis or not)... you get the picture, right?

And remember: being attracted to trans women ≠ fetishizing trans women. If your adult trans daughter one day confronts you about the porn clip she stumbled over at age seven and if she accuses you of fetishizing trans women, you can tell her that although you married a cis woman, you see trans women as women and as human beings with complex inner lives and not as objects and, although you wound up partnering with a cis woman, you see trans women as potential partners.

But I doubt very much you'll ever have that conversation—because the odds that your kid is trans are slim and the odds that your kid will remember that video in adulthood are even slimmer and the odds that you'll one day be confronted by your adult trans daughter about your attraction to trans women are the slimmest of all.

Finally, IDIOT, you didn't deserve to be hit in the face—no one deserves to be hit in the face*—and your wife was wrong to hit you in the face. A child who witnesses or overhears acts of domestic violence is likelier to be harmed than a child who stumbles over porn clip. And chill the fuck out—both of you—about Child Protective Services (CPS) taking away your kids. If stumbling over porn on mom or dad's phone or tablet or laptop was all it took to get your kids taken from you, CPS would've taken all the kids away already.

*The exception proves the rule.