My child came out to me several times, from early childhood to adulthood, before I actually understood what he was saying. When he told me, as a 6-year-old child, that he was a boy, rather than the girl he had been assigned as at birth, I explained it away as him being a tomboy. When he told me he was gay in middle school, I told him it was a phase, and he would get over it. It was only when he was in high school that I began to take what he said seriously.