What Would I Do If My Child Came Out? I Made Myself Actually Answer That.

I have been asked to write about this topic and I want to be honest with you from the opening sentence: this was the hardest thing to write. Not because I think I am a bigot. I don't. I have gay friends. I have colleagues who are in same-sex relationships. I consider myself, in the abstract, a liberal person on this. But there is a very specific difference between holding an abstract position and sitting with the concrete question — your own child — and I think we do parents a disservice by pretending those two things are the same.

So I made myself sit with it. Actually sit with it, not just think "of course I'd be fine" and move on.

My upbringing first, because it matters. I grew up in a household in Hong Kong where homosexuality was never mentioned. Not discussed, not condemned, just absent, the way many things that made adults uncomfortable were absent. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, the word "gay" existed in my school mostly as an insult. Section 27A of the Crimes Ordinance — which criminalised same-sex acts between women — wasn't repealed until 2024. I mention this not as a history lecture but because I want to be clear: the silence and the discomfort around this topic is not some personal failing. It is what most of us in this city were formed by.

So when I ask myself honestly: what would my first reaction be if my child told me they were gay, or bisexual, or transgender — what do I actually find? I find that I cannot fully predict it. I find that I believe I would say the right things. I also find some residue of something I didn't put there consciously, some old formation, some echo of all those years of silence that says this is complicated. I find that when I imagine it concretely — my actual daughter's face, my actual son's voice — there's a moment, just a moment, where I feel something I don't fully understand.

I'm telling you this not because I'm proud of it. I'm telling you because I think most HK parents feel something similar and none of us say it, and the gap between what we say and what we feel is precisely where our children fall.

Here is what I think I would actually do, having worked through this deliberately.

I would say: thank you for telling me. I mean that — the act of telling a parent, in this city, in this culture, takes real courage and I would want my child to know that I understood that.

I would say: I love you. This does not change that. I mean that too, entirely, without caveats.

I would ask questions — not interrogative ones but curious ones. Who do you like? How long have you known? Is there someone you're interested in? The same questions I would ask if they'd told me about a different-sex relationship.

Would I feel anything else, underneath those right responses? Probably yes. Some worry about their path in Hong Kong, in a society still navigating this. Some old reflex. Some grief — and I want to examine that grief because it's not grief about who they are, it's grief for a version of their future I had quietly built in my head without their consent, and that grief is mine to deal with, not something they should have to manage.

The distinction matters. My feelings about my child coming out are my feelings to work through. What they need from me is not the performance of having no feelings — that would be dishonest — but a clear, consistent message that my love for them is not conditional on anything.

In Hong Kong, as of 2025, things are slowly changing. Section 27A was finally repealed in 2024. The courts have ruled on several cases touching same-sex partnership rights. There's more visibility, more conversation, more young people in this city who are out than there were ten years ago. At the same time, schools say almost nothing on this. The curriculum does not address sexual orientation. Most teachers are not equipped to handle it. LGBTQ students in local schools frequently navigate this entirely alone, without language, without support, without anyone telling them that what they feel is legitimate.

This means: if your child is gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning, they are probably figuring it out without much help. The internet helps some — there are communities online, there is information — but there is no substitute for a parent who makes it clear that this is something you can come home with.

My children are fourteen and eleven. I have already told them both — not in a lecture, just in conversation, more than once in different ways — that whoever they love, I want to know about it. I told my daughter: if you ever have a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend, I want to hear about her too. She looked at me slightly oddly and said "okay, Mum" in the way she says "okay, Mum" to most things I say. I don't know if it landed. But I said it.

I said something similar to my son. I said: some people fall in love with boys and some with girls and some with both, and there's no version of that I need you to hide from me. He was about ten at the time and seemed mostly interested in getting back to his game. That's fine. The seed is planted.

I cannot fully control my first reaction to everything. I can control what I build in advance — the language I use, the signals I send, the kind of household I create. A household where this is speakable is not built in the moment a child comes out. It's built in a thousand small moments beforehand, like the ones I'm describing here.

That is what I can actually do. So I'm doing it.