Meet Dr. Lulu: Mother, Pediatrician, and Queer Activist

Content Warning: Suicide

Having a candid conversation with pediatrician and queer activist Uchenna Umeh, who goes by the moniker Dr. Lulu, is a heart-wrenching experience. Her story is a layered, multi-faceted tale that explores the intersections between mental health, suicide, queer identity, and self-acceptance. But ultimately, it’s about a mother’s goal to protect and support her child.

Dr. Lulu attended medical school in Nigeria and moved to the United States at 24 years old, where she completed her residency in 1998. Ten years later, a 15-year-old child she worked with died by suicide. Ten years after that, a 7-year-old she worked with tried to hang himself—twice.

“That was actually when I started asking, ‘What am I doing as a pediatrician writing penicillin (prescriptions) if kids want to kill themselves?” she reflects. “I need to figure out why. I need to help those kids. Because there are enough people writing prescriptions.”

That was when she started speaking about suicide prevention as Dr. Lulu and started her own practice,  Dr. Lulu’s PRIDE Corner. She posted weekly Facebook lives and explored the root issues behind child suicide, probing the topic of childhood trauma. She even had a TED Talk titled “Childhood Trauma, What You Can Do to Help.”

“I realized ACEs, or Adverse Childhood Experiences, lead to a lot of suicide and other mental health challenges,” she says. “And so I was looking into that, and I realized that transgender children, one out of four of them has attempted suicide, but about 42 % of them have, in the last 12 months, seriously considered suicide. It’s just crazy numbers.”

Dr. Lulu has identified as bisexual since her teen years, but as a Catholic Nigerian, she spent most of her life dismissing her queerness and married a man, “morphing into the heterosexual aspect of bisexuality.”

One of her children grew up displaying traits that aligned with the opposite gender. Despite her queer identity, Dr. Lulu prayed that her child wasn’t gay. “I used to just always nonstop tell her, ‘Stop acting like a girl.’ That was my go-to sentence. The entire time the child was growing, I just did not want my kid to be gay. I just didn’t want that,” she says. “I was like ‘God, please, not a black male in America that’s gay.”

In 2020, that same child came out as nonbinary. In 2021, she came out as trans. “And then I said to God, ‘Wait, I thought I said don’t make the child gay. What are you doing? Okay, I’ll take the gay … just don’t do this to me,” Dr. Lulu recalls. “God was like, ‘If not you, then who? You’re talking about suicide. You’re a pediatrician. You’re queer. You’re a mother. You know these things. You have a TED Talk… Why not you? If anyone will do this, it better be you.'”

Her perspective shifted. She educated herself on other queer identities, and as she learned more about her child, she also learned about herself. Her marriage ended, and she explored her bisexuality, slowly coming to terms with her identity as a queer woman and the mother of a trans child. “It’s never about the child. It’s always you accepting yourself and this identity as a parent of a queer child. As a parent of a trans child,” Dr. Lulu explains. “Even a baby chicken and their mother will tell you that the mother hen will go at the eagle if she has to, to protect her child. It’s just what parents do by default. But first, they have to accept their identity. And so that’s what I do to protect my child.”

Her mission is still suicide prevention, but her method looks a little different. She had a practice where she worked directly with suicidal patients, and noticed that “about eighty percent of my patients were queer,” Dr. Lulu says. “And I started asking them (why), and most of them came back to their parent, came back to home. Lots of times they’ve been betrayed by their peers, and they’re bullied by their teachers.” Now her goal is to help other parents accept their LGBTQ+ children and become the safe person their child needs.

“I just practice medicine differently now, rather than prescribing meds and writing prescriptions, prescribing love and self-acceptance and knowledge and support and affirmation, all the other things you that you might not necessarily need if your child has strep throat,” she says. “I still am a child advocate, which is what pediatricians are.”

When she accepted her child’s identity, and therefore her own, Dr. Lulu lost friends and family members. It was a lonely and difficult journey, which is why Dr. Lulu’s Life Coaching Lounge has a collection of resources for parents of LGBTQ+ children, a support group, and an online program titled “Becoming the Parent Your LGBTQ+ Child Needs.” She does speaking engagements and is the author of several books, including “A Teen’s Life,” and “How to Raise Well-Rounded Children.”

In January, Dr. Lulu will move from San Antonio, Texas, to Atlanta, Georgia, where she’ll open a practice (name TBD) devoted to psychosocial, gender-affirming care. She’ll work with parents of gender-diverse children, but also with family units as a whole. “One day I was just thinking about (my son) and I realized he had to go from (having) a big brother to a big sister,” she reflects. “What’s that like? Nobody talks about the sibling. Nobody talks about the parent. Everybody talks about the queer child. But we exist. We’re all going through a transition, especially the siblings.”

She was the host of the “Suicide Pages” and “The Pride Corner” podcasts, and had a radio show in San Antonio called “The Parent Hour.” Dr. Lulu is currently working on a new podcast: “Moms 4 Tran Kids.” It will be released on November 13 in honor of Transgender Awareness Week.

“We’re talking as moms of trans kids, and we’re talking to pretty much everyone,” Dr. Lulu says about her upcoming podcast. “The reason I say we’re talking to everyone is because a lot of transgender people are hiding in plain sight. And so I want you to hear what it’s like to be a mother of a trans child. Because your child might be the next trans child. And just because they didn’t say they’re trans today, doesn’t mean they’re not trans… so while you’re walking around just chilling as a parent today, tomorrow your child might tell you, ‘Mom, I’m actually a girl,’ and I want you to be ready.”

Photo courtesy of Dr. Lulu