Last night’s episode of Friday Night Tykes: Steel Country, Esquire Network’s reality show about elementary-school aged kids who play football, featured a gender-fluid 8-year-old from Monaca, Pennsylvania, who sometimes goes by Abby, and sometimes by Adam. The storyline, however, featured very little direct input from Abby/Adam—the discussion of the kid’s gender fluidity came almost entirely from Abby/Adam’s mother, Sarah Markusic.

This struck me as odd, so I talked to Markusic yesterday by phone. (Markusic used the pronoun she/her to describe Abby/Adam throughout the interview.)

“I’ve sat and we’ve talked to her and I said, ‘This is what’s going on, there’s a community out there that’s like you,’” said Markusic, who explained that Abby/Adam told her (and Abby/Adam’s father) that she was a boy from as early as age 2. It’s hard to tell by watching how Abby/Adam feels about this divide today, because she says so little about anything on the show. According to Markusic, Abby/Adam wasn’t comfortable appearing on camera: “She doesn’t like to talk about it. I think it was too much around the cameras. The cameras were in her face and they had her miked and I think it’s too much for an 8-year-old. They would say, ‘Can you ask her this?’”

So why put your 8-year-old on TV in the first place if she doesn’t seem comfortable with it? Markusic’s short answer is activism: “There’s such a stigma in the community and parents don’t accept their children,” she explained.

While I find it hard to believe in altruism as a primary motivator of any television appearance, there is a plausible logic to Markusic’s behavior. She said that it was only after Abby/Adam turned seven—five years after Abby/Adam was giving indication of gender fluidity—that she began to understand what was going on, with the help of Facebook groups. “I don’t know how many times I questioned, ‘What’s wrong with her? Why doesn’t she want to see herself naked, but then she’s girly the next day?’” says Markusic “I felt like there was something I wasn’t understanding, and then when I found this I thought, ‘Oh, that explains everything.’”

Thus, by putting this story “out there,” for which she says she was not paid by the Esquire Network, Markusic thinks she might reach parents who were similarly confused, or who thought that gender identity was confined to a trans/cis binary, as she once did.

“I grew up [believing] a man should marry a woman, a woman should marry a man,” said Markusic. “And then you have a child like this and it changes your world around. Your child is your world and you want your child to be happy.”