Trans Justice Starts at Home
I am going to get a little personal today and share a little about me. Yesterday went well…I and my kids and spouse spent the day with my parents for Thanksgiving. Before you think it was a disaster, let me tell you that it was a very good day, and we got along fine. The problem is that my parents are stuck in the past where I was still pretending to be a woman/girl. They are still not accepting me as my gender identity, but rather as their “little girl”. My dad referred to me as his daughter, and that I always will be his daughter in his mind. My mom refuses to give me any name at all–at least to my face. Who knows what she says when I am not around?
And did I stick up for myself? Would it have helped? Who knows? I have done that before, and they are not willing to listen. I’ve told them over and over that I want them to call me by my preferred name, and to use male pronouns. And yet…nothing. I had a huge conversation with them–in my head. This morning. While still in bed. On my birthday, no less. It went something like this,
“Why can’t you just accept that I am living in the gender I identify as? Why do you have to be stuck in the past? You say that it is hard to accept…that it is a lot to take in. You know what I say about that? That is crap, and you know it! The only thing that is hard is the difference between you wanting to hold on to who I was pretending to be, and who I really am. You’re wanting to have me forget all this and go back to being your little girl. I never WAS your little girl! I never, ever saw myself as a girl! There was just no space to say anything in that neo-nazi Christian environment you forced me to be in! How the hell did you expect me to be happy?
“This is why I attempted suicide so many times! (Even more times than you knew. I tried so many times that didn’t have me end up in the hospital.) I was depressed…I had low self-esteem…I was miserable. And you worried about me then. Now you worry about me because I am being who I am, and you think I am destroying myself. I have never been happier as I am now. The only thing that I get angry at is you two, who won’t accept me for who I am! Why can’t you just let go of the stinking past, and forget about the ideal you are holding on to of me ever, ever going back to those ridiculous girly pretenses, just so you can be happy again? There is no way I would do that! No chance of me ever doing that!
“How hard would it be for you to just let go of that ideal you have of me, and just acknowledge me as your son? It is actually very simple. First, you need to just realize that you are holding on way too tightly, and it is causing all of us a lot of pain and suffering. Realize that you are costing love between us, and that this love lost is sapping the energy and well-being right out of all of our lives. Second, just declare that you are giving up the past, and your ideas of what you think I should be like. And last, declare that I am who I say I am–your son. Would that be so hard if you weren’t being so stubborn?”
What does this have to do with Trans Justice? Trans justice is about fairness and rights. It’s about letting people be who they are, and not who others say they have to be. Trans Justice is about empowering people to live in the gender they identify as–not about feelings…not about wishing–but about who they are deep at the core of their being. If Trans Justice isn’t fostered at home, how can we have Trans Justice in the world?? If Trans Justice is just thought about in passing as a “good idea”, then we will never have justice in the world for our Transgender community! This is not just a “good idea” people. Give others the space they need to be who they are and not what YOU want them to be! This is the beginnings of Trans Justice.
I love my parents. I love being with them when we get along. But it gets really hard when they don’t listen to me, or acknowledge that I ID as a guy. It hurts me deeply, and it feels like I can say nothing about it, for fear of alienating them from me. And if that happens, and one of them should pass on..it makes me sad to think of never having this resolved. And I know–I need to have this conversation with them. And I will…soon.
Remember: Trans Justice isn’t just a theory or a good idea. It begins with you–stop judging, and start acknowledging others for being who they are!
November 30th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Good luck. I feel for you. This reminds me of trying to deal with my grandmother on that subject before she died. She had the hardest time accepting my gender. It was worse because while I was sorting myself out, she was the one that I could actually discuss it with and sometimes brought it up herself. She’d ask questions like “Why do you want to be a man?” when I was in high school.
I’d tell her “I just want to be myself,” and she’d sigh and get confused… and then put unrelenting pressure on me to act like a girl. To wear makeup. To throw away my money on clothes and stupid things, which I sometimes did just to please her, I threw away a fortune on that junk because I actually loved her, when I was more comfortable scruffing around in unisex hippie jeans, t-shirts and old Army coat.
It was even more confusing because she accepted my coming out lesbian, welcomed a female lover like a family member, went overboard during my lesbian phase to try to make us feel welcomed and treated it as a serious relationship. She had gay friends as a young woman and bragged about that, showed us pictures. Yet she’d come out with zingers like asking why “two girls can’t keep your apartment clean.”
Well, my lover was also an FTM and we got diagnosed together. She died six weeks after hearing the news and treated it as if I’d told her I had terminal cancer. She didn’t believe I could ever be happy and stubbornly thought that if I pretended not to be trans I would be happy because I would make other people happy. She claimed that was how she lived, to make other people happy.
I can remember her telling me things like “only movie stars get sex changes, they do it for the publicity.” “Well, I want it for itself but if it gives my books some publicity, cool, I can live with that.” I can remember her discouraging my writing except for the occasional suggestion to write romance novels and articles for women’s magazines, none of which I read or enjoyed.
It was crazier in its own way than dealing with the birth family that hated and resented me. I’m not in contact any more with my birth family, other issues finally broke the connection completely when after years of intermittent attempts to build a relationship after a childhood I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, a disability-related issue showed me that it was dangerous to keep contact at all and that they had serious problems with my being physically disabled. Weird but I think that horrified my abuser more than the trans itself.
With my grandmother, loving as she was, there was always a gap. A feeling that she loved what she made up, this fictional child, not me, that no matter how generous or good she was, it wasn’t me that she loved. It’s a terrifying, sick, horrible feeling when good people who are in all other ways behaving well deny that you’re real — and stubbornly do everything possible to make you pretend to be what they want, when that isn’t real, and pretend to be happy with it so that they can feel better.
It sounds as if the holiday went well in the sense that no one spoke up about the conflict, but only went well because you didn’t speak up and draw the boundary with them. That choice is yours to make. No one else can decide what’s worth it, whether you get something out of a relationship built on a facade and denial or not, whether you’re applying patience to build toward a day when they will accept you, or what.
My father did accept me, we’re not in contact any more but while he had problems, he eventually got over them and after he adapted to the idea, he showed it once in a conversation on another topic, aging. Sometimes they handle it better than you expect, if you’re firm in holding the boundary. He mentioned “Men in our family don’t live past 72″ and I argued the point rationally with him, passionately pleading for him NOT to fall into the “live and die on your same gender parent’s time table” psychological effect that hits fully a third of all Americans. I guess I won that argument because he’s well past that now, at 78 he was in good health the last I heard.
What gave me a deep glow from that was that without thinking about it, he thought of me as his son and irrationally expected what he thought of as a sex-linked genetic problem to hit me.
So it is possible that if you are patient, and firm, and explain in depth and take the time to help them understand the phenomenon, give them the facts and hold your boundary, your family will accept you. Someone once told me that if they don’t accept it in the first year after you tell them, they never will… but this did not prove true for my dad, only for my grandmother. She knew it was real but she didn’t want me to accept it, she wanted me to live a lie to make other people happy and pretend to be happy with that, without really ever comprehending just how pointless that life would be.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
qsm7wk8tczyj897h