An Open letter to my family…
This is not actually a letter to my family, I don’t have an emotional link to them that would warrant writing letters to them.
It’s a letter to those who run the risk of doing the same as my parents. It’s a letter for those who hew dangerously close to losing a child inadvertently.
Dear family
Our relationships were on their last legs before I came out. You cannot view my queerness and my acceptance of that queerness as the sum total of what destroyed our relationships. It was merely the last straw or cut number ten thousand.
It may well be convenient to absolve yourselves of blame by turning a blind eye to your crimes and proceed to blaming my queerness.
However, It would be more productive to look beyond queerness and intolerance. The continuous assault on my self esteem by my siblings that my parents never halted and in fact joined in on. Perhaps you could look at your willingness to place alcohol and romantic relationships ahead of your children. Your blatant favoritism. Your rampant dishonesty and willingness to lie in service of your own needs whilst labelling me as “out of control”. The hypocrisy of what was acceptable behavior from one child but not the other. Maybe you should look closely at your abandonment of me.
(my parents never tossed me out, I was not homeless or something dramatic like that. Its a very complicated and nuanced set of events that would make an interesting novel one day)
Burying all that and moving on to what you do want to blame though.
My coming out was the last straw for a group of relationships that should have been euthanized many years before. Let’s be frank, it was never going to work for us. I just don’t fit into the box you need me to fit in and I constitute a very inconvenient detail in the fictions you have created. I am merely incompatible with your canon.
However, let’s look at my coming out, the after effects and see why this was the definitive break.
You were granted an opportunity for a fresh start. I came out and this provided for you a clean slate on which to reforge relationships that dearly needed repair. Instead, not contrary to previous performance, but completely consistent with previous performance, you isolated, judged and made sure to victimize me once again. It was the same playbook, just with new and exciting motivations.
When I said I was transgender, my mother placed her beliefs in god ahead of me. My view being that while I am real, god is as yet unproven. So how can a parent place their version of religion ahead of the relationship with their child? Lets not forget Christian beliefs and dogma encompass every possible aspect in the spectrum of queer acceptance. Christianity offers its adherents the opportunity to be completely affirming or completely intolerant and every shade in-between. Yet instead of attempting to reconcile their faith and the obvious reality of a trans child, my mother chose hate. Of course you could ask whose hate she chose? Did she choose for me to hate her? Or did she choose to hate me? I cannot answer that.
When I was at my weakest and most vulnerable, an elder sibling made statements that could be construed as me being a sexual deviant and being perceived as a possible sexual predator in relation to another siblings child. The parent was in the middle of a nasty divorce, the elder sibling said we needed to not be public about my transition lest the soon to be ex spouse used me as a weapon against the parent in a custody hearing. Instead of immediately shutting down the implication that I was a threat, the parent merely said that if they thought I was a threat they would resort to violence.
While these are nuanced occurrences and off the cuff moments. You have to acknowledge the mindset, the thinking that allows these events.
The above are a few examples, not nearly a definitive collection of events. That would take too long to list and become an exercise in whining self pity and incriminations.
My family had an opportunity, not to instantly embrace me being trans. Not to immediately use the right language or be perfect allies. They had the opportunity to close ranks around me and be what they could never be before: there for me.
Yes, I did react in anger and hurtfulness. Justified and legitimate anger and hate. I am not sorry for the horrid things I have said or done in regards to my family. I am disappointed that I let it go so long and get so bad before I pulled the plug though.
We may have had a few good times when I was younger. I may remember the cute nickname, Starfish, my mother had for me. I may think of the warm moments when I went to the train station and my mother showed me the model trains. I may dwell on listening to metal and smoking pot with my brother when he was in his twenties.
But I can never escape the hurt and wounding that had built up by the end of my childhood and the subsequent slow smouldering of being the outsider. I can never escape the lies told and now held up as fact to justify my mistreatment.
The greatest opportunity my family had to heal was my coming out, they missed that opportunity in their rush to continue the status quo.
Do I love my family?
I don’t know.
I know I love a few memories of my family, but the people involved have long since proven to be the sources of isolated good memories interspersed with pain and humiliation.
Like me, they have lost out. They don’t get to experience me as I am and I don’t have a family beyond that which I have built with my spouse. My name will forever be a bitter reminder of loss for my birth family. I will forever have a blank page in my book where the family chapter should be.
I left and while I pine for those warm moments of the past, I don’t wish to see, hear or touch those awful people again.
To those families of young or adult LGBT people, be wary of your actions and your words, because before you lies an opportunity to lose or gain what is now uncertain.
Be better than my family.
