My Letter to My Transphobic Father
unsent.
To my transphobic father, you know how it started. I used to trust you. I used to have genuine faith that you knew what was best for me. I used to believe that you were a person worth looking up to, a person with answers, a person who I could trust with anything. And in truth, I still do believe all these things.
But something stands in the way.
You always encouraged me to be myself. About how not everything is as simple as meets the eye, and that the answer is never as simple as one or another. Never to make choices out of fear, or to accept things as they are. To choose the narrow path.
I know you respect me. You once told me that I am the most ethical of all of your children. That you had no doubts in my potential to succeed in this world. That no matter what the people around me told me, that I was willing to stick to my guns. I wish you knew how vulnerable I felt when I came out to you. I also wish you knew that I didn’t do so for your sake. I wish I didn’t have to agree with you to feel worthy of your love. Because I know you love me. Why is it so hard for me to love you back?
When you encouraged me to be myself, why didn’t you mention that it must fall into traditional masculinity? If not everything is as simple as a binary, why can’t my gender be like that too? If I were to never make choices out of fear, why did you use it to control me? When I took the narrow path, why do you keep lengthening it? Why am I hurting more than ever?
To my transphobic father, maybe heartbreak really is so loud. I wish you understood how much your words hurt me. How when I finally felt ready to share my difference, I felt fear instead of joy. Despair, instead of glee. No, not fear. Terror. Trauma. Damage that I can only dream will one day be undone. Ironic, isn’t it?
Silence was deafening.
Your whispers are forever seared into my brain. Your attacks on my struggle hurt, but they didn’t land. I am proud of my incongruence, but to you it was something I had to change. Because to you, I was the product of an ideology, as if the right to be yourself that I fought tooth and nail for was some sort of amoeba that was slowly eating my brain. And you had to fight it proactively, and I had to hide until I couldn’t hide anymore.
All the stern talking-tos, all the interventions, all the “I love you *but*’s”, they didn’t change me. You will never change me. I knew you wouldn’t be supportive of me, but I hoped you had the basic decency to help me. To be someone to comfort me, to put aside your politics and your religion and be the father I thought I knew.
To my transphobic father, please let me live as myself.
