Читать книгу My Trans Parent - Heather Bryant - Страница 11

More than one person I talked to spoke of having their sense of the world shift. They thought they knew their family and what it would look like for years to come. It’s almost like a rupture of solid ground—an earthquake that shakes up the pieces and puts them back in another order.

Questions can come up at any point: “Who am I?” “Who is our family?” “Can I really know for sure?”

A year or so after the transition, one of my friends who knew my dad before the change came to visit. The way she stared made me glad that no one else knew the whole story. She stared and stared like she was at the zoo. Dana had to step into another room to get away from the staring. I don’t think my friend realized what she was doing, but it made me want to protect my family and our story even more, to make sure no one ever found out. If they did, I might still have friends, I thought, but they would probably talk about how weird it was. I wasn’t going to risk that, and we had a family story in place, so I hid behind that story, kept it like a shield for as long as I could.

As a child, I liked to parade my dad around and introduce him to my friends. “This is my dad.” He was funny, silly, and handsome. From the start of the change, though, it felt irreversible. It never occurred to me to ask her to go back to who she was before. She didn’t tell us until she knew absolutely that this was who she was becoming. Until she’d looked into all the options and found none. At that point, it didn’t feel like she could go back.