Читать книгу My Trans Parent - Heather Bryant - Страница 12

Our whole family was changing. Who we were to the outside world. Now, my parents acted like sisters instead of partners. They shared clothes and books and make-up. People didn’t question that my dad was my aunt. We looked closely related, but no one looking at us would have said, “Oh, that’s her dad.”

Noelle H.’s parents split up around the same time her dad came out, which changed her world, too. “I still found it a little shocking when it happened, because, you know, your life is normal to you and you have rituals and so all those rituals get upended, so it was still a little bit shocking.” The family routines changed, too. Her relationship with her dad was different now. “Over the course of high school, I would get the divorced dad visits. Every Saturday we’d go out for burgers and we never did stuff like that when my dad lived with us. We literally never spent time—the two of us—ever, so that was the first alienating factor. And then my dad started physically morphing, a little bit all the time.” The shift in her parent was accompanied by a change in the family, too.

In my family, we didn’t have any models in the media and very few in books, so there was a lot of guessing and trying things out, improvising as we went along, as the shape of our family changed. We met some other people in transition, and once we even met another family with a parent in transition and little kids younger than me and my sister, but we didn’t connect with them, so we went back to being mostly alone and isolated in our experience. We had to find our own way.