Читать книгу My Trans Parent - Heather Bryant - Страница 38

In sixth grade, my school had a Father and Daughter Dance. As soon as I heard about it, I knew my dad couldn’t go. Already, her hair had grown long, past her shoulders, and her skin was smooth. Each week, she came back from electrolysis with puffy red skin. Even if she wanted to, she no longer looked like my dad to other people. That’s all I thought about—what other people would think.

In my sixth grade class, no one else had a dad who was transgender. I went home to a parent who, more and more each day, was changing, but none of my friends knew this. To me, it was private and belonged only to us. When I found out about the dance, I went home to my parents. “What are we going to do?” I wanted to know. My parents had a solution. Donnie, my dad’s ex-partner, would take me. This felt like the best possible solution. I was excited to have Donnie take me to the dance. Still, it didn’t change the fact that I knew I had to hide this one part of my family, and that I had to bring someone to stand in for this role.

At the time, all that mattered to me was that I would be there with someone who looked the part and fit in. I didn’t think of the fact that it wasn’t fair. The other girls got to celebrate with their dads, but I didn’t, because my dad didn’t fit that role in society’s view. At the dance, I still worried that Donnie didn’t quite fit the part—that he stood out in the crowd of dads in gray and navy blue suits with his gelled hair and white cardigan sweater. If Dana had brought me, though, no one would have known how to respond.

Sharon S. remembered bringing Trish to her Father and Daughter Dance. “It was Trish with a ponytail and then a billowy shirt with a Western tie, and that’s my dad showing up to the Father and Daughter Dance and nobody else is dressed like that! I was just thinking, at least Trish isn’t wearing a dress right now… That used to give me a lot of anxiety.” In school, the desire to fit in can trump any other wish. The desire to look the part. Sharon kept quiet about it for the most part. “I never told anybody when I was younger, I never spelled anything out, but everybody kind of had an idea, but still it was just terrifying to talk about it.”

Over time, hiding the truth was ingrained in me. “They wouldn’t understand,” I thought. “No one needs to know.” We came up with a simple story made up of a mix of lies and truth: My parents were divorced [true]. My dad went to London [true at one time, in 1982, but a lie now]. My dad’s sister came to stay with us [lie].

We lived far enough away from family and friends who had known Daniel well that the story stuck.

At the start of high school, my parents brought me to boarding school. They came together as my mother and aunt. I watched Dana like a hawk to make sure she was playing the part of aunt—that she was fitting in. They met my new roommate’s parents. Everyone was smiling and no one seemed to think anything was wrong. As soon as my parents left, though, I felt a huge wave of relief. It was so much better without them there—that’s what I thought.

Most teenagers have this sense of rebellion, but most teenagers don’t get a chance to move 3,000 miles away from home. That’s what I did. For four years, I kept the truth about my family a secret. Even my closest friends, who I confided in about boys and my period and everything else, didn’t know.

It didn’t occur to me to tell my friends the truth. It wasn’t something that I struggled with—wanting to tell and not having the words. It was simply a closed door. No way was I going to tell. All through high school, I simply told people my dad was in London. The summer before my senior year, I spent a month in London.

“Will you see your dad?” a friend asked before I left.

A beat passed.

“Yes!” I said. I’d almost forgotten the story I’d told.

That summer, I visited a couple who had known my dad before and after the change. I felt pinned under a microscope as the man asked me questions about my experience. I didn’t know what to say. I talked about it so rarely, I didn’t have the words. Also, when it happened, there was an ordinary aspect to it, an everydayness that people didn’t understand. It wasn’t strange inside our house; only when we went outside.

I thought the aunt story was unique to us, but Sharon shared a similar story from her high school years. “I introduced Trish as my aunt to my boss at this little clothing store when I was in high school.” Her boss knew the truth, but didn’t say anything. “I was old enough to know better, and to know that adults would probably know already, but I still was sticking with this charade.”

The aunt story was the one I felt most comfortable with for a long time. In high school, I would announce to friends that my aunt had sent a care package. What if I had told them that it was my dad sending baked cakes and cookies? My friends might have asked. “Why does your dad sign the letter ‘Dana’?” I didn’t want to answer any questions.

When Morgan’s dad came out as trans, they sent a letter to the preschool community asking for their support of the family, but especially of Morgan. The preschool distributed the letter, so the school community knew, as well as her friends at that time. In later grades, she was more selective about who knew. “I started hiding details about my family life in a protective sort of way because I was being ostracized based on my own appearance and I felt so vulnerable around that that I just didn’t want people to have any other information about me that they could use to hurt.” At the time, her parents were living apart, and she kept both of their identities secret. “Not only was I hiding that my dad was trans but I was also hiding that my mom was a lesbian.”

When Morgan reached high school, she had a different perspective. “I wanted to be myself, I wanted to better express myself, I wanted to be more comfortable in my own skin, and I didn’t want to be ashamed of myself any longer.” This wasn’t just about her family. It was an overall feeling that she had. “I no longer wanted to keep this information secret, so I began to talk about it more openly.” The first person she told was a new friend of hers in her math class. “Her response was so welcoming, verging on excited for me, that I think it helped me in going forward and sharing with other people.”

We often think of bullying as happening between students, but teachers can be bullies too. Sharon’s sister had a math teacher in high school who held her after class and said, “I know what your dad is doing and I don’t approve.” At the time, her parent was sharing her experience in a gender studies class at a local college, and the teacher didn’t agree with this.

“How devastating for my poor sister, you know,” Sharon said. “And it’s like how do you go through and finish your semester after he says something like that?”

As schools start to educate about gender expansiveness, more responses are changing. Leila L. described the range of responses from her friends at her school in Portland, Oregon, such as “Cool!” or “That’s awesome!” or “Oh…” It’s not a big deal, which reflects the changing times. As new people join her school, she has a chance to tell her story, which doesn’t set her apart but makes her special or unique. “There were two new girls and they still didn’t know what my story was, so I told them about it and they were kind of really surprised.” That’s a shift from the times of trying to fit in at the Father and Daughter Dance or avoiding pronouns to hide the story.