Читать книгу My Trans Parent - Heather Bryant - Страница 9

“When [my father] finally did come out, my initial reaction was to ask if we could still make the 2:20 showing of ‘X-Men 2’.”

—JONATHAN F., AGE 24

I was ten years old when my dad came out, and I just thought, “Okay, this is what’s happening.” I didn’t think of it as a big deal. Sometimes, when I tell that to friends who didn’t have transgender parents, they react as if I’m somehow in denial or not being honest, but when I speak to other kids of trans who found out at a young age, many felt similarly. As Even B. said, “It didn’t really shake me up or anything—it’s just like, okay, my father likes to dress up as a woman. ‘Well okay,’ I thought, like when I go to carnival, I wanted to be a cowboy or a clown or something. It didn’t really change anything—I don’t think I spent much time thinking about it.” For me, I felt like it was one of the things that people did in the world. I was still learning about the world, so I thought it was simply one of the things to add to my awareness of the whole spectrum of experience. Maybe it was because my dad and I had always been close, but to me, this change felt like the opening of a door that had been there all along. Later, I pushed her away. But at the time when the change first happened, before I even knew the word “transgender,” I took it in like it could happen anywhere, like it was a kind of magic my dad was part of, shape-shifting on an ordinary Tuesday. Only this kind of shape-shifting, it seemed to me, couldn’t be reversed.

Sharon S. described how she and her sister were just okay. “I think for little kids, especially before you know about what society expects, you’re kind of just like whatever—okay. I think a lot of the pressure and the embarrassment happens because of how society reacts and about your fear about people’s reactions.”

Since my family maintained the story of Dana as my aunt, we avoided some of the difficulties in the short run, but in the long run, I wonder if maintaining our family structure as is and telling the truth would have been better for us as a family. At the time, most people on the outside didn’t have a chance to react since they didn’t know the full story. We avoided a reaction by shifting our family story.

To me, it was a bigger deal that we’d uprooted across the country, leaving my friends behind in New York. The only thing about this was that we couldn’t tell anyone, which made it feel strange. The more we kept it a secret, the more it felt like something I didn’t want to tell. That made it harder to tell later on, even when I wanted to.

My sister and I went along like it happened every day. Inside our house, we witnessed a gradual transformation and we didn’t wonder why or how. We simply went along for the ride at first. At home, it felt like we slipped across a threshold. I didn’t question the change. I just thought, “This is what can happen in the world.” Dana showed me a book she was reading, Second Serve by Renée Richards. I looked at the striking blonde on the cover and book jacket, and at the man in the photographs inside. “This is what’s possible in the world,” I thought. It was like learning a new idea in school. I didn’t question or challenge it at first.

Dana’s therapist encouraged my parents to come up with a story that would help us blend into our social world, which was part of why Dana was now our aunt. One of our neighbors walked by the house one day in our new neighborhood in Berkeley and my mom introduced Dana to her as “Daniel’s sister.”

“Oh—you look so much alike!” our neighbor said.

“You should see the rest of the family,” my mother said.

That marked the start of my dad adopting a new identity. Dana had her own history and family, her own separate life. She was still my dad to me, but to the outside world, she was someone else.

We kept it as a family very much in our house, and then outside of the house, she was my aunt. I’d say, “This is my aunt,” and it felt really weird to say the word “aunt” connected to my dad, but no one asked questions.

People out in the community met Dana as my aunt. In that way, I didn’t know how the larger world would respond to this change for a while. I only knew little snippets, like how Dana’s mother, my grandmother, felt that my dad was messing with God’s creation, and how some people still said “he” and sent cards addressed to Daniel Bryant.

When I first found out, I didn’t think I would have any feelings about this shift in my parent. Others spoke of the feelings shifting and changing with time. Olivia C. said, “My initial reaction was to be so supportive and minimize my own feelings. I went overboard, saying, ‘I need to see pictures and you can borrow all my clothes, and this is amazing.’” The wish for a never-changing, ongoing closeness can sometimes mask initial feelings and questions. For me, I felt very protective of my parent. When we were out, I was very careful not to say, “Dad,” not to out her to the world. How close we are to our parents can impact our responses, too. “Me and my dad are really close,” Olivia explained, “so I was saying, ‘this is the best—we’ll be best friends—nothing will change’, stuff like that.” I relate to the part about being really supportive initially and discounting my own feelings. I was also very close to my dad, so I just wanted her to be okay.

When Jonathan W. got a phone call from his dad calling a family conference, he wondered what the news might be. Was his dad sick? Was he in financial trouble? He prepared himself for what could be difficult news. So when his dad shared the news, he was initially relieved. “There was 30 seconds of being relieved, and then there was this ‘Oh my God, no, wait a second. You’re not in trouble, but you’re going to change fundamentally who you are.’” Even though Jonathan felt supportive of people in the world who wanted to claim their identities, the fact that it was his parent wanting to change made it more difficult for him. “For me, objectively speaking, I’m pro LBGT+ and if someone wants to transition or if someone comes out that’s wonderful, we applaud it, and then when it was my own dad, I was like, ‘Oh no, I don’t want this.’” He wanted to find the root cause or reason at first. “I immediately went on the offensive, and was like, are you sure it’s not because you’re this way or because this happened to you or whatever. I started blaming him for everything at that point—I was probably a little harsh.” Jonathan went on to write a book about the experience, She’s My Dad, which tells the story of his experience with his dad’s transition and the new understanding of his religion that came about in the process.

Christy, who also reconciled the change with her beliefs, said, “I grew up in a family that was definitely like ‘live and let live,’ so I felt like, ‘Oh my gosh—this is something that makes her happy and doesn’t hurt anybody. That’s a good plan.’”

Sometimes, feelings can come out in other ways. Olivia spoke of traveling through Japan, right after she found out, with the news on her mind. “Immediately after, I was in action mode, but I was also somatically reactive. I wasn’t processing anything, because I think I had no means of processing it, but I also could not digest anything.” She was upset late at night, but couldn’t voice it. “I think my whole body was in shock or trying to protect itself.”

An initial rush of support can be followed by more complicated feelings. As Amy described, “The week she came out I ended up going to her trans support group with her as an advocate—I was just like—okay great! Let’s go.” As time went on, she went through a period of struggle and adjustment. “One of the hardest things for me was this big shift in personality and in interests, because all of a sudden our interests weren’t the same at all.” Sometimes, Amy felt like her parent’s new-found freedom had a flip side. Who had her parent been for the years when she was little? Amy said, “[My parent told me] ‘I’ve been living a lie for my whole life—now I can be who I really am.’ As a child, you’re sitting there thinking, ‘What does that make me?’”

Becca found herself questioning a lot of her childhood leading up to that point. “I thought that everything was a lie, because at that point my dad was like, ‘This is not how I’ve felt for my entire life.’ I totally get that, but then you start thinking about everything that you’ve ever done with him.” She started to rethink and reconsider their history together. “The sports and the training and the—just any activity—and you’re like, ‘Well was that all a lie now?’”

If our identity has been shaped by this person, then who are we?