Family Matters

I'm not sure if I mentioned this here or not, but I posted on my facebook that I have this blog. Since I've done that I've gotten a fair bit of response. I've being writing this like no one is reading it, that's how I manage to be so candid, but it's kinda obvious to me now that people are reading it.

One of the main reasons I hesitated telling facebook was because of family members reading it.I kinda figured my parents would, but I have a few other extended family that also are, so I'm feeling a little reticent.

And I'm having none of that.

So, let's just press right through this, shall we?

My family had a huge impact on my dysphoria. No one puts expectations on you like your family does, and when everyone thinks you're a boy there are even more, especially from my parents generation. I was clearly different then the rest of my family but no one ever knew why, obviously. No one even had close to a clue, besides the fact that I became an expert con artist about this, it was simply not an option for anyone to think.

My youngest years, say under the age of ten was pretty simple. I was constantly given gender norms to adhere by, but at that time it didn't "bother" me. I had other things I would have rather done, like play with My Little Pony, but I listened to my parents and that was kinda it.

When puberty started setting in though, I started becoming aware of my very different personality. It was unbelievably frustrating going through what I was going through and having people chalk it up as being a "typical teenager". There has never been anything typical about me, except maybe a typical transgender kid.

I tried, and try, often to think of what my family thought of me back then. Just about everything about me was different then them. They thought school education is the end all to be all, I thought it was a bunch of people trying to make themselves feel more important. They were all very religious, I was.... not, and I enjoyed telling you. At that time, that wasn't a very popular thing to do. I enjoyed intelligent stand-up comedy and music, and their lyrics. They seemed to enjoy slap-stick like comedy and more mainstream/newfoundland music. I was an artist, they were not.

I also knew I had beliefs they hadn't even thought about. A lot of it centered around sex and gender. Like transvestites are people too, I was completely ok with homosexuals, I thought monogamy was a recipe for disaster, I was into BDSM. I thought sex could be something shared between any two people, (or three, or four, or...) Transvestism aside, I thought men and women should be able to wear whatever they wanted. I didn't think it was strange for a man to say "beautiful" (yeah, that's backwards times were then.) There were quite a few things.

Most importantly though, I think. I wore black all the time, gave thought to hard decisions, to hard world problems. I had started to become sensitive to my own lack of expression and I started feeling it in others. Ultimately, I was the depressed kid in the family and I think they had no idea how to handle me, and I'm sure I didn't make it easy.

I have a few examples of things that I remember about different relatives and how they related to my being transgender. There is no way I can talk about this without them knowing who I'm talking about so, here we go.

I have one cousin that has been a best friend to me. Time and responsibility has diminished that a little, but he still is one of my best friends. I am, four (I think?) years older then him and there was a time period where he spent more time with me at my house then he did at home. I joke about that time to people and say I "raised my cousin.", which is hardly true, but I felt motherly at the time. It was one of the first times I felt like I wanted to inside, but still had no one to share or explain it to.

There are another group of family members I am just going to lump together, because that's how much love I have for them. I seen this side of the family roughly once a year, for christmas, and... fuck them. I haven't met a single group of such arrogantly ignorant people in my life. They caused me a lot of pain. The other side of my family didn't know how to connect with me, and really left it at that. This side didn't know how to connect to me and that was MY problem that they needed to fix, apparently. No one in my life judged me as much as they did. I was depressed and wore black a lot, "cheer up and wear some color! what's wrong with you!" I had long hair "Only girls have long hair." I didn't want to go to university, "you're no one of you don't go to university."

Just about every core belief these people had was a polar opposite to mine, which is fine. The artistic qualities in me being  a stark contrast to their inelegant ways.  But when you start telling me I'm wrong, you're right, and there's something wrong with me because I feel that way (Which there FUCKING WAS, but not like they thought), you can go to hell. These people basically made me feel like how I was feeling was wrong, alien, and unforgivable.

One visit a year, quite the accomplishment.

During my university days I was getting rides with another cousin of mine who was also going to university. That became awkward for me. Why? You ask.

Well...

I started to become attracted to her. To start with, she is attractive, but as I started to get to know her during our drives I started wanting to be her, like I've done with many females in the past. I'd pick out qualities in her that I liked and wished I could be. I actually found myself hitting on her trying to get to know her (and therefore me) a little better. She was my cousin so I thought maybe there was a better chance for answers in her (not knowing at the time the answers were in me). I don't know if she ever felt it, but once I noticed what I was doing, I stopped.

I just remembered another time where an aunt and uncle tried to, I dunno, "man me up" for lack of better terms. Maybe it was "cheer me up." I'm not sure. I was given motorbike rides, the male version of the sex talk, a handful of other attempts to figure me out. I was so impossible to connect to though, it didn't last long, and I don't blame them even a little bit, I did appreciate it in fact.

Essentially that's what it comes down to I suppose. I was impossible to connect with on any level. Anything you could get me engaged in was something people didn't know about, didn't want to hear, or didn't know want to say about. Probably mostly the latter. I had one side of my family that tried, failed, and I think felt bad. The other side of my family couldn't care less and only gave me enough thought to wonder why I wasn't jumping on their bandwagon.

There is one large thing though that happened that really made me put my head in the sand. When my uncle came out as gay it opened my eyes. I wasn't directly told until he told me, many years later. It still is something that our family claims not to be ashamed of, but are so quiet about I hardly see the difference. How quiet it was kept made me go completely into my closet about being transgender. My thoughts of someone being gay at the time was "Is that all?" I was comparing it to me who wanted to change genders, act and present like a woman rather then the boy I was born, AND I also had homosexual fantasies.

Lol even my fantasies were confusing to me, which ones were homosexual and which ones were heterosexual? Anyway..

Their reaction to my uncle gave me no hope for myself. One of the contributing factors of my trip to Atlanta. I think it's great, I'd like for him to take his boyfriend to our christmas dinner some year (if he has one. See? I don't even know that). I've always felt that way. I always thought it was total crap that my cousins, aunt, myself and my brother all brought boy/girlfriends and my uncle never did. I think actually, once.

All of this being said, very little of this was done intentionally. Clearly they had no idea I was transgender, being sensitive to that wasn't even in our culture then. When it came to me hiding the little girl inside me everything and anything could have set me off, or made me feel worse, or more alone. For the most part they had no idea what effect the things they did and said had on me.