So this is going to be a difficult one, both to write and to read, just assume it’s a massive cw and move on, I don’t even really understand why I feel compelled to write this other than to get a lot of confusing and oppressive feelings off my chest. There’s no plan, I suspect it’ll end up a long rambly mess and I’m sorry. I appreciate those who do stick around to the end. It’s going to be personal and I assume it might offend some people in my family. There’s a lot of red-hot anger here.

When I was around six, I remember my paternal grandfather once said, in reference to seeing a purple Ford Ranger in someone’s driveway outside of a modest home in the inner suburbs of Cleveland, “Only a [n-bomb] would buy a purple car.”

Twenty-seven years later, I still have to fight my internal association of the color purple and African-Americans. A stupid, hateful throw-away line, said with such steadiness has fucked me in the head for my entire life. To him it was a perfectly legitimate thing to say to an impressionable six-year-old. The literal, textual meaning of his words remains only conjecture to me, but the real meaning, the emotion behind the words lingers with me to this day. It was purely, blindingly hot hate.

My paternal grandfather was a white supremacist. And while I think he did his best to hide it, I know that at the end of his life he was less reserved about it, lashing out at colored nurses and needing to be coddled into comfort by white people. In private, in the years leading to his death, he confided in me that he wasn’t just your average bigot, but an old-school one. His definition of whiteness excluded the Irish, Italians, and Slavic peoples. When in private with me, he talked down on my maternal family, hinting that they were likely Polish or worse, Jewish. He often called my maternal grandfather, whose surname is Martin, a name of ancient Scottish and Irish extraction, Martinski, a surname that I am almost certain literally doesn’t exist.

I think I was twelve or so, maybe older, when I remember him telling my parents that the problem with selling your house to Jewish folks is they’d sell their house to African-Americans. I’m just glad I was old enough to not have that turn into some horrid and permanent intrusive thought.

When I was sixteen or so, I slipped out from his grasp, mostly, though I remained close to him. One of the few people in the family who did. I kept quiet around him, tolerating his hate, or letting it in one ear and out the other, but the accusation that my maternal family was “Polish, actually” haunts me to this day. It was the point when I realized, “Oh no, this is advanced bigotry” and I quickly lost a lot of respect for him, though engaging with the racism he had implanted into my head is an ongoing project, one that I don’t think will ever be over.

I remained close to him, in the end, because there was an ever-growing rift between me and my parents, over a lot of things, but my paternal grandfather has always presented himself to me as being on “my side”. And when you’re young and impressionable, or later when you’re young and seeking independence, having an adult of considerable social standing unambiguously on “your side” is a powerful boon, even if it really only feels that way.

In talking with my brother around the start of the pandemic, he asked me if the things he had been told about our paternal grandfather by our mother were true. At the time I had only recently cut off contact with my parents, and my brother was dealing with his own relationship with them, complicated by the birth of my nephew. Michael, if you’re reading this, I didn’t lie to you, I just told you half the truth.

Our paternal grandfather was a monster.

It went beyond just his favoritism and his unfair, unjust disdain for you, it was so much more. I like to think you escaped learning his hate because of his hate. He was mean. And a liar. And manipulative. And, to be frank about it, a fascist. Brazenly racist. Openly authoritarian. Constantly railing again the rights of minorities and harboring paranoid delusions that his son had married “down”. He was everything mum said and so much worse.

There was a moment following the 2020 election where I was able to take a breath. Not much else, really. But having freshly exited the closet at the sunset of Trump’s term, I briefly thought that maybe I’d have maybe four years or so of peace. To grow as a person, free and in the open. That opening twitter might not be the awful shitstorm it had been. Shitty? Yes. Stormy? Perhaps. But not the 24/7 shit storm.

Clearly I’ve been very wrong.

Trans people have become the battleground. Our rights. Our visibility. Our everything. It’s all up for public debate and public lambasting. The hate and vitriol whipped to a froth thanks to the success that US-based and backed transphobes have had in the United Kingdom, imported back to the US as the new culture war. The new thing for half the country to hate and spit upon.

America’s imperialism is now the exporting of hate movements for cultivation overseas and then re-importing what works the best.

The last few months have been very hard. Work is burning me out and seeing the hate is eroding my mental well-being. Depression has been hanging over me again. Worse than ever. The joy in everything sucked out and left grey.

It’s mostly a feeling of worry. I am apprehensive. I don’t know what I can do or how soon I should be doing it. I’m afraid. Very, very afraid. I have shared these fears with friends and close family. I’ve shared them with my place of work, where on multiple occasions I’ve had to turn down projects or positions that would’ve moved me into areas I consider unsafe as a trans woman. I’m not sure how much longer Michigan or even the United States will be safe for me. I often catch myself considering my options. Where can I go? How will things work out? Can I easily continue my transition there?

A lot of cishetero allies considered the matter settled in 2014 with the supreme court ruling on same-sex marriage. It was a goal post that trans people had long fought against, exactly for the reason we’re seeing. Allies are fickle and they want struggles to be over sooner than later. And the American “liberal”, obsessed with process and decorum, assumes too much good faith from the conservative and too much bad from those they deign to “protect”.

So too did a lot of queer folks. Middle-class, white, cis homosexuals taking their newfound rights and fucking off to the suburbs, waiting for a trans person or a person of color to look at them wrong before descending into being life-long Republican voters.

And let’s not beat around the bush here. It’s Republicans.

Democrats are impotent, lazy, patronizing shit-heads, but the Republicans are the ones going on twitter to casually call for the extermination of trans people.

Democrats are debating if we’re worth protecting, but the ones showing up to do harm are still Republicans.

And that counts for anyone reading this. I’m sorry, but if you can still stomach voting Republican, you need to understand that I don’t trust you, and am actively wary of what you do and what you say. Platitudes of kindness are meaningless when you continue to vote for and enable bigots who actively look to kill me. And they do plan to kill us, given half the chance. Whether through “lone wolves” or through state-sponsored violence and oppression, they don’t start insinuating that I’m a pedophile or a “groomer” purely based on the incongruity of my gender and my genitalia without a bigger end goal in mind.

In the months leading up to me coming out and cutting off my parents, my father’s twitter account had gotten more and more unhinged. He was sharing material from increasingly open white supremacist and fascist groups, including groups that consider LGBT+ people legitimate targets for political violence, as well as just the usual smattering of pro-Trump bullshit. He used his account to harass people of color and spread anti-vaccine misinformation, including lying about statistics in a way that I knew that as a life-long professional engineer he understood. His account disappeared after January 6th, after saying he was moving to one of the social media sites preferred by Neo-Nazi groups.

This was on top of all the openly racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and queerphobic things he and my mother just said straight to my face. It was those sorts of things, like my paternal grandfather before them, that told me it was time to move on. Time to cease communication.

It wasn’t “politics”.

I had disagreed with my parents on “politics” for a long time, both when I was a social democrat and still at the end when I found myself increasingly disillusioned with the future as a concept and was slipping into queer anarchism.

A disagreement on “politics” is a good-faith disagreement on the policies that will improve the lives of all people. It’s at least believing that the other side wants what is best, but is misguided, wrong, or working off incomplete information. Perhaps they are selfish and putting their own needs first, while not necessarily wanting to actively harm other people.

Problem is that my parents openly advocated harm for other people, both in big and small ways. At the level of systemic harm, and at the level of interpersonal cruelty.

I haven’t really talked about this openly for two years now, and I’m sure if anyone in my family actually reads this far it’s going to cause a stir. But I said what I said. I stand by it. And getting it out there kills the allure of the secret. Perhaps I can stop having nightmares about them now.

Six-year-olds are impressionable. I don’t think this is a controversial thing to say. Six-year-old me heard my paternal grandfather say something very racist once and has been plagued with an intrusive racist thought for the rest of her life since.

A lot of six-year-olds are being told that trans people in specific and queer people in general are pedophiles, rapists, and groomers. A non-zero number of them will accept this information. A non-zero number will not. A non-zero number will be left wondering why they have this weird association in their head that they wish they didn’t, forced to actively confront their own bigotry forever. This is on top of denying queer people the language and understanding of our own place. Bigots don’t care if children are “sexualized” by trivial matters such as mentioning what gender they are or suggesting that two opposite-sex toddlers are “dating” or being aware that they have parents who are married so long as what they are being taught enforces cisheteronormativity.

But you see it in adults too. I do.

I’ll be on a call and some dude will be talking about his wife and what they’re up to, but I mention “my wife” and there’s a little intake of air. Like I had made a dirty joke or something.

A man mentioning he and his wife going on a date is “normal”. A woman so much as mentioning her wife regardless of the context is on the verge of “pornographic”.

Nevermind if I mention that I’m trans, which almost universally illicits a reaction like “I wish you hadn’t told me that”, even if the words are friendly. We can hear it. We can notice it.

Because even if someone isn’t openly a bigot, there’s a connection, implanted into their brain around age six, between being trans and being a pervert. Between being trans and being a fetish. We’re not the ones bringing our junk to the table, honestly we’d rather never talk of it again. But I also want to talk about my hardships openly just as if they were any other mundane hardship. I want to be able to feel comfortable knowing people are comfortable around me.

And this completely ignores the fact that children do understand, feel, and even become apprehensive of notions of sex, sexuality, gender, gender conformance at these ages. I’m not saying teach’m how to fuck, I’m telling you the truth of the matter. I knew I was sexually attracted to women well before I had ever seen a woman’s genitals. I knew I was a woman well before I knew that being trans was a thing or that I could even transition.

When I was around six, I had my first inkling of being trans. I wanted to be a woman so I could marry my best friend and we could be best friends forever. That’s a pretty innocent thing, all things considered. A misunderstanding of sexuality, gender, and even friendship. I drew myself in a wedding dress, but I got the feeling from the reaction of my friends that something was wrong. That I was weird. And so, following the social cues, I buried that deep down inside.

When I was around thirteen, I dealt with issues that are now, very clearly gender dysphoria. I had no word for gender dysphoria, didn’t even know it was a thing and that not everyone felt it. In what I consider the most blindingly obvious trans thing ever in my life, I had made a pair of prosthetic breasts out of K’nex, not knowing much about breasts at the time, simply to feel the weight of them on me. To see my shirt tent the way that the girl’s did at school. Not because I wanted to see them, but because I wanted desperately and unknowingly to be one of them.

We try desperately to shield children from adulthood, more often than not to their own detriment. It leaves us all unprepared. Lost. And confused. And we do it time and time again, creating generations of lost and confused adults, forced to rediscover reality for themselves. Moreover, we completely ignore mental illness, both in children and adults. We, as a society, despise talking about what we feel. I learned over and over again as a child how to recognize quick sand or what to do if I ever caught fire. As a teen I got taught over and over again how to recognize gonorrhea from syphilis from herpes, but wasn’t taught how to recognize depression, or burn out, or how to work through my feelings in mature ways.

I felt a lot of things growing up. A lot of those things were queer. A lot of them were not. One thing I didn’t feel was supported. I was constantly alone in my head, afraid that the things I felt were weird. When I was eighteen I told my mum I had been thinking of killing myself. Her reaction was a mix of incredulity and of being burdened with that information.

I still have intrusive suicidal thoughts to this day.

The first time I experienced transphobia directly, by my reckoning, was when I had a vasectomy, some five years before coming out publicly as trans. I talked about my experiences with choosing to be child free on reddit and twitter and experienced a large amount of hatred for such a tiny and personal decision. I was told that I was “lesser” and that I was “not a man” for having an out-patient surgery on my own genitals that affected no one but my wife and I.

I wonder how many of those accounts would spew abuse at me now. Telling me that I’m “lesser” and “not a woman”. I assume all of them would.

And I want to end on this, there’s no confusion on their part. They’re not hypocrites. They are consistently bigots. They consistently attack anything they deem as a threat to cisheteronormativity. I can be both “not a man” and “not a woman” to them, because they’d rather me be “a corpse”.