So can we talk about something? So as a lot of you guys know we've been having some conversations
about Dave Chappelle's recent comedy special, and something that kept getting brought up in
the comments is whether or not there is a middle ground between transgender people
and the people who don't accept them because of their religion, or perhaps their politics.
I thought that this would be a really interesting conversation because we are in the midst of the
holiday season, and this is the time when I have to ask myself whether or not I want to
visit my family who has never accepted that I was transgender on the basis of their religion. Now,
a few weeks ago, it was Thanksgiving, and literally a few days before Thanksgiving,
my father sends me a message and asks me if I'm going to come and visit the family for
the holiday. Now, for context, I don't generally spend my holiday season with my family because
my parents decided a long time ago that they weren't comfortable with me being who I am.
Mind you, my parents moved to Arizona a couple of years ago, and I don't know if you've ever tried
to buy tickets last minute during Thanksgiving, but not only is Thanksgiving one of the busiest
times of year to travel, but it's also one of the most expensive times of the year to travel.
So realistically, if I wanted to make the decision to visit my family, I would've
had to make that decision pretty quickly at a very large expense to myself. I thought that
this was the perfect little microcosm of how our relationship has been for most of my life. Now,
I was actually raised incredibly religious. I used to go to Christian private school. I was always in
the church. I used to volunteer in the church all the time, and somewhere out in the ether
is the Christian singing album that I recorded when I was a child because letting you guys in
all a little bit of history about me, I used to be a singer when I was a child.
I figured out that I was transgender when I was a teenager, and I had accepted, at that point,
that my relationship with my family would be come complicated
because of how important religion was to them. So I started living, in many ways,
a double life. I was one person in front of my family and a completely other person when I wasn't
around them. I still remember getting ready for school every day. I would wear what I actually
wanted to wear and then, I would cover it with a hoodie and baggy jeans. I remember finding so
much happiness in like those little things that were androgynous enough for me to feel feminine,
but neutral enough not to offend my father. Usually, what would happen is I would get
to school and I would, of course, change and I would wear what I wanted to wear and then
would change back before my parents picked me up, or before I went back home. I was a good
kid. Even from Christian private school, I was a goody-two shoes, teachers pet, all that stuff.
But rebellion for me back then was finding those little things that made me feel like
I was reaching towards who I knew myself to be. I maintained this double life thing all through
my teenage years. I would run away to Hollywood all the time and I just remember having so much
fun being able to be in a situation where I could be myself. That's what felt comfortable and happy
to me, and I knew that being myself around my family would probably lead to me being disowned
by them. Keep in mind, you guys I'm adopted, so I have hella issues with being disowned. So I really
tried my best not to be somebody who upset them, but as I got closer and closer to
the end of high school, hiding became really, really hard for me. I couldn't really conceal
this version of myself that I was when I wasn't around them. I will never forget that my father
would often walk behind me and yell at me, "Stops switching! Stop switching! Stop switching!"
He would say that all the time, because at a certain point I just started to like myself.
So I felt like it wasn't healthy for me to hide who I was, so there were these moments where
I would just be myself and I would forget that that's a person that my don't accept. I used to
do a lot of over-the-shoulder tee shirts back in high school and I can still hear my father pull up
my shirt and say, "Why are you dressed like that?" I just knew that any way that I felt comfortable
in my own body was the way that my father felt I shouldn't be. Right before I got to college, I had
been identifying as gender queer, and honestly, this was a function of me living this double life.
I wanted to hold on to this version of myself that people had accepted while reaching towards
the person who I knew myself to be. Going away to college, made it incredibly clear to me that I had
no responsibility to be the person who I said I was the day before, and just being in a different
scenario, being in a different situation just made it so clear to me that I was a binary trans woman.
Mind you, this was not an easy realization for me to come to, especially back then
because there were not very many trans people out there being represented. So there was a very hard
path in front of me. I didn't really know exactly where to go with that,
but I knew that it was something that would make me happy. So in college, my style was bold.
I was finally able to be myself because I wasn't really worrying about what my parents thought,
what my classmates thought, I was just being myself and I really, really flourished. I became
a significantly more confident person, but every single time I would go back and visit my family,
I would go right back to wearing these hoodies and these baggy pants,
and I would try to spend as little time possible around them because, again, I knew that me being
transgender made them uncomfortable. As I became more confident in myself in college,
it became incredibly hard for me to hide myself after college. My parents were nice enough
to allow me to come back home, and to sleep on their couch until I figured out my situation.
I was really, really thankful for that, and I will never hold that against them. But when I
got out of college, I'd already legally changed my name. I had all of this stuff that I could
no longer reverse, right? I was on hormones. At that point, I was on hormones for three years. I
couldn't really hide myself in the way that I used to, and that became a problem at that particular
point in time, because my parents had moved to a different city. I was stealth in the town that we
were living in. Now in the small little town that I lived in, the only thing you could really do
was go to the bowling alley and go to little bar in the bowling alley. I will never forget one
night I had gone to the bar, mind you, back then I was 21 and I was enjoying my night. I had a really
positive interaction with people at the bar and I came home feeling pretty good about myself,
and of course, looking cute too. Back then, my father worked at the front desk of a hotel.
I don't know if you guys remember this or not, but 2012 was the year where everyone thought the
world was going to end, and apparently he had a really crazy night because of this, right?
He came home, I was on my computer. I don't even remember what I was doing, probably making art
or some other nerdy shit, and my dad sat next to me and started telling me about his evening.
He told me that if the world really does end, if I wanted to get into heaven that I needed to,
"Go back to how I used to be." This was his very clumsy way of telling me that I should
de-transition. One of my biggest frustrations with Christians, honestly, is that frequently,
they will frame their desires as the desire of their deity. It's not that this man who made me
feel like total shit growing up because I was feminine, wants me to de-transition, it's that
that's what God wants. Yeah. Sure. Eventually I fell in love with some dude and I moved out
with him into a new place. And I really haven't had much of an interaction with my family since.
My happiness and comfort have only increased since I've stopped regularly interacting with
my family. What I realized is that I was cultivating this insecurity within myself,
because I was constantly adjusting myself as to not be potentially offensive to my parents.
This really wasn't even about an ideological or political disagreement, this was simply about me
being myself around them. There's really a huge difference between avoiding certain controversial
conversations and your inherent presence being something that inspires debates. Quite frequently,
people view trans-ness as inherently political, that's why conservative trans bloggers are seen
as so interesting to people because they see trans-ness as this inherent political stance and
anything that deviates from this political stance is novel to them. Recently, I saw this tweet in my
feed, "The teenage/adolescent urge to see family relationships as a battleground for politics
should be avoided at all costs. The personal is absolutely not political. Family and friends do
not have to agree on partisan or ideological bullshit to be close. Happy Thanksgiving."
It really just made me think about how differently I feel about spending time with my family around
this time of year because, for me, the personal is very much political and politicized. I think
that if you were to ask most transgender people if they want their personhood to be a politicized,
they would probably tell you no. But in a society that believes that it could define my gender for
me, where I've had to fight to function in the most basic ways that most cis people just do,
the personal is very much political. I love my parents. Despite our shitty relationship,
I love my parents, but visiting of them means that I would have to relinquish a part of myself
for their comfort. One of the biggest anxieties that I have with visiting my family is that in my
daily life, I do not get misgendered. I don't get dead-named. I'm not used to defending my gender
or standing up for my gender. People generally just accept me as woman and treat me accordingly.
When I visit my family, I have to accept that they're going to misgender me, they're going to
dead name me. Of course, it hurts quite a bit more because they're my family. These are the people
that raised me. A few years ago, I spent 11 hours on the bus going to Arizona to visit my family.
I had to accept going into it, that part of seeing them was just me being disrespected.
It meant that I was going to be misgendered and dead-named and
made to feel like I was not supposed to be myself. I had to go in accepting that,
and I did that because I love them. Generally speaking, a middle ground is met mutually,
but in a scenario where I have to meet somebody between their rejection of me and my existence,
the only real thing we could do is put me in a position where I have to stomach their
rejection of me and they, at the bare minimum, just have to not antagonize me for existing.
A few years ago, my father said something to me that I thought was really profound.
He told me that when he thinks of me, he can only think of the child that he adopted, the little boy
child that he deliberately adopted over a little girl child. He doesn't have many memories of
himself with me as I am now and, of course, that makes sense when I put a lot of work into hiding
who I was. The only memories he could possibly have of me were false ones. As an adult, I can
understand now that my father was not equipped to raise a transgender child. As an adult,
I can understand now that him shaming me for being feminine was what he thought he was supposed to do
when he's raising a male child. It is something that you would tell someone if you want to keep
them protected in a world that is often unfair to people like me. I can look at my father's religion
and say that it's genuinely a positive thing for him. Despite the way that it's impacted me.
I can't look at it and how it's factored into his life and say that it's been a negative for him.
I can accept that he is a Christian, despite the fact that I'm an atheist and I would never have
a conversation with him about religion, with the desire to get him to withdraw
from his own religious beliefs. I've accepted that his religion is part of who he is, and that is a
degree of consideration that he has never given me. On one hand, I can accept that my father,
like so many other people, struggles to understand who transgender people are. On the other hand,
his kid is a person who has been making YouTube videos about being transgender that are accessible
to everyone for the past 16 years and for clarity, that's most of my life. I have been having this
conversation this way for most of my life. You might be wondering why I am speaking so frankly
about my family on here on a platform where I have 421,000 subscribers, and that's because despite
all of that being the case, my father has not once seen one of my videos and he does not care to.
My father will sit there and complain about me not making an effort to connect with him after
years and years of encouraging me to hate myself, and that is what meeting in the middle looks like
for people who don't accept trans people. It looks like him sitting there and dogmatically telling
me who I am, teaching me to hate everything about myself that makes happy and encouraging me to work
my hardest as to not offend him with my existence, but then expecting me to travel 500 miles within
a couple of days' notice on my own dime or suffer the accusation that I'm just not working
hard enough to bridge the gap between us. I think that the average cis person really underestimates
the scope of trans antagonism, because if we're being honest now, most cis people will never be
invested enough in this conversation to really fully understand it, or care to understand it.
Before the minority of cis people watching this video who are trying to understand, I just want
you to get that living in this society as a trans person can be incredibly mentally taxing
when you're constantly dealing with the fact that you don't quite fit in. People like myself are
very privileged in that I was able to transition and be feminine enough for people to accept my
gender and not give me shit for it, but that's an incredible minority of transgender people.
A lot of transgender people are going through their life constantly being antagonized,
and that's something that I think a lot of people don't get when they see the few times a trans
person vents about it on the internet. The crux of most of the debates that cis people have with
trans people could really be boiled down to this idea that trans people think they're cis. For me,
this is a really silly misunderstanding because most trans people are transgender
because they acknowledge that their sex does not relate to their gender.
Most trans people would not be transgender if their sex was
aligned with their gender. So we're defined by the fact that our biology and sex don't align.
There's an extreme minority of trans people who feel otherwise, but at the end of the day,
most transgender people are going to feel disrespected when you try to define their gender
by their sex, because that tends to not only negate their personhood, but quite frequently,
also their experiences. I live the life of a trans woman who most people assume is a cis woman.
That means that my experiences are really not paralleled to cis man's, even if we do share
similar biology. Contrary to what my father and a lot of cis people would probably assume,
I don't really live a controversial life, at least as a trans woman.
There are so many other things in my life that are so much weirder than that,
and maybe that makes my life interesting, but in terms of how I fit into society gender-wise,
this really isn't some complex thing that is complicated, at least for me. I function quite
comfortably in society and I'm really not used to people questioning or challenging my gender,
and I've got friends of all different worldviews and all different perspectives,
I just don't have friends that require me to make myself smaller and meet between who I
am and their rejection of who I am. I am very, very far from living inside of an echo chamber,
but if there's one thing I learned in my youth, it's that life is too short to purposely
surround myself with people who are not fond of my gender. So this Christmas, I will not be
in Arizona, but I will be somewhere just as hot, enjoying a vacation with my boyfriend,
but I might give them a call. I guess that's my middle ground.