The worst, or at least close I don’t have the best memory, thing my father ever said to me was in the parking lot of a Fresh Market. It was the summer before my senior year of college, the middle of August. I was home seeing my family after a summer of working in Atlanta and two weeks of visiting Carli in Indiana. They begged me to come home, crying over the phone various times, screamed at me, called me a liar etc. They were pulling all the usual stops. I guess I shouldnt’ve been surprised about what happened, but even now, it barely feels true.
A year and a few months after I told my parents about my first girlfriend, I went on a drive in the blue ridge mountains and came down convinced that I needed to tell them I was Trans, maybe this final reveal of this full whole truth - and they would see what I’ve always seen, and they wouldn’t experience the loss of a daughter but rather the birth of a son (ish). Up in a pale pink mountain sunset, the idea felt Divine, Meant to Be. We would finally Arrive etc. It was dark when I opened the door and asked my parents to sit down so I could speak. I don’t remember what I said, I wish I did. Actually, I told my mother first. I told her I wanted to be a boy, become a man someday. Her expression was cold, turned off. She led me to the basement where my Father was editing photos on his computer. (He’s a photographer) I repeated something similar to him, tried to explain myself through tears now. My Father looked so broken, completely cracked. He was absolutely devastated, in a childish sort of way. Pacing around the room. My mother was next to me on the couch, weeping. At one point, she screamed.
Wow, this is really upsetting for me to write. My plan was for this paragraph to be some sort of comical or analytical relief from the real. But let’s see what happens when we muscle through.
In the next scene, I am running, keys in hand toward my car parked on the street outside my parent’s house. It’s a short driveway, across a patch of grass and English ivy. My mother is also running. My key fob was out of batteries so I had to manually unlock the car from the driver’s side door. The key is within the fob, in a compartment that required two hands to open. I fumbled with the keys until I dropped them. It was dark and all of my stuff besides my phone and my wallet was still in their house, but if I had been able to get inside the car I would’ve left. Maybe forever. So, perhaps my Mother was correct (at least in her interests) to pull the keys from my hands and lock them in a safe. They took my phone and laptop as well. They said I was “addicted” to the internet and my girlfriend and I would never be able to rid myself of this unless I took “time away.” I got my computer back the next day but they didn’t “trust me” to be home alone so I had to go with my father to his office. I Facebook messaged a few close friends what was going on. Carli planned to come get me the following Tuesday, and we devised a plan to get my stuff out of the car while they were at work and then leave at night, while they were asleep.
I’ll pause here to backtrack. HB2 was passed in North Carolina in March of 2016, the year I graduated high school. I wasn’t out, I started a lot of “Love is Love” arguments on Twitter. Then, I thought, I wasn’t gay or anything, I liked boys (little did I know), I felt lonely, I was a teenager just like all my friends were teenagers. Earlier in my “transition,” I often looked back at this time and thought “Wow, I’ve changed so much,” and now I think “Wow, I’ve changed barely at all.” My parents have always seen my queerness and transness as a surprise, as a rapid transformation (think ROGD). Cis people have this conception of transness as a change as in you used to like being a girl but now you’ve changed your mind but I simply didn’t have a choice on my gender before. Then, I realized I did, and then I asked myself questions, and then made other choices, and now I’m here and look like this. A lot of older TERFs say things like “I fear if I was young now, I would’ve transitioned.”
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition.
(JK Rowling)
This is deeply sad for many reasons but also incredibly revealing. Of course, it’s fear-mongering, because these women believe transition is much more accessible than it actually is - but if we were to take them at their word - they’re saying that the very existence of a gender clinic in the closest big city and I don’t know, trans people on Instagram would be enough to convince them to transition - I mean, then like Yes. Perhaps you would have. And perhaps you find this new body strange and compelling and beautiful. What then?
It’s telling that the very people who argue that gender and/or “assigned sex” is something irreversible and biologically predestined feel their own gender would unravel in a world where it wasn’t violently socially mandated.
The more advanced modern TERFs like Abigail Shier defend themselves against accusations of transphobia by saying something along the line of “well there’s real trans people and I respect them who I don’t respect are these young women pretending to be men and men pretending to be women in order to go to like rec center feminism events.”
On Bari Weiss’s substack, Abigail Shier writes:
The book is not about whether trans people exist. They do. And it is not about adults who elect to medically transition genders. As I have stated endlessly in public interviews and in Senate testimony, I fully support medical transition for mature adults and believe that transgender individuals should live openly without fear or stigma.
But, we get quite quickly to:
“But then, a few months ago, a pediatrician reached out to say that she also thought it was insane that minors were self-prescribing testosterone and that she agreed that her profession was negligent in unquestioningly “affirming” the sudden trans-identification of teenagers...I wrote back as politely as I could: That’s just not good enough. You are a doctor. We aren’t the same with regard to medical scandals. ...But you can appeal to your own authority. You took a Hippocratic oath. If you see young patients in harm’s way, you have an obligation to do something.
The same is true for other professions. If you are a teacher, you entered the profession in order to expand young minds. If you are watching them being warped, it’s your responsibility to fight that. If you are a journalist witnessing lies being spread by your colleagues, it’s your responsibility to stand up for truth.”
I read at a pretty average pace and it took me five minutes to get from “Trans people should live openly without fear or stigma” to Shrier seemingly enlisting teachers to “fight” “young minds” being “warped.” Of course, the warping is just the Being Trans. I won’t take the time to debunk every one of these claims but “self-prescribing” links to a Buzzfeed article about an Australian doctor who believes the WPATH standards of care (which stipulate that patients must be at the legal age of consent to receive hormone therapy - 16 in Australia/18 in Georgia) pose safety risks for kids who feel they’re ready to start hormones. Prolonged use of blockers can affect bone density and mental health. The article does not contain the words “self-prescribe,” nor does it advocate for any hormone treatment to be decided by anyone other than a doctor.
When I start to think about this stuff too long, my brain starts to feel fuzzy, and I feel distant from my life and myself. I get so caught up in debunking their various claims and lies and misdirections that their tactics begin to work, or worse, I begin to empathize with them. The Rowling quote above always gets me because Of Course, I was her, still am, to a degree. Caught up in a cycle of bad eating disorders and self-harm and inward feelings of loneliness and hatred, this is my world, it seems, on worse nights. Rowling projects a “transition cures all” mindset onto young trans people because she too, wished and probably still, wishes for the simple Way Out I spoke of last week. Who’s to say if Rowling would’ve gone on T or changed her pronouns or name or wore different clothes or whatever else if she had been born thirty years later. To me, this seems beside the point.
I’m not going to finish the story about my Father. Perhaps, that can be just for me, a private understanding of the unraveling of a parent-child relationship. Perhaps, I still don’t know how to talk about This. It’s been two years this August and I still have nightmares where I’m running toward the car with my keys in hand and a narrow crevice the exact width of my body swallows me whole until I’m running again, toward a train-tracked Western North Carolina overcast sky. I never reach it, the place I’m headed towards. I keep running.
Last March, the pandemic hit, everyone from school went home. Suddenly, most of my friends, my professors, my dumb little queer life was swallowed into wearing two masks shuttling takeout orders to a Tesla’s passenger-side door. Saddled with mounting grief, deep-rooted trauma, and The Rest of My Life for the first time, it felt, since, well maybe never. I got scared. I retreated into myself, turned back. I still don’t like the person I was then. This is not to say I haven’t since built myself a good life, filled with kind, caring people I love and trust. The best ones have stuck around and I’m beyond thankful for that. What I’m trying to say, is when I read things like Shrier’s book, or JK Rowling’s transphobic essays, I find exactly what I’m looking for. Someone to mimic and amplify this small voice between my ribs that insists everything I love is false or invented. If the person I know myself to be isn’t true, what else is lost? TERFdom is a place I go when I need someone to buy all the sad bullshit I’m selling about my life when the small voice is extra loud.
Of course, I know it’s real. All of it. Even the really bad parts, the good parts, the Georgia sunsets, all the stuff I wish I hadn’t said, the just-bathed white dog asleep in the afternoon sun. I know all of it is there, that whole big life, waiting for me. Perhaps I’ve overstayed my welcome in TERFdom. I hope to leave it behind, maybe even here. Thanks.
Yours,
HG