Do Not Think That I Have Come To Bring Peace To the Earth
(Trigger warning for child abduction/implied sexual assault/murder metaphor.)
Matthew 10:34 – Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
(35) For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
(36) and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
(37) Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; (38) and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. (39) Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Yes, I am well aware that I am taking part of the Bible out of context, (or not). People do it all the time.
My mom has been gentle with me today. She seems sad and apologetic. Walked up wordlessly and gave me several hugs. And before she went to bed, she said, “Goodnight…honey.” Not girl, not sister, not [Female Name]. Just honey. More generally used for girls, but could be unisex. I could tell she chose it carefully.
She will come around. I know she swears she won’t. She swore that about me being a lesbian, too. (That is how I identified at the time, even though, of course, there was more to it than that.) And it took her a good four years before she saw that little gay kids are the same quality gifts from God as little straight kids. I didn’t even believe her at first when she told me that she had changed her position, because it was something of a surprise, and seemed to happen overnight. She pushed against me for four years, then one day, changed her mind. (The Lord had said to her, “Who can make that straight which I have made crooked?”)
So, I might have been a tiny bit harsh with my declaration at the end of the last post that “Your parents don’t love you.” (IE – She doesn’t love me.) In a way, it is true, though. As she said while we were arguing, “I don’t know you! If you say you are a man, then I don’t know you! All the time we’ve spent together has been a lie. You’re telling me that I don’t have a daughter; I have two sons. You’re telling me that you’re not [Female Name].” When she started crying, mourning [Female Name], I tried to hug her. She threw me off and said, “You’re no comfort to me!”
She’s right, she doesn’t know me. If my assigned gender has been a crucial part of how she understood me, then no, she doesn’t know me. There’s a new person, a man, who she has to get to know. Her child. She will love him, because he’s her child. But she will have to get to know him. And she blames him for the death of her daughter. Even though I’ve been me all along; even though I remember everything, and this life has been mine.
There’s an ad for Autism Speaks that I found in Blogdonia, hmmm…some time ago. The video presents Autism as a bogeyman who tyrannizes your “normal” child’s body and brain; inserts his own will over the will of your “normal” child underneath, and destroys EVERYTHING. A demon, if you will. Needless to say, actual people who have autism were greatly offended at integral aspects of their identities being construed this way, as a malady to be cured, and as a demon, by people who don’t have autism, and obviously don’t have any meaningful compassion for people who do.
I was also reminded of this thread, on Feministe. Chally had this to say, about imposed/projected identities, (emphasis mine):
People are that which they understand themselves to be; one ought to respect that a person is what they say they are, accept that and move on from the urge to police. There is not some other real identity buried back there that you can grasp hold of irrespective of what the person concerned says. You cannot fix an identity or change it or correct it, it just is – and trying to do so is particularly problematic in terms of marginalised identities, because that’s a continuation of what the whole world is making a good go of. Trying is undermining not just someone’s experience within the world, but something of their being. It takes some kind of bizarre embarrassment or self-assurance – or higher social placement – to continue to insist on referring and relating to a person incorrectly once they’ve told you otherwise.
All parents expect “normal” children. I think they all fear their children coming out not “normal”, but fully hope for, and expect, normality. When faced with the reality of a child who does not fit their understanding of “normal,” they don’t believe it. There must be a “normal” person “in there” somewhere, and whatever is obscuring this hidden normality that they’ve invested their belief in must be demonized, whatever it is.
I feel sorry for my mother, because she can’t hear what I am telling her. If there is a man “in here,” then that means that a 23-year old man has kidnapped her infant daughter, her two-year-old daughter, her ten-year-old daughter, her fifteen-year-old daughter, even her 22-year-old daughter. A man has sneaked his way into her life and abducted her daughter, and plans to do unspeakable things to her daughter. Ultimately, the man intends to kill her daughter. She’s just a baby/girl/teen, so helpless in the clutches of a man; a predator who wants to live in her body. Carve it up to suit his perverted needs. Destroy her beautiful, natural femaleness and overwrite it with his tyrannical, demonic maleness.
(Go read Asher Bauer’s post “Frankengender“, if you have not done so already; pay particular attention to his criticism of Silence of the Lambs, and also the feminist idea of top surgery as mutilation of “women’s bodies.”)
There’s that possibility. Then there’s the possibility that I’m telling the truth; that I really am a man, that I have always lived in this body, (and what’s more, that this is truly my body, and I have a right to my body); that there is no divided self…only a transgender man, who is built this way because he’s a transgender man, and who is a man because a transgender man is a man, and who wants to be recognized as a man, because doesn’t every man?. That is scarier than the notion of having a daughter abducted and killed. That means that the daughter (the normal child) does not exist, and never has.* All the hopes were false, all the dreams were false, all the projections were false.
Not to mention all the scary implications about the world; about society. The lies run broader and deeper on a larger scale than the interpersonal relationship. Not only was the parent-child relationship based on lies, but all of society is based on lies.
My mom: You’re trying to do away with rules that society goes by!
Myself: [Shrugs.] Yeah?
When my mother first found out I like girls, she said, “I can’t love you up close. You are going to be one of those people who I love at arm’s length.”
Right now, I have to hold her at arm’s length, too. She’s disoriented. This is what I mean when I say do not trust your parents. Love them all you want to, but don’t trust them. Don’t confide in them. Don’t make yourself vulnerable, least of all when they are disoriented this way.
(FaggotBoi said more and better than I can.)
I am trying to remind myself how much I had to go through as a trans person to reconfigure my whole understanding of the world in order to make room for my own self to exist within it. Would I have done that work if I hadn’t had to? I don’t have the most trans-friendly history as far as theories and opinions go. I had been trying to undo my transphobic socialization for only two or three years prior to recognizing my own transness, and I did not fully get it until I had to, and I only had to get it because that was me. I was not making room for someone else; I was making room for myself.
“Couldn’t you just sit on this?” my mother asked. “Couldn’t you just live your life and be you without pushing this? Why do you need to come out, anyway? You couldn’t let things be peaceful, could you?”
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
John 15:18 – “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. (19) If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you.”
*(In my case, the daughter never existed, but I realize that is not the way all trans men understand their pasts.)
(edited at 4:12 pm 21 January to correct a few typos. I’ll fix them as I see them.)
Asher said,
January 21, 2011 at 11:58 am
Powerful post. Thank you for the link.
My father went through a “grieving” process over his “daughter,” which needless to say sucked because ‘Hi I am right here and also not dead and could use your love right now?’ But he is over it. Sorry you’re going through this shit.
southcarolinaboy said,
January 21, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Thank you for reading and commenting, and for that articulate post that I linked. I am glad that your father got over it; all the stories I hear about parents getting over it gives me hope.
Faggot Boi said,
January 21, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Insightful post on the expectation of cis normality. I think it’s incredibly weird how the trans child (in the eyes of parents) gets split into evil doubles. The “known,” familiar, beloved cis child and the uncanny, intrusive, nightmarish, violating trans double who aspires to take the place of the cis child. How trying to convince the parent that there are not two children but just one. And that the nightmarish trans double is actually the real child and the beloved cis child the lie.
southcarolinaboy said,
January 21, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Yes. These ideas all seem so strange to me, though; as strange as what I say sounds to her. I was thinking, “Don’t you see me? Don’t you recognize me??” And no, she honestly *couldn’t.* It’s so clear from my side how this works, and what actually went down, that even though I can understand *that* the good cis child is real to her, I don’t understand *how.* I can’t relate to it.
Yourfriend said,
January 23, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Once again your writing leaves me stunned. I am so sorry you have to go through this. Thank you Faggot Boi (I am so conditioned it was painful for me to type the word faggot; is that a good thing?) for giving my friend hope.
Skewed reality « South Carolina Boy said,
January 28, 2011 at 4:51 pm
[...] body, that is what set her off the other day, and started the argument that I spent the last two posts complaining [...]
Carto said,
February 10, 2011 at 7:22 am
Yeah, this sums it up in (yet) another way – in the end it all boils down to the pig-headedness of some cis people, and how it reveals the emotional and intellectual investment cis people have made in a cis binary system of sex/gender.
it isn’t all of cis, however: my history has had pretty jaw-dropping statements like “Yeah, I always wondered if you really were a man, you didn’t vibe like one (pre-transition)” from regular, probably not at all enlightened cis people. It curious, not every cis person is quite as heavily invested in all of this, although it of course varies with the relative closeness of the trans person involved, too.
southcarolinaboy said,
February 10, 2011 at 11:31 am
Yeah, I think it depends. I have gotten the sense by the way people have addressed me, (hesitating before calling me “sir,” or hesitating and visibly deciding not to say “ma’am,”) that a lot of people who are probably uneducated about trans issues still seem to have some sort of intuition. Sometimes I’ll be interacting with a person and I can tell that they both know “what I was born” and yet what I really am. I suspect that people have an innate knowledge about how this gender stuff actually works and have to learn otherwise as part of cissexist socialization.
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June 3, 2011 at 1:35 am
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A Real Trans Person (Reprise) « South Carolina Boy said,
November 24, 2011 at 2:51 am
[...] So, this morning my ma left a note on the table telling me that she was going Christmas shopping. I stayed in bed as long as I could till I had to get up and get stuff done to go to work, of course. I found her note. She used my boy name. I, of course, snatched it up and put it in my room to keep. These things mean a lot to me. But even though I was happy she used my male name, it’s bittersweet. I know what I’m doing. [...]