Surgery Recovery, and Colliding Personas

[child_of_the_air]

I don't know when I started filtering what I told my parents about my life. I suppose it was in middle or early high school, when I started masturbating and instinctively knew it was something I wasn't supposed to do and they weren't supposed to know about. But that was something I didn't really tell anyone about, until Sir Grace and I became really close friends in my senior year of high school and I finally had someone to confide in about such things.

Still, the real start was probably at Caltech, where I started to have multiple close friends, developed interests I didn't want to tell my parents about, and realized that I was transgender. By the time I was in grad school, I'd learned to maintain two versions of myself: the real one, and the curated version I showed my parents: straighter, saner, more normal, and more boring.

I didn't tell my parents that I was trans, I didn't tell them when I started taking hormone therapy, I didn't tell them when I started using anti-depressants, and I certainly didn't tell them about my suicidal ideation or other mental health problems. When I did finally tell them about things, I did my best to minimize them: I treated my mental health problems as entirely a thing of the past, I explained about hormones while trying to minimize my transness, and so on.

Up until about a week ago, this had worked fairly well. I had explained to my parents that I was trans, but had let them mostly think of this in terms of my being on hormones, even if that was something they didn't really understand. I'd let them continue calling me "he" and by my birth name, because it seemed like the easiest solution. I'd made sure they never saw me with a purse or in a skirt. And I'd generally made sure that their interactions with my friends were constrained to ones that wouldn't make them too uncomfortable. (And wouldn't make my friends too uncomfortable, either.)

It's hard to say why exactly I did this. Or, more accurately, it's hard to admit why I did it. I'd stopped really loving them, and had transitioned to just wanting to avoid conflict or stressed. That and, especially with me living three miles away and getting to use their car for free and so on, it made a lot of financial and practical sense to be on good terms with them. In any case, it's something that had worked well, and could probably have gone on for a while...until the cancer situation hit.

I hadn't really planned to tell my parents if and when I had the gender-affirming orchiectomy I was looking into getting. It didn't seem necessary or a good idea. But when I found out I had a tumor, it felt like something I couldn't rally keep secret from them. Especially not since there was a possibility of longer-term treatment being necessary. Of course, telling my parents what was going on meant them wanting to be there for my surgery and my recovery. And meant a lot of awkward contact between them and the friends who took me to surgery, and whose house I'm staying at while I recover.

The result of this happening, and happening while I was stressed out by cancer and surgery, and then under the influence of anesthesia and opiate painkillers, was that my two personas collided. My parents saw me wearing skirts (pants weren't really an option with my healing crotch), and they heard my friends calling me "she." What I didn't predict, and probably should have predicted, was just how angry this made them. They found it deeply disturbing, and the fact that they were already distraught by my having cancer only made it far, far worse.

The result was that I ended up getting yelled at for fifteen minutes by my dad about how the friend who came to the surgery with me was a horrible person because she kept calling me "she" in a "heavy-handed" way. There was also some weird anti-Semitism (he asked if she was Jewish and said she was acting "just like a real New York Jew") and homophobia (he said that lesbians are social outcasts, and her being gay was probably why she was reveling in the fact that my queerness was forcing him to join her "island of misfit toys"). And then my mom lectured me on how the friends I was staying with didn't really care about me like she and my dad did, because they were letting me stay with them even though some of them were sick.

I haven't talked to my parents since those conversations happened, and I'm stressed out by thinking about what to do about this. The best option strikes me as trying to pretend the whole thing never happened--which largely worked for the time in grad school where I blew up and wrote a very angry email to them about how upset I am that they had me circumcised as a baby--but I am not sure if it is viable this time.

Advice would be appreciated.

Comments

[sorcyress]

I don't have a lot of useful advice, but I do have a *lot* of hugs.

I would suggest trying to detangle your parents from your necessary life (financial, car) as much as possible in the upcoming time, so that if you have to make a clean break, you can.

I'd also suggest keeping hold of that found family, like the sister you recently ritualized. The blood of the covenent is thicker than the water of the womb. There are people who love you and accept you and know your glory (myself included) and they are who you should hold to.

[alexseanchai]

^^^

[pickleweasel]

This is good advice IMHO, and the first bit is what I was getting at the other day just in more clear language.

Sending love and lots of hugs!

[child_of_the_air]

*hugs back and nuzzles and purrs* Thank you for the hugs! And thank you for the advice, too.

Other than the car, my finances are fairly untangled from my parents...the big issue is my using their car for free rather than owning one myself. I'm disinclined to purchase a car myself unless it's absolutely clear that I have to make a break, though, because it would eat into my income and savings more than I'd really like.

And yes...I am incredibly lucky to have such a large and loving chosen family, and I still don't entirely grasp how it's managed to happen...

[ambyr]

I'm sorry, that sucks. It's possible they'll be less awful about it once they've had time to process it--that's not to excuse their behavior, but surprise and shock and stress tend to heighten people's reactions. But it's also possible they won't.

My only advice--well, other than agreeing with sorcyress's practice advice about disentanglement above--is that it might be worth trying to mentally separate the unified entity of "my parents" into "my mom" and "my dad," because my own experience is that while it's easy to assume my parents share all opinions, they often . . . don't, and deeply emotional conversations tend to work better when I have them one-on-one, and mom and dad don't feel like they need to perform the reactions the other parent expects to see.

[phi]

it might be worth trying to mentally separate the unified entity of "my parents" into "my mom" and "my dad," because my own experience is that while it's easy to assume my parents share all opinions, they often . . . don't, and deeply emotional conversations tend to work better when I have them one-on-one, and mom and dad don't feel like they need to perform the reactions the other parent expects to see.


This is also definitely true for me. although even when my father isn't present, if my sisters are around, my mother still performs the reaction dad would expect, just in case either sister reports back to him. Sigh.

[child_of_the_air]

Thanks for the advice on this. I think it's definitely worth separating them, since their responses--and motivations for those responses--seemed quite different.

[alexseanchai]

Many many hugs.

I want to introduce your parents to ring theory. YOU are recovering from cancer-related surgery, and this is not about THEM. Any stress your situation puts on them is something they need to vent to NOT YOU. (It's also YOUR gender under discussion, but maybe if you frame the whole thing to focus on how their being upset with you over all of this interferes with your cancer surgery recovery, they'll pay better attention.) But then my approach to staying on good terms with transmisic parents worked so well for me I live on the far coast now, so I don't know.

[child_of_the_air]

*hugs back, tightly* *purrs appreciatively* Thank you!

Right, I think I've actually heard of ring theory somewhere! Not certain where or when, though; it took me a while to realize I'd heard of it. But I'm guessing that they don't want to vent about the gender stuff to anyone other than me, because doing so would involve acknowledging that they have a queer freak for a son, and that's not something they want to spread around. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that's how my dad feels about it.

And yeah...your parents sound a lot scarier, honestly, from everything I've heard about them. And I do hope I can make it to the far coast some time this summer, and if I can, I'll definitely poke you about it.



Also, before I forget, I've already introduced you on Facebook, but you should be introduced to my friend https://inlovewithwords.dreamwidth.org/, who is also a huge fan of Miraculous Ladybug.

[alexseanchai]

ring theory

They don't get to put their difficulty coping on you. Neither of them just had cancer surgery. (Yes?) If they don't want to talk about their difficulty coping with anyone who isn't you? That's their problem.

[child_of_the_air]

Fair, that sounds reasonable. Now if only reasonable was a thing they were...

[duskpeterson]

Do you have family members or mutual acquaintances who could intervene with your parents? Because my instinct is that you shouldn't be dealing with this right after surgery and right after you've been diagnosed with cancer. Somebody (not you) should be telling your parents to back away - that this isn't the moment for you to be dealing with family problems. This is a moment when they should be supporting you through your medical trials.

Beyond that, it's hard for me as an outsider to grasp the best path, but if I had parents who had serious queerphobia, but I thought there was a chance that our relationship could survive, I'd enter into family therapy or some informal version of it that brought in a third party.

At any rate, the cat is out of the bag, so unless your parents share your view that silence is golden, it seems likely they'll want to follow up on these revelations.

(I'm writing all this without access to the comments that other folks are saying. I hope you manage to find some bits of helpful advice here.)

[child_of_the_air]

I really should get in touch with my dad's brother about this. He's been supportive of me, and when he came out to my dad as gay, I get the impression my dad's original reaction was problematic, though they're on better terms now. I ought to update him on things, anyway, especially since he's a cancer survivor himself (prostate).

I suspect that family therapy isn't an opinion, given my parents' general disapproval of therapy as a concept. It's plausible that I will be able to have them just not talk about it again because discussing it makes them uncomfortable. If not, though, I'm not sure....

[duskpeterson]

"I really should get in touch with my dad's brother about this."

That sounds like a great idea!

[child_of_the_air]

I did so, and he had a talk with my dad. My dad didn't acknowledge that the talk happened, though, so no idea if it changed anything.

[calledtovienna]

*hugs*

I don't know what advice I can give, but I think that avoiding emotional entanglement here is fine. If they are willing to pretend this hasn't happened, OK. If they are not, bail out every time it comes up (that you can bail out on) with nice excuses like "not feeling well", "got to run" etc.

There is a time to fight, but it is much better when you are not financially dependent on the other party and can just withdraw your participation and cut them out of your life (at least temporarily).

(This is Ekate BTW).

[child_of_the_air]

*hugs back*

Thanks for the advice...that largely feels reasonable to me. I wish I wasn't financially dependent on them, but that doesn't seem viable in the foreseeable future, if ever, honestly.