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Surgery Recovery, and Colliding Personas
Mar. 17th, 2019 10:03 amI 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.
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.
