Twenty one years ago I lost my father. The hardest part of losing him is that he didn’t die. One day he walked out the door and never returned. Sometimes I allow myself to imagine how much easier it would have been if he had died. My grief would have welled to the surface and exploded out. Instead, I carry my grief with me every day.
Twenty one years ago my father became the woman he believed he should always have been. I recall my initial response to be “you mean Dad’s gonna wear a dress?” It’s easy to forget that at this point I was 16 years old, in my final year of high school and living on the outskirts of Brisbane.
I couldn’t begin to imagine how the act of my father changing genders would affect my life, but that revelation all those years ago was like the experience of being in the proximity of a bomb blast, metaphorically speaking. Our lives were now littered with carnage, both in front and behind, and there’s an after-effect that will reverberate for generations to come.
I’m 37 years old now and for the first time in 21 years I have found a voice to speak about my experience and the isolation I have felt. It took twenty years to meet another person like me. A child of a transgendered person. This was not through lack of trying. At 18 I lived with Karen (previously my Dad) and it was a time unlike any other. At best I would describe myself like Alice, falling down a hole, wide-eyed into a wonderland. A nightly cabaret of men and women, blurring the lines of gender and sexuality. And booze, rivers of booze.
I too questioned my gender and my sexuality and began to traverse the duplicitous terrain of letting people in on the unconventional family I had. It is fair to say that their responses were sometimes nonplussed, but the vast majority of my friends at the time did not think twice. Yet I was still alone. There was no-one like me.
By then the realisation that my father was no more hit hard. Some have argued that no matter what Karen is, she will always be my father. There is no truth in this for me. I have no father and to say that I do denies Karen’s existence.
The relationship we have today is not that of a father or a son, in my mind it is not even parental. To be honest I have no label to give it, except to say that we are very close and share a bond that is loving and robust. To continue to call her Dad would be tantamount to wishing for Karen’s demise.
Because I understand that in the end, it was Karen or suicide.
Coming to terms with the loss of my father has been incredibly difficult. There has been a loss of identity. Questions of my masculinity, the loss of that important social figure at my wedding and the birth of my son and the fading memory of him, his voice, his body and his presence.
Read more at The Guardian
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This is so interesting because it goes to the heart, the essence of these matters. What matters to kids is so significantly different than what matters to adults. Because of the fact, the inescapable reality of those long years of complete dependency, biology is always at the forefront of existence for children. They simply can’t ignore it the way adults can. It wasn’t a man, for eg., that gave birth to them. Adults can forget that — kids cannot. But it goes deeper than that. The reality of biology for the existence of a person, a reality that seems dispensible when other realities, like social life, or feelings, or profession or just other facts, is fixed in the heart, the reactions, the intransigent feelings of a child. They simply don’t have the choice to believe biology is malleable. Adults can convince themselves that everything, physics, ecology, biology, everything, all the laws of existence, can be played with and re-invented to suit the individual. Children simply do not, and literally, cannot, have that mindset. Even if they try, they can’t. This story highlights the reality of being born human. He lost his father — and he didn’t lose him against his father’s will, as death would have indicated. He lost him by his father’s own choice. His father put his own well-being ahead of his son’s need, so there is pain within pain, grief and then the grief of it being his father’s own choice to deprive his son of what his son needed. We must not blame Karen however, because s/he was tormented by feelings our society told her could be alleviated. When you’re in pain and your society tells you it can both ease the pain and that the ‘damage’ to your child will be minimal or non-existent, how can you not take the offered bromide? This piece exposes the seductive evil at the heart of our society — that is, that all pain can be fixed and no one suffers as a result. Karen bought that falsehood and we can see just how alluring it is. Who, when in pain, wouldn’t buy the lie? It’s like your doctor offers you Thalidomide and tells you it’s perfectly safe and you’ve been suffering for like, three months with 24/7 nausea — who wouldn’t take it? Or you have massive spinal pain as the result of a car accident and your doctor offers you a ‘safe’ opiod, telling you it has been proven to be non-addictive. That’s kind of what this group is up against, something so compelling, so beyond the wildest dreams, historically, of any other time in history — the belief that pain can be cured and sacrifice isn’t necessary and no one is hurt by meeting what feels like, intractable, powerful desires. Thanks for your story!