<
https://judedoyle.medium.com/being-a-queer-parent-is-terrifying-right-now-a634fafacee9>
"I’ve run out of things to say about myself during therapy. This is not to say
I don’t still need it. I now spend my sessions talking about one and only one
thing: My kid, who is preparing to enter kindergarten. Specifically, I talk
about my fear that I have fucked up my kid’s life forever by coming out.
If you were to ask me why I transitioned when I did, I’d probably tell you that
I did it to be a better parent. I’d point to the studies that say kids do
better when their parents are happy; I’d tell you that I had a mentally ill
parent who drank to numb his pain, and that I vowed never to be too depressed
or dysfunctional to take care of my own kids. At a certain point, I realized
that transition was the only way to get my shit together. Maybe, if I were
alone, I would have found a way to put it off, but I had a child who depended
on me. I had to play it safe.
There is, of course, nothing “safe” about transition or queer families in 2022.
Every day, I see or hear something that reminds me how unsafe it is: I read
about the gay couple who had to shield their young children from an enraged man
screaming “they stole you, they’re pedophiles;” the boy with two moms whose
teachers called him “dirty.” I go online, where there’s a crowdsourced campaign
to call child protective services on a non-binary colleague because they used
the term “emotional labor” in regard to a tough conversation with their
teenager. I go home to Ohio, where my very cisgender uncle — a public school
teacher who’s been supportive of LGBTQ+ students — says that he finally figured
out who’s been sending him all the death threats, but the guy works for the
state, and has connections, so he doubts they’ll stop.
My daughter didn’t choose to grow up in this world. She can’t control who her
parents are. She’ll be more supported at home if I’m not depressed and
dysphoric, but by making myself healthier, I have also put her in the middle of
a culture war. We are not city people. She will not know many other families
like ours, and neither will her classmates. I can’t escape the feeling that I
have created a human life and tossed it out into the world where people can
bully her endlessly over things that were neither her decision nor her fault."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
