I'm not comfortable writing this blog. I really do not LIKE writing this blog. It's a profoundly uncomfortable experience that I am able to tolerate for now because for now, I'm not a big name, it doesn't get a lot of traffic and at the moment writing it pains me less than not writing it.
Does that make it right to write this blog? I don't fucking know, frankly.
I am not going to cite any sources here. Citing sources is the stuff of trying to "prove" something and I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to express myself, to sort my thoughts and my feelings and those things are rooted in PERSONAL experience that isn't on the public record even in cases where there might be a public record of some sort.
Even if there are words for me to link to, those words most likely do NOT capture what I was feeling and experiencing as I wrote them. A record of those words is a record of a final product in some sense and not the inner world out of which they grow.
Genevieve was still a teenager when she contacted me. I no longer remember exactly how old. I want to say she contacted me shortly before her nineteenth birthday.
I knew her six weeks when it became crystal clear to me she was being horrifically abused. She was trying to get out of the abusive household in which she was trapped and I privately vowed to myself that if it's at all possible, I'm getting her out of there.
I was a divorced single mom with a lot of health and financial problems. She was hobnobbing with rich people who had been trying to help her for at least a year and not really getting results.
She was really bright. They saw that and they wanted to help her, but they seemed to think she was some overly emotional emo teen writing angsty poetry because teens are hormonal emotional basketcases.
I no longer remember the phrasing she used but it was phrasing talking about being trans and I realized first, she is not some emo teen. She's more like someone trapped behind enemy lines who needs to be extracted before they kill her and second that thing she keeps repeating about being trans that all her other friends interpret as "emo teen" is rooted in the fact that her parents are horrifically abusive and their latest justification is that she is trans.
It was a teenager on some level trying to ask a question they did not consciously know they had: Do I DESERVE to be this horrifically abused because I'm trans like my parents SAY?
She kept asking if people could accept her or something like that. Like a Christian meme of "can you accept the unacceptable?" or "can you love the unlovable?" because her parents could not accept her nor love her and they framed it as rejecting her desire to "be a girl" but the reality is they had always been abusive and it had nothing to do with her coming out as trans.
I made one suicide attempt as a teen and after that my family backed off. They didn't know how to deal with me. I was a handful, frankly. I always had been and it ramped up in my teens and I wasn't guilty of somehow being a bad kid or whatever, but I did know people around me found me hard to deal with and I did have SOME sympathy for them being uncomfortable and lacking good answers.
But I tried to kill myself because of the friction and them trying to control me and whatever and they decided "I don't get it. I don't know what the HELL to do with this girl. But I also don't want her DEAD." So I got breathing room to be myself after that and I don't regret attempting suicide. It made a positive difference in my life because of the way my immediate relatives reacted in the aftermath.
I guess that's kind of what a lot of kids are hoping when they attempt suicide: It will send a message and people will stop doing x, y or z. All too often, it has no such effect.
Genevieve had attempted suicide at least twice that I know of. She overdosed on pills once and I think cut her arm open another time.
She received NO medical care in either case. The "reason" given: Suicide was illegal where she lived.
They let her just sleep off the pills and I don't know what was done about the cut to her arm. I do know this: Her parents did not react like my family. They did not decide "I don't know how to deal with this girl, but I don't want her DEAD."
They did not back off. They continued to reject her desire to be a girl, continued to treat her horrendously abusively and continued to signal that "We would rather have a dead son than a living daughter."
I didn't expect to get anything in return for helping Genevieve. It was a private relationship between me and her and I did what I did because I felt it was the morally right thing to do and I still believe that.
I was willing to "give it away" and walk away and let her go. I didn't really want anyone to KNOW I had played a key role in her escape. Her parents had some degree of power and money and her other associates had some degree of power and money and I really had no way to guage just how much either camp had.
I did know I was in over my head and didn't want to tangle with any of these people. I had a depth of skill and knowledge on my side and it allowed me to help her get out in roughly six months and then she kicked me to the curb.
She was a mess and that was a large factor in why she kicked me to the curb and I kind of didn't care about being rejected. She no longer needed me. My task was done and she now needed the financial resources of the wealthy people with whom she had been hobnobbing who had been trying and failing to get her out prior to me showing up.
She decided they got her out and I had never done anything for her and I didn't argue it. I didn't want her associates to come after me and come looking for my head on a platter for getting her out. I wanted them to place the blame where it belonged: With her abusive parents.
What I did not expect and did not know how to effectively deal with: Genevieve ran around telling LIES about me to people and it had a much bigger impact on my life than I can explain here or have any hope of proving.
She was scared and she didn't really trust me and she had never known anything but abuse. She was trying to make sure I did not hurt her.
And I had no one I could really talk to about that or any means to sort my feelings or somehow find a path forward and one day on a twitter account I no longer have, some trans individual asked some question and I engaged with it to be able to feel like I could breathe again. And it helped, but she was ugly to me while telling me she was being good to me and some of her followers were ugly to me and I ended up blocking a few people because of that incident.
I no longer remember her name and cannot look it up in the "blocked" list of said twitter account because that account no longer exists. I have no means to try to thank her or apologize or explain or make amends for hurting her because someone hurt me. I wasn't trying to hurt her. I was trying to get some oxygen and try to move on and find some constructive path forward and I eventually did and that exchange played a key role in my ability to do so.
I do not know and never did know even when I was friends with Genevieve what the hell it really means to "be trans." I have no means to separate out the horrific abuse she endured from whatever her "baseline" self was before that.
I've certainly wondered if her "being trans" was really a reaction to the abuse she endured, a statement that "I just don't really want to be me ANYMORE, thanks!" or something along those lines.
What I could relate to is the idea that "There is something very, very wrong with my life somehow rooted in my BODY and other people think I am MAKING SHIT UP and I'm NOT and I don't know how to make my life work because I need OTHER PEOPLE to believe something they don't want to believe about me and that I have no means to somehow prove to them. They just need to take my word for it."
I could relate to that because I was diagnosed in my mid-thirties with a genetic disorder and getting what I often call "a better label than crazy" dramatically improved my life. Being able to say "The invisible thing wrong with my body and life is THIS MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS" and get taken seriously helped me stabilize my health and begin growing healthier even though the world STILL calls me crazy because according to the world people like me do not get well.
I run a languishing parenting blog because parenting is much harder to write about WELL than I naively thought decades ago when I set out to write about the topic. One of my parenting principles was "Deal with the woman in the mirror."
If mom is okay, the kids will be okay, basically. And I think in an ideal world, parents would all get therapy and deal with their SHIT first before making decisions about the sexual and gender stuff of their children.
What's wrong with a lot of LGBTQ folks is not that they are LGBTQ. It's that their parents couldn't accept them and didn't know how to deal with them and did a lot of harm, sometimes "with good intentions" rooted in fear, wanting their child to NOT be LGBTQ because they wanted their child to NOT be the target of a homophobic world, more or less.
So I write a parenting blog more or less for the PARENTS of children like Genevieve -- bright kids with other issues going on who drive their parents nuts. I write that blog in hopes of giving parents better answers than I generally see out there in the world.
I write that blog for parents like ME who were tearing their hair out, didn't know what to do, got tired of hurling themselves on their bed and crying in frustration and would LIKE to be actually good parents in spite of being handed non-standard children who aren't all easy-peasy to raise.
I write this blog for the Genevieves of the world, the non-standard kids whose parents failed to make any attempt at all to find an enlightened way to raise them who are covered in scars, sometimes just psychologically and sometimes both physically and psychologically, and are trying to figure out how to accept themselves when no one else ever did and trying to become functional adults in spite of their parents saddling them with all their baggage, sometimes in a misguided attempt to "protect" them from what they feared.
I talk about things here that I MIGHT have talked about with Genevieve if things had not gone so horribly sideways. It's kind of a private conversation with someone I no longer know, can no longer speak with but it is uncomfortably a private conversation posted publicly, potentially becoming part of the public discourse.
Sort of a repeat of me thinking I had a PRIVATE relationship to Genevieve only to find out she was lying about me and it was having a hugely negative impact on my "public" life and public reputation.
Some issues I fear tangling with and fear I may not be allowed to sidestep should I ever be more in the public eye than I am currently:
I'm a former homemaker. I can kind of see why some women are -- what is that term...TERFs. Trans Excluding Radical Feminists.
I'm not a TERF. I am a former homemaker and Genevieve got more social support than I did from the social group where she and I met and that experience makes me kind of understand why "suburban mom" types and trans individuals end up being enemies in too many cases.
I got burned badly. I can understand why SOME women feel threatened by some other group getting the support it needs to survive.
It's just not the right answer for a long list of reasons.
Does that make it right to write this blog? I don't fucking know, frankly.
I am not going to cite any sources here. Citing sources is the stuff of trying to "prove" something and I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to express myself, to sort my thoughts and my feelings and those things are rooted in PERSONAL experience that isn't on the public record even in cases where there might be a public record of some sort.
Even if there are words for me to link to, those words most likely do NOT capture what I was feeling and experiencing as I wrote them. A record of those words is a record of a final product in some sense and not the inner world out of which they grow.
Genevieve was still a teenager when she contacted me. I no longer remember exactly how old. I want to say she contacted me shortly before her nineteenth birthday.
I knew her six weeks when it became crystal clear to me she was being horrifically abused. She was trying to get out of the abusive household in which she was trapped and I privately vowed to myself that if it's at all possible, I'm getting her out of there.
I was a divorced single mom with a lot of health and financial problems. She was hobnobbing with rich people who had been trying to help her for at least a year and not really getting results.
She was really bright. They saw that and they wanted to help her, but they seemed to think she was some overly emotional emo teen writing angsty poetry because teens are hormonal emotional basketcases.
I no longer remember the phrasing she used but it was phrasing talking about being trans and I realized first, she is not some emo teen. She's more like someone trapped behind enemy lines who needs to be extracted before they kill her and second that thing she keeps repeating about being trans that all her other friends interpret as "emo teen" is rooted in the fact that her parents are horrifically abusive and their latest justification is that she is trans.
It was a teenager on some level trying to ask a question they did not consciously know they had: Do I DESERVE to be this horrifically abused because I'm trans like my parents SAY?
She kept asking if people could accept her or something like that. Like a Christian meme of "can you accept the unacceptable?" or "can you love the unlovable?" because her parents could not accept her nor love her and they framed it as rejecting her desire to "be a girl" but the reality is they had always been abusive and it had nothing to do with her coming out as trans.
I made one suicide attempt as a teen and after that my family backed off. They didn't know how to deal with me. I was a handful, frankly. I always had been and it ramped up in my teens and I wasn't guilty of somehow being a bad kid or whatever, but I did know people around me found me hard to deal with and I did have SOME sympathy for them being uncomfortable and lacking good answers.
But I tried to kill myself because of the friction and them trying to control me and whatever and they decided "I don't get it. I don't know what the HELL to do with this girl. But I also don't want her DEAD." So I got breathing room to be myself after that and I don't regret attempting suicide. It made a positive difference in my life because of the way my immediate relatives reacted in the aftermath.
I guess that's kind of what a lot of kids are hoping when they attempt suicide: It will send a message and people will stop doing x, y or z. All too often, it has no such effect.
Genevieve had attempted suicide at least twice that I know of. She overdosed on pills once and I think cut her arm open another time.
She received NO medical care in either case. The "reason" given: Suicide was illegal where she lived.
They let her just sleep off the pills and I don't know what was done about the cut to her arm. I do know this: Her parents did not react like my family. They did not decide "I don't know how to deal with this girl, but I don't want her DEAD."
They did not back off. They continued to reject her desire to be a girl, continued to treat her horrendously abusively and continued to signal that "We would rather have a dead son than a living daughter."
I didn't expect to get anything in return for helping Genevieve. It was a private relationship between me and her and I did what I did because I felt it was the morally right thing to do and I still believe that.
I was willing to "give it away" and walk away and let her go. I didn't really want anyone to KNOW I had played a key role in her escape. Her parents had some degree of power and money and her other associates had some degree of power and money and I really had no way to guage just how much either camp had.
I did know I was in over my head and didn't want to tangle with any of these people. I had a depth of skill and knowledge on my side and it allowed me to help her get out in roughly six months and then she kicked me to the curb.
She was a mess and that was a large factor in why she kicked me to the curb and I kind of didn't care about being rejected. She no longer needed me. My task was done and she now needed the financial resources of the wealthy people with whom she had been hobnobbing who had been trying and failing to get her out prior to me showing up.
She decided they got her out and I had never done anything for her and I didn't argue it. I didn't want her associates to come after me and come looking for my head on a platter for getting her out. I wanted them to place the blame where it belonged: With her abusive parents.
What I did not expect and did not know how to effectively deal with: Genevieve ran around telling LIES about me to people and it had a much bigger impact on my life than I can explain here or have any hope of proving.
She was scared and she didn't really trust me and she had never known anything but abuse. She was trying to make sure I did not hurt her.
And I had no one I could really talk to about that or any means to sort my feelings or somehow find a path forward and one day on a twitter account I no longer have, some trans individual asked some question and I engaged with it to be able to feel like I could breathe again. And it helped, but she was ugly to me while telling me she was being good to me and some of her followers were ugly to me and I ended up blocking a few people because of that incident.
I no longer remember her name and cannot look it up in the "blocked" list of said twitter account because that account no longer exists. I have no means to try to thank her or apologize or explain or make amends for hurting her because someone hurt me. I wasn't trying to hurt her. I was trying to get some oxygen and try to move on and find some constructive path forward and I eventually did and that exchange played a key role in my ability to do so.
I do not know and never did know even when I was friends with Genevieve what the hell it really means to "be trans." I have no means to separate out the horrific abuse she endured from whatever her "baseline" self was before that.
I've certainly wondered if her "being trans" was really a reaction to the abuse she endured, a statement that "I just don't really want to be me ANYMORE, thanks!" or something along those lines.
What I could relate to is the idea that "There is something very, very wrong with my life somehow rooted in my BODY and other people think I am MAKING SHIT UP and I'm NOT and I don't know how to make my life work because I need OTHER PEOPLE to believe something they don't want to believe about me and that I have no means to somehow prove to them. They just need to take my word for it."
I could relate to that because I was diagnosed in my mid-thirties with a genetic disorder and getting what I often call "a better label than crazy" dramatically improved my life. Being able to say "The invisible thing wrong with my body and life is THIS MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS" and get taken seriously helped me stabilize my health and begin growing healthier even though the world STILL calls me crazy because according to the world people like me do not get well.
I run a languishing parenting blog because parenting is much harder to write about WELL than I naively thought decades ago when I set out to write about the topic. One of my parenting principles was "Deal with the woman in the mirror."
If mom is okay, the kids will be okay, basically. And I think in an ideal world, parents would all get therapy and deal with their SHIT first before making decisions about the sexual and gender stuff of their children.
What's wrong with a lot of LGBTQ folks is not that they are LGBTQ. It's that their parents couldn't accept them and didn't know how to deal with them and did a lot of harm, sometimes "with good intentions" rooted in fear, wanting their child to NOT be LGBTQ because they wanted their child to NOT be the target of a homophobic world, more or less.
So I write a parenting blog more or less for the PARENTS of children like Genevieve -- bright kids with other issues going on who drive their parents nuts. I write that blog in hopes of giving parents better answers than I generally see out there in the world.
I write that blog for parents like ME who were tearing their hair out, didn't know what to do, got tired of hurling themselves on their bed and crying in frustration and would LIKE to be actually good parents in spite of being handed non-standard children who aren't all easy-peasy to raise.
I write this blog for the Genevieves of the world, the non-standard kids whose parents failed to make any attempt at all to find an enlightened way to raise them who are covered in scars, sometimes just psychologically and sometimes both physically and psychologically, and are trying to figure out how to accept themselves when no one else ever did and trying to become functional adults in spite of their parents saddling them with all their baggage, sometimes in a misguided attempt to "protect" them from what they feared.
I talk about things here that I MIGHT have talked about with Genevieve if things had not gone so horribly sideways. It's kind of a private conversation with someone I no longer know, can no longer speak with but it is uncomfortably a private conversation posted publicly, potentially becoming part of the public discourse.
Sort of a repeat of me thinking I had a PRIVATE relationship to Genevieve only to find out she was lying about me and it was having a hugely negative impact on my "public" life and public reputation.
Some issues I fear tangling with and fear I may not be allowed to sidestep should I ever be more in the public eye than I am currently:
- Medical treatment of adolescent trans individuals.
- Legal positions for LGBTQ issues.
- Friction between trans/LGBTQ folks and "suburban moms" for lack of a better term.
I'm a former homemaker. I can kind of see why some women are -- what is that term...TERFs. Trans Excluding Radical Feminists.
I'm not a TERF. I am a former homemaker and Genevieve got more social support than I did from the social group where she and I met and that experience makes me kind of understand why "suburban mom" types and trans individuals end up being enemies in too many cases.
I got burned badly. I can understand why SOME women feel threatened by some other group getting the support it needs to survive.
It's just not the right answer for a long list of reasons.
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see. -- Dr. Martin Luther KngI sometimes speak of the long shadow of my childhood and the dark pall it has cast over my life. I would like fewer LGBTQ people to live in such shadows.