Given today’s controversy in the United States regarding Biden accidentally acknowledging trans people on easter Sunday, I have been in thought and reading most of the morning. I stumbled across this article this morning and it floored me. Except for ages, timelines, and the lack of physical violence and conversion therapy, this story could have been written by my parents about me. It is disgusting.
Throughout the entire article the author misgenders their child consistently, but that’s not even close to the end of it. This passage is deeply disturbing, but I believe it’s very important to call attention to the sick thinking patterns that go on inside these peoples’ heads.
During one conversation, when we said we couldn’t use his preferred name and pronouns, he said to us, “Then I can’t guarantee I won’t kill myself.” He eventually went to his room, wailing and weeping profusely. My wife and I were also crying, feeling helpless. Certainly, it’d be easier to simply call him by his preferred name and pronouns. Certainly, it’d be easier to celebrate the things he celebrates.
The parent, recognizing the emotional abuse they are inflicting upon their child and its effects even acknowledges that it would be easier to affirm their child’s gender and not be an abusive asshole. But instead, the author doubles down and adopts a victim complex, “taking up his cross” so to speak of continuing to abuse his transgender child.
When my son thought we hated him, he didn’t realize our love for Jesus (and for him) is greater than he could imagine.
This sentence is deeply revealing and it is the experience of being on the other end of this resonates with me to my core. My parent’s didn’t love me. They love an abstract idea of a straight white christian man that they wanted to create which never existed and never will. When they say “our love for Jesus is greater”, the author is showing the exact same thing my parents did. His own hatred and rejection of his child’s, not only gender identity, but entire self, is way less important than their well being, and is upheld by his professed “spiritual convictions”.
I should note, there really isn’t a coherent anti-trans argument from the Christian Bible. I’ve read and studied the book several times in my life, and it’s hardly concerned with the ideas of gender identity, it’s more about lineages and not eating shrimp, no, you cannot blame what you are on “Jesus”.
At the end of the day, the white american evangelical is an abusive, destructive person who seeks justification for their internal prejudices by manipulating a religion, but it has little to actually to with the religion. It’s the people. The religion doesn’t make them hate, hateful people adopt it as an excuse.
I hope for the child of this author, that they have found a safe and healthy life away from their abusive family with people who love and support them. I know I have. It has taken me years, but I am a happy, successful, woman with a very full social circle and a great life. Sadly, not everybody makes it out of this so lucky.
And for every one or two like me who survives through all of the abuse, the beatings, the torture, and the pain of white christian bigotry, I fear many more don’t get through it.
Sorry for the long post, I will never stop thinking on this topic. As I grow older, I work with younger transgender people in my community with similar trauma, and I try my best to never forget where I came from, and all of those who are still there.
Happy trans day of visibility everybody. If you’re able to, help somebody else, and if you are struggling, please never give up. :3
