Looking back on my middle school and early high school yearbook photos, I see a sad and trapped individual fighting for the courage to exist as themself.
It’s actually kind of comedic in retrospect — it was so obvious that I had no idea how to be a girl, except I was the only one who saw that truth. I would look at the girls around me and mimic their behaviors. Their crushes, the popular brands that were being worn, how they styled their hair, how they talked to boys and how they existed as girls.
When I see my school pictures I do not see myself. It reminds me that most of my memories have been lived in a body completely dissociated from my soul — and that used to make me so angry and bitter. I was so sad all the time, and it reflected in how poorly I treated those around me.
Contrary to what most would probably think, looking back on those pictures also brings me immense gratitude and pure bliss— that never again will I have to live a life that doesn't belong to me. No longer am I forced to navigate through the world as someone else, and I feel a strong sense of power that I was able to get to where I am. No longer do I hate myself so much that I project that on those around me. It doesn’t make me sad to see how different I look, it fills me with immense pleasure that I was able to tune in enough with my soul to accept who I was, despite how genuinely scary and hard it is to exist as a trans person.
After I told my dad I was getting top surgery and had been on Testosterone for a year, he responded with a plethora of videos burning all my middle/highschool photos in a bonfire in his backyard. Attached to the videos was a pitiful attempt to poetically disown his child, speaking about me as if I had died. From claims that I was mutilating my body, to praying for my salvation, each line was a reflection of his realization that he no longer had control over me, my body, or my future. That I now lived for myself, not him, and it was his responsibility to accept that —not mine.
The truth is, my father’s refusal to accept my existence is reflective of far more than just transphobia. My father, like many fathers of daughters, had children because he wanted to mold them into a tiny version of his sad and insecure self. I was useful to him only until I became sentient and stern enough to be my own person, outside of him, and outside of the idea of who he wanted me to be.
I need it to be understood that I write about this not for sympathy or pity, but because, if anything, his incredibly heinous and psychopathic response is what affirms to me that I am exactly where I need to be. That my ability to be myself in a real and true way, no matter how deviant from the norm it is, is so threatening to somebody as broken as he is.
The experience of “losing” my father (though I really never considered him one), has allowed me to no longer crave the validation or acceptance of others. I am incredibly used to the feeling of being perceived in a different way than how I see myself, and for much of my life it consumed me everyday. It took my father being narcissistic enough to choose a “dead daughter” over a relationship with a happy and healthy kid for me to realize that how others perceive me is nothing but a reflection of themselves.
I hate my father, and I always will. I want nothing to do with him and I expect that to never change. I do, however, from the bottom of my heart, hope that he recognizes that he deserves to feel the security and freedom in himself that I finally feel within myself. That he does not have to hate everyone and everything around him, or be perpetually insecure and scared of things that are different. I hope he one day finds the courage to be himself like how I was forced to.
I don't know why I wrote about this, it just felt right. I don't know much about my family and I really don't have relationships with many people in it anymore, and although the absence of my father doesn't make me “feel bad”, it pisses me off. It’s not fair that he made me such an angry child my whole life and then got to just absolve himself from any responsibility and essentially disappear into thin air. It's not fair that I get blamed for not talking to him anymore, and have to see others in my family maintain contact with him after what he did.
It’s not fair that he has brainwashed my brother into his same disgusting and violent beliefs. It angers me that he raised me to bend the rules and then disowned me when I did exactly that. And it angers me that I never get to tell him how much it hurts because it makes me look weak. I like to say I don't think about it or care anymore, but deep down I know that is a lie, so I guess writing about it helps me release and remind myself that everything I accomplished and am today I did on my own. I am me because of what I did for myself, and none of that credit is owed to him.
I want to end this on a happy note but I think it's too nuanced for that. Five days from now, I will be a year post-op from my top surgery. In this past year I have never felt so comfortable, happy, and secure in myself. No longer do I look at pictures of myself or my reflection in the mirror and see someone completely different. I finally see myself, and feel like myself. No longer do I wake up every morning angry and sad, wanting to isolate myself from the outside world. My scars are proof of my existence and of the life I have lived, and I feel so oddly grateful and bittersweet that my father will never be able to see them.
Nobody can take away my transness or my existence, whether it's a politician, or my father, and that gives me a sense of power more than many people will ever be lucky enough to understand. Being trans is both incredibly frightening and beautiful, and every picture of me throughout my life is a reflection of that experience.
