I have a recurring nightmare that I am visiting my parents, staying in my old room in a childhood home. While I am occupied with something, they steal my clothes and rental car, leaving me stranded and with only my old boy clothes for me to wear. They misgender me and called me by my deadname, pretending like nothing has changed. I feel helpless and afraid, with no recourse to get myself to safety.
My actual relationship with my parents is this: my mother badgers me to call once a month, and we have a quick chat about my wife’s career, what my sister’s kids are doing, and any notable good deeds my parents have done for my relatives or their church. They don’t ask, “Erin, what’s new in your life?” unless it pertains to my job. My parents think of themselves as supportive of my transition - when I first came out I directed them to find a local PFLAG group, which they attended for a bit. This gave them an opening to be interviewed for a TV spot on pride month, where my father proceeded to talk on statewide television about the grief he experienced when I came out from “losing a son.” He had shared none of this with me. He uses the wrong pronouns on the phone when I call, and the only questions my parents ask about transition are from my mother, in the form of “Are you really happy?” Yes, Mom. I’m really happy.
Something that helped me early in transition that didn’t really apply to me directly but bolstered me a bit were Daniel Lavery’s “Let Me Save You Some Time” essays (1, 2), brief pieces on common antipatterns trans people encounter with their families when coming out. As far as I know he hasn’t written about the phenomenon of “supportive in word but actually just tolerant.” This thing where family members pat themselves on the back for checking the boxes of being good little progressives, but fail to acknowledge the humanity of the transitioner and instead treat them as an abstraction. It’s not about caring for the trans person in their life, it’s about getting brownie points and not being seen as a “bad person.”
I think this scenario runs adjacent to a phenomenon a friend of mine has termed “the Void.” Here’s the setup: a trans person is out with cis friends or family members, and everyone is talking about their lives. The trans person mentions something about their transness or transition, hoping to be a little bit vulnerable and get some empathy for what they’re going through. Instead the group goes silent, and then proceeds as if the trans person had said nothing. That’s the Void, and practically everyone I know who is trans has experienced it. One time I had several neighbors over for cocktails, and when the conversation turned to extended family I brought up my aforementioned struggles with my parents. There was a brief pause, and then the woman who was speaking before me went right back to bitching about her mom as if I hadn’t said anything. The Void made me feel like I wasn’t there, but hey, everyone in the group had plausible deniability: they didn’t say anything transphobic!
Hearkening back to my post Between Two Worlds, spending considerable time in groups of people who are majority not-queer becomes more and more difficult for me because of my growing awareness of phenomena like the Void. When talking to my parents, the Void is the region of conversation that they will not cross into or draw attention to, despite my past efforts and willingness to open up. The Void reinforces that by talking about my transness, I’ve done something wrong, and it generates feelings of shame and disgust inside myself. I think the fear in my nightmare is an insecurity I hold that there’s validity to the Void, that I deserve to be ignored. My waking mind knows I deserve better.