Atypical Trans Late Bloomer

We don’t do that, which became: We don’t allow ourselves to do that. And be “we” I mean my family, and by family I mean my parents and siblings. Sidebar on “family” How Family Is Used to Excuse the Inexcusable Family is a construct, and like all constructs, it covers for something darker, and more complex, than we’d like to admit. Many families use words like “love” and “loyalty” to mask all matter of toxicity and aggression, both passive and overt. … invoking “the family” becomes a means of blunting anger, of sublimating resistance. When an authority invokes the family, it’s often to subjugate the subordinates and get them to willingly conform with “less”. I was raised believing that WE don’t do THOSE THINGS. Drugs, children out of marriage, major crime, blasphemy, second families, divorce, homosexuality. And yet, my cousins, aunts and uncles did those things, but we believed WE didn’t do those things. I thought it was a statement of virtue. I didn’t think we were elite or...

Assignment: describe yourself before and after your Dad and your Priest. Before my Dad and the Priest. I would place this at when I was age 2.5 years, because that’s when the beatings started. I was happy, enthusiastic, and curious. I had a big mop of curly hair like Harpo Marx; I greeted days and people with brio. I was happy in the house and out of the house. After my father started beating me, I was careful and wary. He started calling me Crisco (fat in the can) which I hated. He cut my hair short at home when my mother was out. Decades later, he told a sibling: when [me] was two and a-half, he had beaten me like he beat prisoners in the station house. He was a cop. Being outside was better than inside, being with others was better than being with my parents. I learned my block and my neighborhood. I still had most of the core of myself when I was out. I became a reader because he respected reading. Years later he’d say I had my head in the books too often, and why did I ...