worries about non-acceptance
May. 9th, 2004 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashThis coming weekend, I'm going to a Renfaire up in Santa Barbara, thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
roon's enticement and providing of free tickets. I conned ultraken into being my way there (the joys of being carless, yknow? always begging rides. sigh.) He may well need such a thing more than I do after a couple weeks of pre-E3 crunch time. At the very least, it's certainly a scenic drive and something different from the usual ritual of hanging out on a weekend and having supper.
After talking with my mother about this and that today, I mentioned this. And the fact that there was a threat to stuff me into a bodice while there. And the fact that I was thinking of going out in a dress anyway. She pointed out that I might want to warn Ken about this intent.
I did; I phoned him at work and talked about this a little.
Not only is he cool with it, but he's curious as to what I look like nowadays when not hiding behind boy clothes. And this is someone I was initially worried about coming out to because he's religious, and politically conservative. It took him a month or two (I think) to deal with it, but he's been pretty much all for it since seeing how much happier I've been.
I keep on bracing myself for people to have bad reactions to my transition. They keep on never happening. It's such a non-issue with all my friends, even the ones who've known me as a boy for years.
On the other hand, one of the this and thats I discussed with my mother is something as yet unresolved. For years, she'd have photos taken of me on my birthday and/or Christmas. A couple of years ago, she came to the conclusion that I was mostly done growing and changing, and we stopped doing this as often. Every five years, she settled on.
And then it turned out I was far from done growing and changing, because a couple years later, I came out to myself, then to my mother.
What makes this interesting is who'd been taking these photos for the past ten or fifteen years. My godfather. (No, not like the Mafia thing. The original meaning of the word - someone assigned to see to your spiritual, churchly growth around the time of your baptism.) Whose day job was being an engineer, and hobby-turned-semi-pro was photography. The photos were nicely relaxed because I knew him, and was comfortable with him; he'd been my father's friend since before my parents met. Mickey and Beverly never really took the godparents thing too seriously; they had their own kids to raise (three daughters), my parents were pretty irrelegious... it was more an acknowledgment of the friendship than a real commitment to Be My Parents In Christ.
Nowadays, he's a lay official of the Roman Catholic church.
I don't know the particular attitudes of different divisions of Christianity to queerness in general, but I can just see all kinds of potential problems here. It might be better for everyone involved if he's simply stopped the photography as being a deacon takes over his not-at-work commitments. Because if we go get photos of me taken by someone else, and he finds out, there will be angst, and there will quite probably be angst over the obvious conflict of a deacon being a godfather to a semi-pagan transgendered queer dickgirl. And I don't want to ever show up on film as a boy again if I can help it.
My mother said she was going to get in touch with Beverly sometime soon and find out if Mickey's still doing photos. And if he is, then she gets to draw them out on opinions of queerness, and trans issues, and decide... my general attitude towards being out around New Orleans is that it's a non-issue to me. I'm out to my friends there, I can be myself when I hang out with them while visiting home. The relatives? The relatives mostly never understood me anyway, and will probably hassle Mom about 'letting' me do this endlessly if I'm out; I can stand tying down my boobs and lying through my teeth to Grandma for about ten or twenty hours of an entire year. I leave the decision on outing me to relatives to her, because it will be entirely her who catches any flak on it.
It's a little different, perhaps, with Mickey and Beverly. Because they were good friends with my father. Because I wonder how much his opinion on this would mirror Dad's. Because they were fully aware that I was a weird, geeky kid, and thought it was cool. And were all for me going off to LA to be an animator. If religion-driven intolerance rears its ugly head, it's going to be a hell of a conflict between them being glad that their old friend's kid is happy with herself for the first time in decades, and being horrified that she's, well, a she. I'm worried that coming out to them might be the first real rejection, and that it'll hurt. A lot.
I might need to come out to them just to know, now that I think about it. Ugh. This bears further thought and worry.
roon's enticement and providing of free tickets. I conned ultraken into being my way there (the joys of being carless, yknow? always begging rides. sigh.) He may well need such a thing more than I do after a couple weeks of pre-E3 crunch time. At the very least, it's certainly a scenic drive and something different from the usual ritual of hanging out on a weekend and having supper.After talking with my mother about this and that today, I mentioned this. And the fact that there was a threat to stuff me into a bodice while there. And the fact that I was thinking of going out in a dress anyway. She pointed out that I might want to warn Ken about this intent.
I did; I phoned him at work and talked about this a little.
Not only is he cool with it, but he's curious as to what I look like nowadays when not hiding behind boy clothes. And this is someone I was initially worried about coming out to because he's religious, and politically conservative. It took him a month or two (I think) to deal with it, but he's been pretty much all for it since seeing how much happier I've been.
I keep on bracing myself for people to have bad reactions to my transition. They keep on never happening. It's such a non-issue with all my friends, even the ones who've known me as a boy for years.
On the other hand, one of the this and thats I discussed with my mother is something as yet unresolved. For years, she'd have photos taken of me on my birthday and/or Christmas. A couple of years ago, she came to the conclusion that I was mostly done growing and changing, and we stopped doing this as often. Every five years, she settled on.
And then it turned out I was far from done growing and changing, because a couple years later, I came out to myself, then to my mother.
What makes this interesting is who'd been taking these photos for the past ten or fifteen years. My godfather. (No, not like the Mafia thing. The original meaning of the word - someone assigned to see to your spiritual, churchly growth around the time of your baptism.) Whose day job was being an engineer, and hobby-turned-semi-pro was photography. The photos were nicely relaxed because I knew him, and was comfortable with him; he'd been my father's friend since before my parents met. Mickey and Beverly never really took the godparents thing too seriously; they had their own kids to raise (three daughters), my parents were pretty irrelegious... it was more an acknowledgment of the friendship than a real commitment to Be My Parents In Christ.
Nowadays, he's a lay official of the Roman Catholic church.
I don't know the particular attitudes of different divisions of Christianity to queerness in general, but I can just see all kinds of potential problems here. It might be better for everyone involved if he's simply stopped the photography as being a deacon takes over his not-at-work commitments. Because if we go get photos of me taken by someone else, and he finds out, there will be angst, and there will quite probably be angst over the obvious conflict of a deacon being a godfather to a semi-pagan transgendered queer dickgirl. And I don't want to ever show up on film as a boy again if I can help it.
My mother said she was going to get in touch with Beverly sometime soon and find out if Mickey's still doing photos. And if he is, then she gets to draw them out on opinions of queerness, and trans issues, and decide... my general attitude towards being out around New Orleans is that it's a non-issue to me. I'm out to my friends there, I can be myself when I hang out with them while visiting home. The relatives? The relatives mostly never understood me anyway, and will probably hassle Mom about 'letting' me do this endlessly if I'm out; I can stand tying down my boobs and lying through my teeth to Grandma for about ten or twenty hours of an entire year. I leave the decision on outing me to relatives to her, because it will be entirely her who catches any flak on it.
It's a little different, perhaps, with Mickey and Beverly. Because they were good friends with my father. Because I wonder how much his opinion on this would mirror Dad's. Because they were fully aware that I was a weird, geeky kid, and thought it was cool. And were all for me going off to LA to be an animator. If religion-driven intolerance rears its ugly head, it's going to be a hell of a conflict between them being glad that their old friend's kid is happy with herself for the first time in decades, and being horrified that she's, well, a she. I'm worried that coming out to them might be the first real rejection, and that it'll hurt. A lot.
I might need to come out to them just to know, now that I think about it. Ugh. This bears further thought and worry.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-10 12:00 am (UTC)What really gives me pause is the whole deacon thing. The reflexive connection in my mind (despite knowing that many people who're quite glad for me regarding my transition are various forms of Christians) is that Christianity = queer-hater, given that most of the people openly campaigning against queers are doing it on religious grounds...
no subject
Date: 2004-05-09 11:45 pm (UTC)1) I'm Catholic
I'm not really sure of any official stance on transgendered folk in the Church. Catholics condemn homosexual sex, not homosexuals, with the same level of 'sin' as unmarried sex, or sex with your wife and using technological contraception (Don't even get me started on that one, gah).
This leads to
2) I'm a pretty bad Catholic, for reasons you can probably guess at. *chuckle* So don't take my statements as being 100% factual.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-10 12:15 am (UTC)But on the other hand, a discussion like that would probably turn into a horrible downward spiral when the whole priest/altar boy thing got opened up.
Coming out to my 'aunt' and 'uncle' (as I always called them, growing up) will certainly be interesting. For everyone involved.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-10 12:25 am (UTC)I only go to Catholic services, because that's what I feel most comfortable with and I've tried many 'flavors' of Christianity.
I hope it goes okay. *hug*
no subject
Date: 2004-05-10 04:23 pm (UTC)We hate the sin, but not the sinner. Did I just read that right? I suppose this is better then, we hate the sin, stone the sinner, but geeze!
Someday, I hope the spirit of the children I probably won't have will be able to come back and laugh at how silly everyone has been... of course, I'm hoping the world doesn't become as bright as the sun before then as well.
no subject
Date: 2004-05-11 12:14 pm (UTC)Going the opposite direction, MLK said something about a lot of prejudice being just ignorance; once racists see that Black people aren't the monsters of their imagining, then a lot of them stop being racists.
So yeah. Someone needs to be pretty hardcore about their ideology to let it blind them to the worth of good people they know.