On cis (and allistic) grieving

kiriamaya:

I’ve talked in the past about how cis family members sometimes feel like their relationship with a newly-out trans* person will never be the same, etc. I understand that such people often have to go through a grieving process; a lot of people object to the idea that they should have to do that, but I don’t. I mean, if that’s what they have to do in order to unfuck their ideas about transness, then that’s what they have to do, and the sooner they get it done, the better.

But uhh, I obviously have a serious problem when it’s framed as the trans* person “dying”. (That was how my parents phrased it — “our son is dead and a woman has taken his place”.) I have rather boundless contempt for that idea, because it’s a violent imposition of coercive gender upon the trans* person. What I wish these people would understand is that they’re grieving, not for the person themself, but for their false perception of the person. What they’re grieving for is their understanding of their relationship with the person, which is now shown to be inaccurate.

I’ve connected this before to the kind of grief that parents of autistic children sometimes experience when they realize that their child is, in fact, autistic. Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn For Us” is probably the best article by an autistic person on the subject, and as someone on the spectrum myself, it really resonated with me. A choice passage:

What it comes down to is that you expected something that was tremendously important to you, and you looked forward to it with great joy and excitement, and maybe for a while you thought you actually had it—and then, perhaps gradually, perhaps abruptly, you had to recognize that the thing you looked forward to hasn’t happened. It isn’t going to happen. No matter how many other, normal children you have, nothing will change the fact that this time, the child you waited and hoped and planned and dreamed for didn’t arrive.

This is the same thing that parents experience when a child is stillborn, or when they have their baby to hold for a short time, only to have it die in infancy. It isn’t about autism, it’s about shattered expectations. I suggest that the best place to address these issues is not in organizations devoted to autism, but in parental bereavement counseling and support groups. In those settings parents learn to come to terms with their loss—not to forget about it, but to let it be in the past, where the grief doesn’t hit them in the face every waking moment of their lives. They learn to accept that their child is gone, forever, and won’t be coming back. Most importantly, they learn not to take out their grief for the lost child on their surviving children. This is of critical importance when one of those surviving children arrived at t time the child being mourned for died.

I

Can you see the parallels? As a trans woman on the spectrum, I sure can.

I just wish I could tell my dad: “You didn’t lose a son to transition. You never had a son. This isn’t my fault, and it shouldn’t be my burden.” Would he listen? Would he see past his grief? I don’t know. But while I understand his feelings of loss, it really hurts that he constructs that as “losing” his “son”, rather than recognizing that he doesn’t have one.

I’m prefacing this by stating I am a cis person. When my partner began to transition, I mourned. I mourned for “Harry”, I mourned for the perceptions of others around the life we had planned, for the demolition of my self-imposed gender roles. It was  a profoundly selfish, privileged mourning, please don’t misunderstand, but I feel it was completely necessary for me to  go through to keep from resenting Amy. I tried very, very hard to hide my grief from her because I was genuinely happy for her joy in transition- I was happy she was comfortable in her own skin, in expressing the person she was. I love her- how could I not be? I love her because the *person* my partner is, didn’t change- just the outward expression. My partner’s always been a woman- it just wasn’t outwardly obvious before.

Mourning what could have been is valid. Mourning what could have been at the expense of what is moving forward is not. It takes time. It needs to take time to process through a loss of expectation, of plans, of what could have been. But it is *never* the trans* person’s fault or responsibility that we were expecting something that wasn’t there.  Take time, but not forever. It deprives both people.

(via southcarolinaboy)

Woo!

Today I

a) made my flowered crown for the wedding

b) made a corset lacing for Amy’s dress. I opened up the back and removed the zipper last weekend, but today I sewed in the corset loops and closed the lining.

SO MUCH PRETTY

In Order of the Phoenix, when Molly Weasley tries to defeat a boggart, it transforms into each of her family members in turn, including the twins. But they appear together, because not even in her worst nightmares did she imagine Fred and George being separated.

forgivemeannabelle:

thatblondeeveryonelaughsat:

motherfucking-cunt:

….oh god

I just whibbled, showed my girlfriend, who hid her face, then hit my arm and whibbled “WHY WOULD YOU SHOW THIS TO ME.”

(via thesilencethatfell)

Reblog if you honestly have NEVER sent anon hate.

(via awkwardftmboy)

have-you-seen-my-haggis:

So I just realised. A lot of people, when you say you have a friend on the internet, go “but you don’t know! They could be a middle aged man pretending to be an teenage girl!”

They dont know that most of these people are my RP partners.

And are teenage girls pretending to be middle aged men.

(via knitmeapony)