My mother never brought it up. We did not speak of it. I felt too scared to say one more word about it. In the car I had watched my father’s heart crack, a wave of emotion I’d never seen, a dismantling. You did a horrible and hurtful thing, I’d think. I knew I could never cause him to feel such a way again, or anyone. So I kept going back and forth between households. That seemed to smooth things out.
I can see now how moments like these—between me, my mom, my dad—silently paved the way for my future relationship dynamics. I would throw the feelings aside, worried I’d get in trouble for having them, remaining in situations a lot longer than I should have, hide my truth. Inevitably, this would always lead to more damage and more harm. Like the many ways in which I have been difficult for people—my abrupt shifts, shutting down mixed with the instinct to run, being dishonest because I felt so irrationally frightened.
It is fruitful to dig through the muck.
It was not too long after my thirtieth birthday that I made the decision to stop talking to my father for a while. My ability to suppress my feelings waning. A mental storm, a collision. I’d unconsciously chipped away to reach the bottom. For the first time I was acknowledging my transness out loud, allowing this knowledge to breathe without obstruction, brief moments, sparks, not just grazing it, but holding. This understanding did not stop at my gender. Finally, I was on the verge of disentangling myself from toxic family dynamics, at last able to find the words.
I sent him a short and direct email stating I needed space and wouldn’t be able to come home for some time. I had never given myself permission to speak up to him, to own what I’d experienced in that household and its lasting impact. His response was as I expected—not good. He didn’t seem capable of taking responsibility for anything I shared.
My father had acknowledged Linda’s treatment of me back in my early twenties when I brought it up over coffee. There had been noticeable distance. I was on a rare trip home, and my father and I were in a small, intimate café on Hollis Street in downtown Halifax.
“It feels like you don’t miss us, that you never want to see us,” my father said.
Looking down at my double Americano, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Even when my stepbrother and stepsister’s father died, I didn’t travel back for the funeral. In therapy, I couldn’t explain why, I had no answer. I lay on the floor, crying, my stomach full of nails, a sharp pain, an unknown origin. It felt physically impossible. Understandably, my siblings may have never forgiven me for that.
“I feel so disconnected from you,” he followed up.
I had no plan to have the conversation, it just came out.
“Linda was pretty horrible to me when I was growing up and it has affected me and I’m finding it hard to be home and around you,” I said.
He wasted no time, agreeing instantly. I was not yet capable of approaching my father about other things. Showing hints of relief, he was able to pin it all on her.
“Why did you not do something if you knew?” I asked.
“I did. Ninety percent of our fights were about you.” He echoed the line from my childhood.
I felt a glimmer of hope—the hold that family has over us. But then he told Linda about our conversation, which caused an eruption. She quickly wrote me a long letter, an apology, which was less of an apology and more of an explanation, outlining all of the reasons that caused her hostility. I was a kid. Reasons that ultimately had nothing to do with me.
“You should forgive Linda,” my dad said to me forty-eight hours later. “It would be good for you.”
I sunk. I had to say it. That’s how it felt at least, an obligation. For them, but mostly for him. It’s that moment—the body freezes, autopilot, the words ejected for a steady landing. Like writing those birthday cards, a hand not my own. We cried and hugged.
Linda said she was sorry, that she loved me.
“I forgive you,” I said. But I didn’t, not yet at least.
But by the time I was thirty, my father’s means of control faltered. Suddenly, I could see through it, aghast I hadn’t before, shedding the reflex to throw my feelings aside, to make myself disappear.
I haven’t spoken with my father in five and a half years. When I first sent an email saying I needed space and wouldn’t be able to come home for a while, it did not go over well. There have been unpleasant email exchanges from time to time, but that has been the extent of it. Not long ago I suggested we Zoom with a moderator, a family therapist of some sort, but initially he refused, saying he would only meet alone. Eventually, he agreed, but the conversation felt frustratingly similar to our previous interactions, without much resolution.
To be frank, it is hard to imagine a relationship again. Dennis and Linda support those with massive platforms who have attacked and ridiculed me on a global scale. Regardless of everything before, it’s painful to think that someone who parented you could support those who deny your very existence.
I will receive enormous waves of hate, not because I made harmful jokes, but because I am trans. It often seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than they do to support trans people as we deal with an onslaught of cruelty and violence.
When Jordan Peterson was let back on Twitter after he’d made a horrific tweet about me, he posted a video, just his head filling the frame. Staring menacingly into the camera, he said, “We’ll see who cancels who.” My dad “liked” it. I have no clue what my father thinks of his son at this point, what he says, how he explains my absence. I do know that I am blamed, the one who made the mess, that little skid mark.
* * *
The lowest point in my life came after I stopped speaking with my father. The weight of everything I’d grown up with finally hit me, and I was unable to hide. My life has always come in undulating waves, and this low moment was reminiscent of a time when I was nineteen, just as my career was taking off. I wasn’t really living anywhere at the time, no home base. Traveling constantly, I was going from one project to the next, press tours, always alone. The weight of loneliness was taking its toll.
In a gesture of kindness I will never forget, a woman I knew from childhood offered to let me crash at her place in Brooklyn. She had been living between Halifax and Fort Greene ever since she started dating the mother of my high school friend. Her relationship with my friend’s mom captivated me, in a whole league of their own, no restrictions. I remember so clearly meeting Julia for the first time. I was sixteen, on their bedroom floor, my hoodie pulled over a recently shaved head, curled up in a nest of blankets, ready to sleep over. She walked in the room, and I grinned up at her. Her eyes conveyed tenderness, a presence I could trust. She saw the secret we all knew was in me. I sensed she knew it, and in that knowing I could relax. I always felt comfortable and cared for with her.
Julia suggested that I drop the never fully unpacked luggage off at her Brooklyn loft and create a home, a base, a place to come back to between shoots. Less drifting. The loft had two small bedrooms in the rear, and in the space between, she set up two shoji screens that we purchased in Chinatown, creating a little nook for me. I was in and out, traveling constantly for work, but having that foundation to return to, a queer one, was pivotal.
Julia and I were both extremely early risers, she would make strong and mouthwatering coffee, all fancy like on her stove. We’d hit the streets in the morning, barely past dawn, taking the dogs, Scooby and Dolly, on a looping walk around Fort Greene Park. The relationship evolved. I became closer with Julia than I ever was with my friend from high school. I loved hanging out with her, preferred it in fact. Spending such a significant amount of my life around adults from the age of ten onward, I found myself more comfortable in her presence than that of my peers. I could discuss a bevy of topics that I never would with others, including my crushes and queerness.
Julia became one of my best friends, more like family in fact.
Eventually I moved out, ultimately settling in Los Angeles. Still, when I’d travel to NYC for press, we would spend endless time together in the fancy hotel rooms I was put up in. The Regency, the Mercer, the London, the Mandarin Oriental, the Crosby, the Bowery … She was a lifeline to me when I was closeted and continued that role well into my adult life.
When I stopped speaking to my father, I spiraled. I was on the brink, my mental health plummeting. I didn’t want to be in this world anymore. I didn’t know how to be. I called Julia from Los Angeles and asked if she could come be with me, knowing what would happen if I was left alone. My call shocked her—I so rarely asked for help. She dropped everything, took a week off work, and flew to LA.
While Julia was in town we sat among cozy blankets on my living room floor, a protective nest like I’d been burrowed in the first time we met. She helped me nourish my body, she made me laugh. I blabbered away about the same shit on repeat and she listened. It didn’t matter how raw, sad, or enraged I was, Julia let me feel.
In a world where queerness all too often alienates us from blood, I am grateful to Julia, and the family I have chosen. Without them, I wouldn’t be here.