I've been outed to my parents - whether in whole or in part, I'm not yet sure. The story follows, with advance apologies for my Homeric allusions - I was feeling whimsical.
Sing to me of the woman, Muse, she
of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once
she had escaped
the hollow depths of Boy...
The long-suffering Kaitlyn, kin to the blind seer Tiresias, dwells with her family until she may depart for her university. Cursed by wrathful Poseidon never to come within sight of her lost X-chromosome, golden-haired Kaitlyn languishes within the closet.
Kaitlyn's uncomprehending mother has occasional compulsions to clean house, and she's lately been after her disguised daughter to tidy her room, heavy with the looseleaf remnants of semesters past. Wily Kaitlyn - lazy and impious girl - plots to delay her labor for a score of days, biding time until her return to school. Scheming in her heart, she proclaims, "It'll be more efficient to do it all at one shot when I pack."
As the gods would have it, Kaitlyn's long-suffering mother, grown tired of her daughter's insouciance, sweeps through the bedroom like a storm across the wine-dark sea.
.... enough with the Odyssey stuff, haven't got much more in me...
A few months ago, I'd actually written out a TG to-to list on a sheet of looseleaf, mostly to make myself feel better. I'd written down things like getting my ears pierced, practicing my voice, and finding a support group. I'd forgotten about the list, but somehow my mom found it amongst all my junk while cleaning - and read it. It looks like just a folded up sheet of paper, mixed with hundreds of other pieces torn from notebooks, and yet she choose that one to read
. She apparently read it over,
and then showed it to my father without even telling me. This happened yesterday when I was out of the house, and they didn't say anything about it when I came home.
When I went to my room, I saw the folded-up list on my dresser. I was on the verge of tears imagining that my mom had read it, but though about it for a bit and decided that she wouldn't be reading through the gazillion random papers I had strewn about. I didn't want to think about why it was put there by itself. And nobody said anything about it until today, when out of nowhere my dad asked me (in a really snide tone), "So <male name>, when are you going to get your ears pierced?"
I was petrified, and stoically asked what he was talking about. He and mom then filled me in on the list, and I learned that my abysmal handwriting and their own assumptions about me and ignorance of TG issues had kept them from understanding it entirely. I didn't like what they'd just done to me, and especially didn't want to come fully out to my dad, so I told them that I was bisexual (which is true).
Here's where it gets even weirder. After the bisexual revelation, my mom said to me, "I didn't even know you were having sex." Now, I was in shock from the whole situation, and I wasn't able to figure out what the heck she was on about. I tried to tell her that I was a virgin (thinking it'd set her straight), and she just gave me this blank look, and asked how I could be bisexual then. I went into how I can find people of both genders attractive, and she still wasn't getting it. She asked me, "Doesn't bisexual mean that you've
had sex with both men and women?" At that point, my
dad jumps in with, "It's a sexual orientation he's talking about", which I guess my mom understood, since she stopped talking about my having sex.
Then, my dad says, arrogantly, but completely without rancor, "I choose to think you're just telling us this to be controversial." Now, I'm feeling this immense "WTF?!?" sensation, like I've just fallen down the rabbit hole. I start to press him on the issue, and he tells me flat out that he doesn't want to know, or even think about it. So I drop it, and mentally note how surreal this whole scene is.
No one's said anything about it since. I do worry that they're not as clueless as they seem, because some things on that list were pretty unambiguous - "Find a therapist & endocrinologist" or "Start HRT". I mean, they've
got to know what HRT stands for, since my mom's post-menopausal and had discussed it with the doctor. My writing's not
that bad. But no one's saying anything, and I'm not sure what, if anything, I should do...
