A Trivial Story

Arise, bonfires, blue nights!
We are the Pioneers, children of workers.
Bright years are coming,
The Pioneer’s call:
Be always ready!
(anthem of the Young Pioneers of the USSR)

Bright years were coming indeed.

We, in our twenties, got approved for a permanent resident status as skilled workers, took three plastic storage bags of our wretched belongings and moved oversees to a prosperous country to build a life from scratch away from chronic deprivation. Our oldest, HER sibling, was a toddler back then. The prospects were incredible. Our kids were going to grow free and happy.

We rushed to assimilate. We absorbed the surroundings like PNIPAM sponges.

We bought our house. Our home. A dream once unimaginable has stepped into the real world.

Then she was born. One more source of light of our lives.

Lively, exceptionally smart, very verbal from the get-go, artistic, curious and stubborn. Everything I thought I knew about parenting didn’t apply.

She and I talked and talked and talked. We talked while hiking and biking, talked on the way to swimming and gymnastics, talked while strolling a newborn around the neighborhood.

Something changes around grade one; anxiety, that manifested itself at age four, became a part of everyday life. We talked even more. The topics were different, but the underlying strain, the source of anxiety seemed to be escaping scrutiny and hard to pinpoint.

Was it perfectionism that she had developed? Did I make it worse? Was I still making it worse? I surely contributed to its rise, being of a typical immigrant mindset: to keep it in place, we must run as fast as we can, but to get anywhere we must run at least twice as fast, as the Queen told Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

...We binge read to the kids every night with religious fanaticism, up the point the oldest started college. It was a way to keep our native language strong and talk carefree about everything in the world. The only excuses not to - was fever and a week when the youngest was born. We read Dickens, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Cervantes, Hugo, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Joyce, Kafka, Orwell, Murakami and Swift. Everything that Steinbeck had ever written. Dozens and dozens of the world’s best of the best. I was hoping to raise free thinkers, immune to falling into ideological potholes.

I loved her elementary school! Volunteering in the classroom once a week, going on field trips, talking to teachers, assistants and other parents.

That was when the word “trans” first time entered my everyday life.

2015-2016.

An elderly substitute teacher, a fearless horse rider in her late 70s, had a conversation with another, very left-leaning teacher in front of me. About an Olly turning into a Polly. “It’s pure madness”, the elderly lady said bluntly, “I’m glad I’ll most likely be gone in 10 years and won’t see how it unfolds”.

I approached her later and we had a conversation.

“Are you a person of faith?”, she asked? - “Stick to it, you will need it.”

Oh boy, was she prophetic!

(I don’t know if I have faith anymore, I’m a self pitying mess at the moment).

Junior High was...something.

That was where she learned to be ashamed of our middle class existence. Ecological Footprint Calculator, you know. We dared to live in a freestanding house with running water, no renewable sources of electricity; we generated some trash (not less than our neighbours, probably more, since our family was twice as big); dared to have road trips but no carpool, kinda ignored public transportation, and - wait for it!!! - went on holidays by plane once in 2-3 years. No indulgences left for our climate sins.

Some teachers addressed students as “kiddos”. Or even “my kiddos”. It rubbed me the wrong way. I’d never seen that before.

And then came the pandemic.

We, adults, lost it. We were angry as the country descended into fear and snitch culture. I was verbally attacked every now and then at grocery stores for not wearing a mask. I was more self-absorbed than I’d like to admit.

In the hindsight, we should’ve pulled everyone from their respective schools and home schooled full time. But what if they ended up with inadequate English? That was cowardice whispering in my ear. I went with the flow.

She turned 13. Made social media “friends”. She never posted anything personal though, no photos, artwork only. Kept it open to dad and myself.

Found a new “best friend”, a boy of the same age from abroad. She shared a lot with me. I helped her navigated the bumpy ride of being an adolescent.

...That young man now thinks he is a woman. He has been poisoning himself with estrogen for quite a few years and on his way to his Holy Grail of obtaining a fauxgina. There were zero signs of him having gender dysphoria prior to age 14, but a ton of horrific childhood trauma including sexual abuse and subsequent mental health issues.

High school.

Lots of new friends and acquaintances. One of them called herself “it”, another one was already on testosterone. Supernumeraries pledged their allegiance to the god of queerness.

She became a they/them.

We didn’t know.

She asked her favourite teacher to change her pronouns, but “not in front of parents”.

He didn’t tell me.

He didn’t tell me, despite knowing me very well since the time when my oldest had been his student for three long years. He probably thought it was not a big deal. It felt like betrayal nevertheless. It still does.

She tested waters. A radical haircut, clothes from a men’s department. Jokingly calling herself “one of the boys”. Lots of signalling without actually saying. We miraculously managed to stay close.

Our attempts to constructively discuss critical race and gender theory, the topics she herself had started, didn’t go anywhere. She either listened politely but didn’t give much response, or quickly became distraught and unable to speak.

She graduated.

First year of college.
I got a letter from her. The letter - a bunch of stereotypically worded paragraphs I’m sure every single one of you is familiar with. Something about how she had always known she was a boy. You know. She made up a name that “had come in a dream.” She wanted me to prepare everyone in the family.

I didn’t. I’m not good at allyships of any sort.
I spent the next few days in a haze, trying to assemble my thoughts. We attempted to talk, but I completely lost it, dissolving into tears. I told her I would always support a healthy, whole side of her, not the self-hating and compartmentalized one.
I never told her dad. I don’t want him to look at her with different eyes, to have that excruciating feeling of an invisible axe hanging over his neck at all times.
A year passed. Everything stays the same. She is most likely living a double life, probably using a made-up name on campus. She is overly polite and attentive with us.

I don’t know her anymore.
I feel like we are some sort of a stumbling block on her way to a bright, progressive future.

***

...It creeps into morning consciousness, still fresh and naive, and sucks the life out of it. Pastel colours of a once calm mind turn grey and staticky. A new day, that was supposed to mean new opportunities and mundane magic, is now a pointless stack of minutes and hours, like old gum pulled thin and long.

It collects mothers’ tears, gulps vitality, and steals fathers’ sleep and dignity. It turns them into some unfathomable currency called euphoria. A child in pain trades her wholeness for it.

It doesn’t kill hope immediately; it plays with it for a while, suffocates it almost to the point of death, leaves it breathless, then resuscitates it for a few moments, lets it linger, and the cycle goes on and on. Eventually, something dies out. Myocarditis of the soul?

Its name is Trans.