Inside the ROGD Home
the Zen koan of fake family harmony
This is a repost from the Redford Greene substack…
In my current life, at home with both my daughter and my husband, in order to live without daily conflict and turmoil, I censor myself. I never speak my daughter’s name or pronouns—biological, chosen or otherwise. When I need to say something, I must go to her. I don’t shout across the house to her. I don’t talk about her in front of her, as we tend to do in family homes. And I certainly do not bring up gender ideology, queer theory or any of the horrific harms done to gays, lesbians, women and children in the name of Trans that I read about daily.
With my husband, who agrees that our daughter is not a gay man, things are slightly different. I can talk about my fears regarding Carly* but if I go on for too long, he grows brittle and distant. He doesn’t want to travel to the dark places, and he is sure she’ll grow out of it. If I tell him about an article I read, if it comes from someone on the right side of the aisle, he’s not interested. He abhors “right wing talking points” like CRT and groomer, and dismisses them out of hand. So Marcus* agrees with my general take, but not with my “influencers” or my obsession, and he doesn’t share my level of panic.
So now the question is, how do I live in my house with my daughter, whose desires diametrically oppose my own? And how do I coexist with my husband who thinks I’m spewing right wing bullshit?
How do we get along without censoring ourselves?
The answer is, we don’t. If we don’t self-censor, we fight. We’re all shutting parts of ourselves away in order to cohabitate in strained harmony. Marcus isn’t gabbing on and on about the podcasts he listens to. And Carly, for the most part, lays pretty low.
Which begs the next question—
How do we not resent the shit out of each other?
Maybe by taking the position that we’re doing it for something bigger than ourselves—for the family. Call it a code of conduct. Live by the code.
But for what? If it’s not true harmony, then what is it? A mirage? An imitation? A facsimile? And isn’t our daughter attempting to be a facsimile? And now we’re doing it too?
What in the ever-loving fuck?
🤦🏻♀️
It's the same situation in my household. I come from a family of staunch Democrats and my husband is a lone Democrat in a family of Trumpy Republicans. When our kid announced, at first we said "How brave," etc., and then changed our minds almost immediately after doing some research. Our kid has estranged us and is old enough to pursue surgery without our permission, so we live with constant dread. I see my husband spontaneously break out in tears several times a week, and he sees me do the same. But I spend much more time reading about all this and listening to podcasts than he does, and if I use words like "cancel," "woke," or "groomer," my husband gets squeamish, as if I've gone over to the "other side." It's difficult to reconcile having always had Liberal politics with the current cowardice of leaders on the Left. They fear the transactivists more than they fear voters, and that simply has to change!
What a great post. I often presume that both parents are in agreement about the trans lunacy, but (men and women being different) that's probably not the case most of the time. I'm sure my wife and I would not agree completely were we in this position. I would be ready to relocate to another state, take away my daughter's Internet access, and live off grid for a year. My wife would call that an overreaction.
As to the question asked... why do you do it? Why do you keep arguing?
Because truth matters.
Because reality matters.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it best: Lying in order to survive makes you unfree. Only truth can set you free. Live not by lies.