Letter to My Sister-in-Law Following the Holidays

You are not helping

You know I love you and your children. I want to have a close relationship with them and be a good Aunt, as my sister is to my children. But you seem to be undermining our relationship by inserting yourself where you don’t belong, after I pointedly asked you not to.

You know Katie, my 24-year-old daughter, is trans-identified. And you know what she has been through since she started medicalizing three years ago – dropping out of college, estrangement from us for a while, multiple trips to emergency room for severe bladder infections. You can see how unhappy she looks now, how furtively she behaves. You can see she is balding and putting on weight. And you know what she used to be like – a beautiful, star student at a top university.

I explained her experience with rapid onset gender dysphoria to you quite a while ago. You said you understood. You seemed to sympathize. I appreciated your kind words but asked you not to get involved – not to try to talk her out of anything but also not to affirm her. I asked that, when you see her at holidays or family get togethers, you simply treat her with the same affection you always do and avoid the name and pronoun minefield.

But you couldn’t do that. You had to affirm her. You had to call her by her “male” name and instruct your grade school age kids, her cousins, to do the same, in front of me. Why are you doing this? Have you done the research and concluded that affirming a mentally distressed young woman in her delusion that, with enough drugs and surgery, she can become a man is a good idea? Please do share that research with me. Did you not trust me when I said we had done the research and are following a course to help her be comfortable with her body as it is? Do you think we are bad parents? Do you know what’s best for our daughter?

Putting all that aside, couldn’t you resist affirming my daughter in my home merely because I asked you not to? Couldn’t you keep your word after you told me you wouldn’t get involved? If your 10-year-old daughter, my niece, developed anorexia, I wouldn’t agree with her that she’s overweight. I wouldn’t ask her how the diet was going or how much weight she had lost. You may not see this as an apt analogy. I do.

If you can’t control your social justice warrior impulses, you are no longer welcome in my home. I know that will cause a rift in the family. I know it means I may not see my nieces for a while. I know it will put my brother in bad spot. So, yes, it’s that important to me. Stop the affirmation of my daughter’s trans-identity or stay away.