[trans]PARENT

I can truly say that every relationship I've been in has, in some way, suffered due to the fact that I'm trans. Though I've only seriously dated two people, I've never met the parents of either of my partners. Don't get me wrong, I'm not itching to meet anyone's parents - I have social anxiety. However, everyone knows that meeting someone's parents is part of the essential experiences of being in a relationship and falling in love. Before I dive into this, I want to mention that I don't blame any of my past lovers for not introducing me to their parents because as a queer person I know how hard and degrading it is to be forced to explain something so personal as a romantic attraction. Still, even with this understanding it doesn't make me feel better about being hidden. In my first relationship I would convince my parents to spend the weekend at my boyfriend's house by saying "his mom said it was okay" - luckily my mom is also anxious and doesn't like meeting people or she'd know that my boyfriend's parents were always away on vacation when I came around. In my second relationship, my boyfriend explicitly mentioned to me that he didn't want his father to know he was in a relationship, he didn't say why and frankly he didn't have to. I knew. i’d watch as he did small things like remove me from his phone’s wallpaper- signs of a precarious relationship that i still endured.

Why did i allow myself to be a hidden ?

I allowed myself to be hidden for many reasons, but primarily because I understood the journey. Having gone through my own struggles with accepting myself as trans and the hurdles I had to jump to be myself, I didn't want to burden my partners by forcing them to come out. I know how dangerous that can be. Being trans is lonely and isolating, and I would rather experience love with these limitations than not at all. As a trans person, you learn early that being accommodating - lowering your standards - is often necessary for survival. You know the world won't bend for your unconventional lifestyle, so you learn to bend instead. While this might sound like I'm criticizing my past lovers, I'm not. They were great people who loved me and shared themselves with me to their abilities. It's just that sometimes, in quiet moments, I think about how being trans has made my life much, much harder in ways most people never have to consider.

What many people don't understand is that being hidden isn't always a choice for me - it's an instinct. The experience of being Black and being trans are intrinsically linked within me. When I was a child going into the market with my grandma, it was a rule that I was not allowed to bring any food or drink inside of the store with me. She would explain that the workers would assume that I stole the bag of chips or the soda that I already had before walking in. In my grandma's defense, she was born in 1958; she lived in the South during Jim Crow and segregation, attended a segregated school and later integrated, which I'm sure wasn't easy. She had to learn how to survive a racist world, and she taught me how to survive it as well. The point is, before I was trans, I was Black. And as a Black person, I don't have the luxury of just assuming that the color of my skin won't be a negative factor in my interaction with the world. And as a trans person, it is the same. That social anxiety I mentioned earlier is not just personality trait - it's a learned response, a survival skill honed from years of navigating spaces where I might not be welcome. Though being hidden and feeling transparent can be a burden or barrier, it is also a defense mechanism - one that I learned long before I knew who I truly was. These survival instincts - the anxiety, the hiding, the constant awareness of potential danger - unfortunately manifest themselves in my relationships. I find myself constantly checking the stability of my connections, because I learned that security is never guaranteed.