Explaining Transness to My Dad, Again

I was trying to explain transness to my dad one evening. We were out back, behind his house, by the creek where I’d caught crawfish as a kid. I’d asked him to come out because he called Ora “he” again.

Ora had done the thing they do when someone misgenders them and I’m around: look at me expectantly and blink until I say something, their eyes sad, a little vacant. 

“Dad, let’s talk,” I said. He’d continued standing right where he was, at the kitchen counter. Ora, tall at age 7, stood next to him in their fluffy pink cat dress.

Out of earshot

“No, let’s talk out back,” I said, meaning out of earshot of Ora. I didn’t want Ora to hear Dad’s questions or any further refusal of who they are.

It’s not that I was braced for a yelling fight. For one thing, Dad loves Ora. For another, he generally is able to listen to multiple perspectives. And he has a steady warmth, even when we disagree. But he was really, really stuck about gender. I could feel my heart begin to race.

I had tried multiple times to explain to him about nonbinary gender and how misgendering Ora hurts them. Time to try again. These conversations with Dad are exasperating and painful for me.

In the woods behind the creek, a woodpecker drummed—eight fast taps in a row. Nearer to us, a chipmunk darted across the mossy slope. I had launched into another loose history lesson on gender. “European colonial powers didn’t just take land,” I was saying, “they also took away people’s ways of knowing themselves.” I could see the lesson wasn’t landing, but I dug in. Surely a historical argument had to work eventually.

Punishment

I explained how early settlers imposed rigid gender roles on indigenous people that had, for thousands of years, recognized more varied ways of being. “If the male-female gender binary looks ‘natural’ to you,” I was saying, “that’s because it has been policed and enforced across generations—through sermons and laws, shaming and punishment.”

“I don’t know, Isa,” Dad said. “If this history is true, why have I never heard about it?”

I could’ve said, erasing history is part of the point. Or: The people with power decide what counts as history and what gets dismissed as ideology. The fact that you’ve never heard about it is the evidence.

We’d been here before, to no avail. I cast around for a different approach.

Metaphors

Dad is a dentist, and he describes what’s going on with his patients’ teeth using metaphors. Two of his favorites: “Your teeth are like pipes. Inside the pipe is where the nerves and blood vessels are.” And, “the reason you want to brush plaque and tartar off your teeth is that they are bacteria hotels.” 

As a writer, metaphors are my wheelhouse, too. I remembered a metaphor the stand-up comic Alok Vaid-Menon used and decided to try it. “You know that pseudo-psychology book from the ’80s, Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus?” I said. “I didn’t know it was pseudoscience,” Dad said, his forehead wrinkling.

I shifted my gaze to the creek. The woodpecker was hammering again. “I read that book,” he said. “It seemed true to me.”

(If you haven’t heard of it, Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus was a 1982 pop psychology book by a self-appointed “relationship counselor” that sold in the millions to Boomers and people of the previous generation. Its theory: men are essentially tough, women weak.)

Not fitting

I sighed again. But Dad wasn’t trying to argue; he was curious. Nonbinary just didn’t fit neatly into the system he was taught and had come to believe—the system that had been hammered into him, like a solar system with only two planets.

“That book never once brings up how the gender binary is in service to power,” I said. “Think about how pressure to ‘man up’ and not be ‘soft’ positions men toward public power. Then consider: Who gets authority, and who is expected to obey?”

With his index finger, Dad pushed the cuticle down on his thumb. “Interesting,” he said.

Then I used Alok’s line: “If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, that means all the other planets are reserved for the rest of us.”

A smile spread across Dad’s face.

“That’s good!” he said.

Increment

He put an arm around my shoulder, gave me a squeeze. “I can stop calling Ora ‘he.’ I’ll just call Ora, Ora.”

Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. Not all the way there, but this is an improvement. An increment.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, squeezing him back. “And, hey, even when we can’t see the stars in the daytime, they’re still there—right?”

— I.L.

Isa Lichen is at work on When Leaving Home, a book about life under the current U.S. administration as the parent of a trans child, which explores questions of immigration, including their great-grandfather’s flight from Germany after he brushed shoulders with Hitler in WWI.

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