True Happiness on Holiday

The Artist D

The garland is draped all over the sign posts and each tree on every corner is decorated with big shiny balls. It’s beginning to look a lot like Thanksgiving! I saw signs of it back in October when one week worth of Halloween marketing was instantly abolished and replaced with penguins in Santa caps. Each year it gets worse and worse, but that’s none of my business. My trouble is you getting all trussed up in the clothes of a gender you don’t want to be and going home to have happy holidays.

I see it each year! There are the penguins in Santa caps and then the budding male to female transgender individuals pretending to be the gender their parents assumed they were. People putting on a stressful façade just so they have “a little peace” around the holidays. This column applies whether you are stuck in a charade or have conga-danced out of the closet years ago. Because this column isn’t about closets, it’s about how ridiculous people can be kowtowing to their birth family to have a little Christmas cheer. Stop that!

I was raised in a family unit like a lot of people where our elders believe that family is everything. My ancestors rocked back and forth on wooden porches talking about how blood is thicker than water. I grew up around blood relations not being able to stomach the sight of each other yet always being there when needed. It seems to be the norm. How many times have you seen a movie, read a story or lived through an experience about a family hating and helping each other at the same time?

It’s nice in theory that people have some kind of family guarantee. At the same time it can be repressive for a person trapped in the wrong formation of skin. The reality is that blood family live in the closet from each other. They show up at family gatherings and pretend with each other. Then they go home and talk trash. They’re pretending on a shallow level and so are you! The trouble is you’re also pretending on many other levels. You’re pretending to like people while also living in several closets. It leads to more hate than usual. It’s a double hate, sometimes a triple or quadruple hate. Not only did blood family annoy me on a social level, they annoyed me on a personal level. I had to fake being nice but more importantly I had to fake being me! All of me, any of me, and that’s a lot more than most are accustomed to. After awhile you begin to feel very boxed in and that’s why I hate the assumption of family.

My advice to you is only advice I myself have taken. Your birth family either loves you for who you are or hates you. There is no “putting up with” in my definition of family. There is no “my cousin Artist D is pretty freaky and he really creeps me out, but I have to love him because he’s family.” No, no, none of that! I put blood behind me a long time ago because I found something better.

It didn’t take me long to find out that family was up to you. We build our worlds, change our bodies and grow up to be ever so slightly what we hoped we’d always be. That goes for the family around us too. I was lucky to learn at a young age that I was not bound to biological blood. I was allowed as a human being to go out on a search for other human beings. Humans that would not just love me because they had to, but love me because they wanted to.

My advice to you this and every holiday season is to pave your own road to happiness. You’re already doing it with your gender, sexuality and hair color. Why not do it with your foundation of family? We’re too far advanced as a species to still be dwelling on the pretense of begrudgingly going home for the holidays. Find people you really love and people who really love you! Spend time with those people. Life is far too short to spend it with anyone else.

Tags: choices, family, featured, holidays, theartistd

Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion