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Apr. 10th, 2005 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaAs a follow-up to the post I wrote in the middle of the night (when I couldn't sleep) about the way I feel I was failed by my parents (which in turn was a follow-up to my reflections on the way I feel I was failed by religious school), another aspect of this is the thought that they simply didn't have faith in me. My parents were not all that religious, but they sent me to religious school anyway. They said they did this because they wanted to make sure I received a quality education, but I wonder how much of it was an effort to program my queer tendencies out of me?
One of the earliest comments I can remember my father making was that he was afraid that watching Mr. Rogers (who I loved when I was four) was turning me into a wimp, so I wasn't allowed to watch his show any more.
He rarely actually told me to do one thing or another, he just made it clear what it was that I should do if I wanted his approval, and that his approval would be withheld otherwise. Memories from my childhood are sketchy, and it is hard for me to consider how anything other than my childhood experience was normal (something I understand that people who were abused as children have difficulty comprehending). So I have to piece this together using clues: I must have been emotionally starved as a child. I have overpowering fears of abandonment and dependency, a willingness to do anything to earn even slim tokens of approval, and a driving need to find male affection. (Even so, I have trouble accepting male affection when I find it, which means that I usually seek out unhealthy expressions of male affection.)
A few years ago I was puzzled when I heard a therapist describe me as having been neglected as a child. After all, I received all kinds of encouragement -- to study math and science, and participate in sports, and learn how to do "manly" things like car repair and house repair. Many times as a teen I was dragged down to the garage to help him with car repairs, being bored out of my skull, and wondering why he wouldn't let my sister (who is also, as it turned out, genderqueer) go instead because she really wanted to be there.
Taken alone, none of those things sound all that bad. So it's very easy for me to rationalize and say that I am making a lot out of nothing. I mean, here I am, complaining about how injured I am because I had to help fix the car? But the underlying tone, the nonverbal message, the sum total of what these things added up to, was that I was valued and nurtured only to the extent that I pretended to be someone I am not.
When I was eighteen I told my father that I am transsexual, and his response (after thinking about it for a few days) was that I must have searched high and low for the one thing that he couldn't possibly accept. Even if I was gay, he told me, he could learn to live with that. As if the person I am is a personal attack on him or something.
There is an extent to which all of this adds fuel to my efforts to debunk fundamentalist Christianity, even though this was not a prominent part of the abuse from my family when I was a teen. (Well, outside of the occasional unprovoked vitriolically homophobic exclamations my mother sometimes made.) As I wrote a while ago, I think many of us tend to look at God as a father-equivalent, and those of us with anger towards our fathers are likely to be angry at God, too. (Edit: just to be clear, that's not why I do it -- I do it mostly because I believe that the fundamentalists' ridiculous beliefs contribute to human suffering. But it adds a degree of eagerness to the task that might not otherwise be there.)
One of the earliest comments I can remember my father making was that he was afraid that watching Mr. Rogers (who I loved when I was four) was turning me into a wimp, so I wasn't allowed to watch his show any more.
He rarely actually told me to do one thing or another, he just made it clear what it was that I should do if I wanted his approval, and that his approval would be withheld otherwise. Memories from my childhood are sketchy, and it is hard for me to consider how anything other than my childhood experience was normal (something I understand that people who were abused as children have difficulty comprehending). So I have to piece this together using clues: I must have been emotionally starved as a child. I have overpowering fears of abandonment and dependency, a willingness to do anything to earn even slim tokens of approval, and a driving need to find male affection. (Even so, I have trouble accepting male affection when I find it, which means that I usually seek out unhealthy expressions of male affection.)
A few years ago I was puzzled when I heard a therapist describe me as having been neglected as a child. After all, I received all kinds of encouragement -- to study math and science, and participate in sports, and learn how to do "manly" things like car repair and house repair. Many times as a teen I was dragged down to the garage to help him with car repairs, being bored out of my skull, and wondering why he wouldn't let my sister (who is also, as it turned out, genderqueer) go instead because she really wanted to be there.
Taken alone, none of those things sound all that bad. So it's very easy for me to rationalize and say that I am making a lot out of nothing. I mean, here I am, complaining about how injured I am because I had to help fix the car? But the underlying tone, the nonverbal message, the sum total of what these things added up to, was that I was valued and nurtured only to the extent that I pretended to be someone I am not.
When I was eighteen I told my father that I am transsexual, and his response (after thinking about it for a few days) was that I must have searched high and low for the one thing that he couldn't possibly accept. Even if I was gay, he told me, he could learn to live with that. As if the person I am is a personal attack on him or something.
There is an extent to which all of this adds fuel to my efforts to debunk fundamentalist Christianity, even though this was not a prominent part of the abuse from my family when I was a teen. (Well, outside of the occasional unprovoked vitriolically homophobic exclamations my mother sometimes made.) As I wrote a while ago, I think many of us tend to look at God as a father-equivalent, and those of us with anger towards our fathers are likely to be angry at God, too. (Edit: just to be clear, that's not why I do it -- I do it mostly because I believe that the fundamentalists' ridiculous beliefs contribute to human suffering. But it adds a degree of eagerness to the task that might not otherwise be there.)
