Today is a melancholy day. It is gray outside, windy, and cold. It is the one year anniversary of The Girl's partner's death from breast cancer. We will go to the cemetary in a little bit. I am supposed to now be studying, but I cannot. Instead, my mind wanders. I think of relationships I've had, loves I've lost. They are as gone from my life as surely as her former partner is gone from The Girl's. I think of The Girl and her attempts to protect me from her own pain and natural sorrow. In an effort to distract me, I began surfing my own computer. I came across the letter, below, that I had written to my children 7 1/2 years ago, when I first fully transitioned. I'm not sure why I am compelled to share this here now. Still, I just now stumbled across it, so here it is. I've placed it also into the Transistion Stories category.
April 18, 1998
My dear sweet children,
I know there are many questions and many fears you have about the changes in me. I want to take a few minutes to speak to you about them. These are thoughts from my heart, from my soul, directed to you, my children.
I will not now speak of the whys and wherefores of my transgenderism. I have come to terms with it and am comfortable in my skin. I want instead to speak to you about you and about us.
I have told you countless times throughout your lives that “I love you.” I have worked hard to show you, in practical ways, the application of those words. I want you now to take the time to repeat them to yourself. Get into the depth of their meaning. I am now, I have always have been, and I always will be, your father. No force on earth or elsewhere can change that fact. Nothing I do, nothing I say, nothing you do, nothing you say will ever alter that relationship. The same is true of my love. It is eternal and it is unconditional.
There may come a time in your life, nearer now than you may believe, when you will not want me to be a part of some or all of your life and its activities. Regardless of your motives, or even my perception of your motives, I promise to honor and respect your wishes in this regard. Some of that desire for distance will be the normal, healthy growing pains of children learning to be independent of their parents. I suspect those times are never easy for either parent or for child. Our time of this will be more difficult. We will get through it, with love and with compassion.
There may also come a time when you are embarrassed by me or ashamed of me. I want you to know now that I understand that and that it will, in no way, diminish my love or my respect for you. But I ask something of you, I ask something of your intellect and of your humanity. I ask you to recognize now, with that intellect and before that time comes, that those feelings are nothing more than the reflection of your own acceptance of society’s fear and suspicion of the unknown. I helped to cause that in you; I am a part of your societal training. You have nothing to be ashamed of in that feeling. But in its recognition, you are challenged to rise above it. You are challenged to be better than society at large. The price may seem high. The rewards are immeasurable. Lots of people can “talk the talk”, you will be asked to “walk the walk.”
Finally, I must say to you that none of these changes in me are directed outward of myself. It is not done to cause you upset or harm. It was not done to end my marriage and relationship to your mother. It is done for my internal sense of balance. There is no change in who I am. Our relationship as parent/child will not alter unless you wish it. My relationship with your mother ended because of her own personal reasons that she judged good and valid. I cannot question her motives; like all of us, she made a choice for her life. You will be asked to make the same choice. Make the choice for your life, my loves, and not for someone else’s—especially not for society’s.
I love you forever.
Daddy
