August Guang

In September 2012 I started saving up money for top surgery by August 2013. At the time I couldn’t stand the thought of going another year without it. The binder that I was wearing suddenly started causing physical pain around April, and I was generally experiencing a lot of dysphoria and panic instigated by graduating from the safe and familiar haven of college. All of a sudden the world seemed to hold nothing for my genderqueer self. My chosen name was not accepted in the new academic system I’d joined, everywhere people used the wrong pronouns for me, what I had come to love and accept about myself was suddenly rendered invisible.

Leaving college also brought with it financial independence, and with that the reality that I could transition on my own. In college, it was sometimes painful to see all these people transition so rapidly after coming out as transgender with their parents’ support, money and insurance, while I was still stuck with a family I didn’t think would support me nor had the money to. Setting up a timeline of transitioning, a one-year plan of events to follow was thus both a celebration of a long-delayed dream and a way for me to control an important part of my life, even as everything else felt disrupted and uncertain.

Yet I had crafted a certain identity in college, and even though I wasn’t in college anymore, the process of changing it, recognizing that it had to change was difficult for me. After pushing transitioning off as a distant dream for post-independence, I became comfortable with how I presented and who I was. Taking the steps to leave that comfort zone again made me panic. Reopening websites and starting to do research on prices gave me that feeling of lumps in my throat and tears coming to my eyes. Sending e-mails and making phone calls to therapists triggered emotions I couldn’t remember feeling. I had gotten comfortable with wearing binders–so comfortable that the idea of not having to wear them anymore became distant. Making a plan caused the idea to come back, along with all those enraged, confused and fearful thoughts about who I was and how to be honest to the people closest to me.

I had wanted to control how my identity changed, but wanted to hold onto it as well, the calm relationships I had with my institutions, my family and myself. Now my institutions had changed on me, and I recognized that some day everything else would have to change too. I was taking steps to changing my relationship with my family and, by extension, myself. I was afraid of what changing it would mean.

Over Thanksgiving I came out to my parents as trans* as part of the timeline I had made. They seemed cautiously accepting, but were adamant about their rejection of anything that “modified” my natural body, such as hormones or surgery. The situation has progressively gotten worse with my mother since then, to the point where the thought of spending any time with her fills me with misery. When I am with her I feel like a child, unable to speak and have conversations, unable to even defend myself against her vicious words. Yet I can’t leave. My mom worked eleven hour days, seven days a week, yet made dinner every night, drove me for whatever school supplies I needed, helped me with what she could. I can’t turn my back on that. Whatever Americanization I’ve undergone, whatever Americanization my parents say I’ve undergone, I am still committed to my parents who have given me everything they could.

I wish I had told them earlier as much as I wish I hadn’t told them anything. Because I love my family, but I also can’t recant myself, I can’t hide anymore. This matters, and maybe things would be easier now if I had passed the hard part already. But every part has been hard. I remember the days after I came out to them as queer without clarity and without trauma only because they are old now, four years gone from when I was a different person. But reading my journal from those days makes me remember that it was hard to deal with then too. Maybe harder. An 18 year old just barely removed from self-harm and suicidal thoughts, no savings or financial stability and no concept of self-care or an emotional support system. I was not ready to face my parents as my own person, altered irreparably by white queer culture.

I am still not ready to have these conversations. In my stilted Mandarin I feel helpless against my mother’s harsh words and arguments, and when I switch to English to (finally) express myself as I want to I feel like I have betrayed my culture and who I am. Our dialog is always wrong. I don’t know how to say that I am an individual but ultimately unchanged, still me, still Chinese, when my parents keep telling me I have changed too much, am too extreme.

It is one thing to give in to your parents’ demands as a form of survival. That was me in 2008, unprepared for a world where I lived disconnected from my parents without my own understanding of financial and emotional support. It is another thing to be unable to give in to your parents’ demands as a form of survival. This is me now, unprepared for a world where I have to give my identity up in order to keep peace with my family.

I don’t know how to reconcile this situation. I want to break away from my parents and stop speaking to them. But I often feel conflicted about becoming too Americanized, individualistic at the expense of other people, and cutting off contact with my parents would feel both like abandoning them and abandoning my Chinese roots. And more than that, I also realize that they are my parents, who have never thought about gender like this, who were probably blindsided by my coming out letter, who need time and understanding just like anyone else. I don’t need their agreement to go through with anything transition-related, but I don’t want them to be completely alienated and hateful either. My parents sacrificed a lot for me, and I can’t hurt them by ignoring their wants and needs.

I am giving up on transitioning by this summer so that I can maintain a relationship with my parents instead. I don’t think they will come around by August. I don’t know if they will come around by 2014. If it happens, I’ll be ready, and if it doesn’t then we will see. Nothing is certain. Things have to change. Maybe it will take another four years before we reach a tentative conciliation over my gender identity. This decision disrupts my careful timeline, but maybe that’s the way it has to be. I can’t control change without consideration for how other people react to it. Perhaps this is not an ultimatum, but instead an opportunity for growth.

I wish I could just step away and stop speaking to them until they come around, but that would probably be easier, be too easy, and it is the hard things I need to do. There is the need for self-care, and safe environments, and protecting yourself, but there is also the need to understand, to reach out, to connect. I cannot always be running away from difficult problems and conversations and never to them. I believe in my ability to engage meaningfully and build relationships, and I believe in my parents’ capacity to do the same. I believe that things will not remain either/or. I came out to them in 2008 as queer, and we are still together now. I believe that we can stay together after this too.

August Guang spends most of their time as a model minority cog in the academic industrial complex, but we’re all part of systems of inequity in some ways. They is a 2nd-gen trans* Chinese-American who is currently wondering how they will sustain progressive politics after graduating from college in the LA area and moving to the East Coast. Hopefully this project will help. =)