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ramblings |
Parental Units 01
2002.05.04
Last Monday I went out with my dad for dinner. We rarely have these father-son type of times. Recently, though, I think he has been getting more concerned about me. We never talk much about anything and he doesn't usually initiate going out to eat so this sort of took me by surprise. There has to be plenty on his mind.
My dad comes from real humble beginnings told through his stories of poverty and manual labor. He is an artist by trade but his parents wanted him to be something a bit better. (I guess it's the usual thing about Asian parents wanting their kids to be some big-shot doctor or engineer. Nope, that wasn't his style.) Eventually he got to a point where he felt he needed to do some soul searching. He could probably have been a chemist like one of his sisters but he wanted to follow his heart. This sort of searching took him to different places.
He's a real thinker-type and he loves delving into the mysteries of the human pysche. He spent a good part of his young life searching for who he was. In the past we've had long chats on the family room couches about personal motivation and discovery. I thought he'd understand my situation a bit better by being able to draw parallels to his own life. But selling him on the ideas that there are such things as me being transsexual, let alone the existence of transpeople, has been challenging. He is trying to understand but has some fundamental disagreements.
He doesn't believe people should change their bodies like this. He can't quite see what would necessitate a change. I totally see his point. What we do to ourselves defies logic because it relies almost entirely on our personal evaluations of our desires. Sure, a psychologist can tell us we have GID or something, but we have to reach the conclusion about what we want to do. There is very little in the way of physical signs that something is wrong.
We got to talking about life and stuff and that's about as far as we got. Really, it was just an ice breaker. But it's a start---we have to start the conversation somewhere, right? I can tell you that he's looking for some reason to say that maybe I'm exploring the wrong thing in my life. The trouble is that there are a lot of parallels between lives. (Not in the gender way, though.) So a lot of what he says I can actually use in my own defense.
I think that when we next resume these talks we'll be able to get in a little deeper to the issues affecting me and hopefully he'll be able to see that I've taken a similar self-exploration route like him, but I've ended up in this place where I feel a transition is imminent.
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