When a trans person comes out, one of the most common, and challenging, parts of doing so is responding to family members who say they need to grieve us. A lot of pain, on every side, tends to swirl around the members of a relationship when that happens.
But it's not necessarily--even commonly--a bad thing.
This week on #StainedGlassWoman, we're talking about Letting Them Let Go--when family members grieve us in transition.
@Impossible_PhD I'm terse about it since i can't really think of anything to be said differently.
You put out one other possibility that is rarely described and yet important, and it's up to us to tell it apart from the rest, with no easy way of doing so.
@Impossible_PhD looking forward to reading this. As someone who has gone through a computer misunderstood grief from the other side (parent of kid with disabilities identified before birth), I've read a lot about the general idea and have probably written up my "spiel" about it probably 10 times by now. Hopefully you've done a clearer and more precise job so I can point to yours instead 😅
@Impossible_PhD yep. You did it. You actually researched the thing I just spit balled about, then wrote about it better than I can. You didn't make the parent disability analogy but that's not in your experience so it makes sense. You wrote it for the trans person, but I think I'll share this one with my cis family.
I know this is just parasocial, our worlds don't interact that much, but I'll still introduce it as "by somebody I know".
Gonna send this to my friend who's a researcher in grief issues at a local uni. She's got a trans brother and a nonbinary kid. I think she'll really appreciate this trans-flavoured take on her subject of interest.
Her specific area is grief tattoos, btw. Really fascinating work.
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