The Peace Of Being A Family Secret

Over Thanksgiving, we met my cousin’s new boyfriend. My sister and I shook his hand, and when I sat down next to my grandpa afterward, he leaned over and asked, “Do men and women shake hands when they meet each other now?”

I answered, “Sure, why not?” And he nodded and said, “That’s good, that’s good – it just never happened in my day.”

I figured that he was talking about my sister, since he was still looking towards her by the couch, but I wondered if he also saw my handshake and thought of me as another woman in the interaction. The possibility didn’t bother me, but it’s always weird to remember that people still perceive me as feminine. I’ve been out as transmasc, and socially transitioning, for the past three years. I’ve been medically transitioning for two, and I was in the process of legally changing my name. I was out to friends, to coworkers, and to my whole family, except my grandfather.

He was my last grandparent standing. We weren’t close, but he was my go-to storyteller. My other grandparents tried to talk to me and the other grandkids about our family history when they were still alive, but we were too young to pay attention. My grandfather, on the other hand, lived long enough to tell me about how he met my grandmother in high school Spanish, that his parents came from a tiny Polish town called Bilgoraj before immigrating to New York, and that he spent the best summers of his life waiting tables in the Catskills. He was born in New York City in 1929 and grew up in tenement housing without running water, sharing a bed with his two older siblings for years. We had nothing in common, but listening to him was the closest glimpse I’ve ever gotten of my family’s roots, and I wanted to memorize every word.

He definitely had never met a trans person (or, so he thought). I don’t think he even knew what “trans” meant. A distant cousin randomly posted on Facebook that they’d published a book about their child coming out as a trans woman, and my mom and aunt tried to read it to my grandpa as a temperature check, under the guise of celebrating the publication. I had just started transitioning, which made hiding easy – the only thing that had visibly changed was my haircut, which he loved. I didn’t feel the need to tell him anything yet, or maybe ever. When my mom passed along that his main take-away from the book was “that must be so hard on the parents,” I decided to shelve the idea completely – I’d rather soak up the time we had left together, pocketing stories that I could keep when he was gone, than explain gender politics to him.

Hiding became more complicated after a year on testosterone. I grew a mustache and sideburns and put on muscle, and my voice got deeper by the month. My mom told me that none of it mattered – he was hard of hearing, so he’d never pick up on my voice change, and yes, he was still lucid, but that didn’t make him observant – I shouldn’t change myself to see him. But I couldn’t stop myself. I shaved my mustache before visits and rehearsed as high a “hello” I could get before calling him on the phone. One summer, in a fit of anxiety about wearing shorts around him, I trimmed my leg hair with scissors on my parents’ bathroom floor, leaving my empty, scattered patches on my calves and thighs. It had taken a long time to grow out, and I didn’t want to lose my progress completely, but I couldn’t risk him noticing either.

That Thanksgiving with the handshakes ended up being the last time I saw him in person. I was halfway through a whiskey ginger at a friend’s wedding afterparty in Richmond when my mom called to tell me that he passed away. I stood on the sidewalk, drink in-hand, and asked to say one more goodbye before the nurses took him away. When she held the phone to his ear, I said, “It’s [DEADNAME]. I love you, I’ll miss you, thank you for everything…” and nothing about being trans.

I regretted it as soon as I hung up. I’d kept myself a secret from him for nearly three years just to avoid a conversation that might not have gone perfectly, and I couldn’t even come clean when he wouldn’t be able to hear me do it. It would’ve only been closure for me, and in the hours and days after the call, I felt like a coward for not taking the chance. I wondered if my reflex to hold it in stemmed from fear of who I was. Then I came back to New York City to a landslide of transphobic news and life-threatening executive orders, adding a new layer of grief to process on top of the loss I was already experiencing.

I spent the first two years of my transition going through the motions of assuring people in my life that it was real. I wanted to go by a new name and new pronouns, and I wanted a flat chest and peach fuzz, but I also wanted them to see my reality and know that I wasn’t just looking for them to appease me. At the same time, I went to bed every night wondering if I’d wake up realizing the next day that I was wrong, and thinking about how embarrassing it would be to tell people, “Never mind! I was under a spell for two years, sorry for all the trouble!”

Lately, I’ve felt more and more sure of my transness. I read headlines about trans people being murdered, disenfranchised, called “sick” and invasive. Why would anyone want to go through that if they could live without it? Why would I want to receive so many “thinking of you in this political climate - hang in there,” texts from people I’ve only met once? Why would I want to put myself in a position to be let down by the people who are supposed to advocate for my rights over and over again if it wasn’t real?

Transitioning brought me more self-love and excitement to live than I’ve ever had. It also means that a lot of people know me as someone who should be scared to be who they are, and I can’t carry a burden that heavy alone all the time. My grandpa didn’t know about this part of me, but he did watch me grow up. I’ve found peace and meaning in the month since his passing by remembering that for all he knew, I had nothing to be scared of.