Helping my mom write a letter to explain both my gender and sexuality situation to my extended family. THAT'S a fun little bit of wordsmithing. o.o

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Not included in the letter, thankfully: the polyamory thing or the paganism thing.

Minor family negativity, gender 

Still, that was an awful lot of emotional labor to have to do for a parent, especially given the very basic requests like "maybe could you not deadname my partner"

I still dunno what she thinks about the Paganism thing; I only brought it up once really, around winter solstice 2015, and basically got an "Oh that's nice..."

Which is certainly much better than such things go sometimes! But I do, for instance, wonder what she's thinking is happnening now when I do agree to pray for folks, etc. ;)

Minor family negativity, gender 

@literorrery It wasn't an ARGUMENT, but it was very... hand-wringy? I mean, it's all okay that she wanted to explain Ana's transition, it all just centers, as ever, on the last-name issue, an awkwardness I suppose you have some experience with too!)

Minor family negativity, gender 

@literorrery Yup. I started to spend words on why we decided it the way we did and then just gave up and basically said "We got to choose, we choose this way, the end"

@indi if given up sharing anything personal at all with my family and they sort of know if they misgender or deadname I'll just silently walk.

@Fuego I'm so distant from all of them that I never saw much point in dealing with it, but my mom thought it was time, because of folks aging, legal complications, etc. Which is also why she wanted to write the letter. Which is also also why I'm mildly weary about having to rewrite chunks of it.

@indi hey well... at least you know that if she saw you as masculine she wouldn't expect you to do all this free emotional labor!

@indi one prayer = one goat sacrifice

Seriously though this is super tough and I am sorry you have to go through all this shitty emotional labor.

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