Is a trans woman still her children’s father? Is she an uncle or an aunt?

Well, of course I am my children’s father.  I say that without one iota of hesitation.  Perhaps it confuses some that I now have a vulva and am a legal woman, a trans woman, a transsexual, a woman.  And some of my trans sisters do feel that existential slippage as parents that makes them move from the clarity of the position of the patriarch, and seek patronymics belonging to the matriarch.

That need doesn’t resonate with me.  What do lesbian couples do?  They are usually both mothers.  When my children were born, I was their father.  That strikes me as the ruling principle.  There was a period where, more in jest than any other motive, my children tested out silly hybrid names which combined aspects of mother and father.  But in day-to-day parlance, they refer to me by one of the nicknames associated with a father.  

Over a social dinner one evening, mentioned previously, one of my nephews asked me, “so, do I call you my aunt now, or my uncle?”  I didn’t have a response.

“Let me get back to you on that,” I said.  Well, I didn’t get back to him, and post-op, he and his fellow nieces and nephews started referring to me as their aunt.

I related this story, this conundrum, to a nearest and dearest.  She wasn’t having it.  “You can’t continue to go by ‘father’ as a title or name [I put ‘father’ simply to act as a placeholder for the real nickname that my children use for me without wishing to share it].  Of course, you are still and always will be their Father, but you are a woman now, and they are of an age that they should shift to referring to you by name anyway.”

I repeated the suggestion to my children and they weren’t having it.  “But ‘father’, ‘father’ is your name to us.  ‘Cherished person’ has a lot of wonderful ideas, but this isn’t one of them.”

“Okay, just asking,” I said, seeing that this was a firm position, and I actually don’t wish to move them from it anyway.  I am perfectly happy being called ‘father’ and feel no gender incongruence.  But what about if and when they bestow the honour on me of becoming a grandparent?  I guess then I will choose an apt nickname.  Thoughts anyone?  But I believe that my grandchildren are going to get one lest grandfather and one more grandmother.  And that also feels okay because they haven’t been born yet.

Part of all this too is that my children already have a mother.  In the case of two lesbians, two mothers makes sense.  But my wife showed her hand the moment I came out: our relationship for her was predicated on my staying hidden.  I guess that her admonition, “I don’t want to be party to a secret.  If you are going to be out, then be out, but don’t ask me to be a part of this behind closed doors,” meant to her that if I didn’t do it, I would never do it or feel it, or maybe she didn’t care.  A form of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.  I always thought it was so grown-up and hoped that someday I would live up to those standards and be able to come out.  I was also so utterly certain of the solidity of her love and willingness to commit to our marriage.  That was my need on so many existential levels and for so many reasons.  Thank goodness I outgrew it.

And well, uncle and aunt are so much less charged as names and relationships.  I don’t like being mis-gendered, and so this falls into the category, and I therefore accept ‘aunt’ as a more respectful way to refer to me going forward.  But father is different.  I don’t want to budge, and thankfully, my children don’t either.

There was a period towards the very end of our living together where my wife invited her brother and fiancée to stay with us.  I had always been very close and friendly to him.  He didn’t say a word to me in two weeks in our house.  His fiancée, who has a transgender younger sister, never spoke to me either.  Not because she didn’t want to, but because she wasn’t “allowed”.  Isn’t that weird.  And it was very, very rude of him to behave that way in my house.  And it was clear that it was my house at that point, and that my wife was going to leave.

There was this weird dynamic going on as well, where my wife was trying to engineer alone time between my children and their uncle, her brother.  She was wishing to give them a male role model, a father figure.  The manipulation and set up that went into these engineered scenarios was ungainly and so obvious to see that my children picked up on it.  They refused to play ball.  When asked to go out to dinner with him, they refused and said they already had plans to eat with me.  When asked to go out for man-to-man talks, they balked, but I encouraged them to go, confident in their abilities to listen to their own conscience and independent thoughts.

I am not the only person who has remarked that my wife has an inappropriate relationship with her brother.  There is something too intimate there.  He has bankrolled her divorce approach, she uses the lawyer he used, and he pays the bills.  He makes money, I don’t.  Don’t they say that whoever spends the most wins?  My lawyer says no, but we have not been winning until recently, and anyway, there is no winning when lawyers get involved in a dispute there are only degrees of bad, less bad and worse.

So, even in my womanhood, I remain a father.  My children are also unshaken in this view.  They don’t need a male role model.  I am one.  I joke, but I am not kidding, ‘I am more a man now than I ever was’.  And what I mean by that is not what is between my legs, but the content of my character.  Those qualities we ascribe to men.  Strength, constancy, a willingness/desire to be the pedestal upon/from which a woman shines.  

Am I butch?  Nope.  I am a girly girl.  I wear slinky outfits, pencil skirts, blouses, and very high heels, because I am not tall enough already.  But I also have a partner attraction to hyper-feminine women, which is new to me.  Before I liked husky, butch women like my wife (please don’t interpret this as anything other than my wife being a babe, as she was and still is a gorgeous woman).  What I mean is their energy.  My wife is utterly dominant in her energy.  I liked that, and I still do.  But I also like the soft and frilly of the hyper feminine.  It draws me in and activates my desire to protect.  It triggers me into feeling mommy energy, something which runs very deep within me.

And that is something quite profound.  Obviously, I was a man.  But my testosterone levels, though normal, were at the absolute bottom of the range for normal.  I grew up androgynous, my body never became hairy or overly masculine, I have a slight build.  The female in me was not fully suppressed.  Thank goodness.  But that also meant something about my wiring.  It always does.

I wonder whether I would have felt as driven, this insatiable need, would have experienced such serious gender dysphoria, were our society more tolerant of difference, of variety.  Had I married someone who was more indulgent or encouraging of allowing me to express my feminine would it have been enough.  I am not sure, but I don’t think so.  It might have happened at a younger age.  But I am glad that it is happening now when I have the confidence to negotiate life without fear.  Certainly, the painful need to “pass” in trans circles is one that we could all do without, as it causes suffering.

I am taking voice lessons.  Learning to talk like a girl.  I have a beautiful voice.  It is a mid-range male voice, not too deep.  My therapist thinks I can get into the lower range of female voices, which suits me fine, as a husky woman’s voice gets me every time.  But there is a movement in some trans circles to refuse to do this, to resolutely keep the “male” voice.  And another part of me is in solidarity with that.  We are trans women, why should we be forced to pass?  Why should we force ourselves to pass?  Isn’t the binary exactly what we are trying to escape?

I don’t like being misgendered, and as my body and affect are increasingly female seeming, the voice is a “giveaway”, or a source of incongruence.  It is not easy to just turn it on and off unless you are so good that you have a future in voice coaching.  There is something else.  Safety.  Sickos attack people like me, and you don’t know when it is coming.  The voice is a trigger that is impossible to hide.  Trans self-defence teaches us to adopt a very femme voice when being attacked, as it is more likely to stop the attacker than a deep voice.

With all that, I have one question.  Whose your Daddy?  For my children, it’s me.  For the beautiful women I get to spank, it’s me.  For the men who kneel before me and taste my whip, it’s me.  I wonder, am I any more or better a Daddy because I used to tick all the boxes for Daddy?  Who knows, but I like the idea of being trans and being a daddy.

And to my wife who said that she will never get over the ‘death of her husband’, I say that I am dead to you only.  I am more man, more husband, stronger, more powerful, and more solid than I ever was.  And also more fun.