I’m complaining about two separate uncles in one day!? I’m really feeling the unclephobia right now.

Anyway, an uncle of mine who currently is in Africa is coming to my state for some time starting in August.

To give a very brief explanation of the backstory that this deals with, my grandparents (his parents) and I went no contact roughly 6 months ago. This was a decision that I made after coming to the conclusion that it was the only right path forward.

My grandparents are devout Roman Catholics who go as far to say that even LGBTQ+ allies are damned to hell for eternity because they’re “endorsing sinful behavior.” They have been raised to be such a way from their childhood, and they’re originally from Trinidad and Tobago. The Caribbean can sometimes be quite the unforgiving place for LGBTQ+ folks. They found out that I was trans nearly seven fucking years ago. And as you’d expect, they have not made even an iota of progress in accepting this as reality, let alone being supportive.

I sometimes use the terms “accepting” and “supportive” to mean different things in the context of queerphobia because of this, with “accepting” being used to mean acknowledging the truthfulness of someone being queer even if you don’t think it’s “okay” for them to be queer. Yeah, my grandparents are still in much denial that transgender people exist at all, let alone me as their grandchild.

Well, I’m writing up this complaint because this uncle from Africa asked me if I’m going to my grandfather’s birthday dinner, which would be in October. I explicitly said “No.” Just to clarify, I’m not entirely sure if my uncle has too solid of an idea of just how distant I’ve grown from his parents, but one thing he absolutely does know is how vehemently transphobic they are. He’s a practicing Catholic himself, but he’s not necessarily transphobic. He can just be a little misunderstood and do a lot of “appeal to moderation” type shit when it comes to talking about my grandparents’ transphobia.

He asked me “Why not?”, to which I responded “I cut my grandparents out of my life due to some incompatibility that cannot be negotiated.” I can guarantee you that he knows that I’ve gone no contact with them. My grandparents talk to him regularly, and they live in the same city as me. In addition, before I cut them out of my life, they were deeply involved in my life, so there’s no way it hasn’t come up with them when talking to my uncle at all.

When I brought that up, my uncle said “Ok but coming for one dinner with us would not be awful.”

Are you fucking kidding me? In October, it’ll be around 10 months since I completely stopped having any form of contact with my grandparents to a point where they’re figuratively dead to me. For me to just show up to transphobic boomers and get deadnamed while creating a lot of emotional awkwardness would be more than fucking awful. It’d be hell, more hell than what my grandparents expect LGBTQ+ people and allies to get when they die.

I really don’t think people like my uncle or my grandparents themselves have total acceptance of the fact that things are just over between me and my grandparents. My birthday was last month, and my grandparents literally used the uncle referenced in the other post as a proxy to wish me happy birthday even though, like I said, they’ve been figuratively dead to me for so long.

Things are over and not workable. You cannot make a negotiation between “Call me my chosen name or fuck off” and “I will never call you your chosen name.” Those are two inherently incompatible sentiments that will cause a disgusting degree of fighting between people who regularly interact with each other, and the name is just one aspect of why resuming contact with my grandparents, even just for one occasion, will be problematic. What about my appearance feminizing? What about my hair getting longer and the effects of HRT? There is no way that my grandparents will see me in a totally different form like this and have the ability to react in a way that leaves the dinner as “not awful.”

The bottom line is that it’s actually better and more respectful for me to not attend the dinner because I’d be making a celebration meant for MY GRANDFATHER awkward and ugly for him if I did. I really tried to push to my uncle that there is no special caveat or exception for me talking to my grandparents again. We are fucking done, and if my uncle cannot respect that, he’d be on the chopping block too.

I sent him a long “letter” articulating most of these details, and it’s been marked as read, but he has not responded yet, so who knows what the fuck he’s thinking?