Dear Care and Feeding,
My daughter, who is 15, is transgender. She’s getting gender-affirming care and thriving. Most of our family is supportive.
My problem is with my nephew. My sister and I have always been close, like BFF close, so it was hard when our kids didn’t get along. My daughter is about 2.5 younger than her son, and they’ve never been able to play or interact with each other. At Thanksgiving four years ago (my daughter was 11 and my nephew was 14), my nephew went on a rant about how he hates transgender people, how they are everywhere, and how they should be eliminated. No one said anything to him but me—I asked him if he had ever even met a transgender person, and when he said, “I don’t have to meet one to know they’re bad,” I just moved on to avoid getting into an argument with him. (His father, my brother-in-law, loves it when his kids are outrageous and we engage, so he eggs them on.)
My daughter had not yet come out as trans at this point; she came out about a year later. But she had a vivid memory of this scene, and it was the reason she didn’t want to tell the rest of our family for another year. She had me tell my sister, because she was scared of their family’s reaction. When I told my sister, she seemed ok, so I asked about my nephew, reminding her about his Thanksgiving rant. First, she acted like it had never happened and said she had no memory of it. Then she told me that her son “doesn’t hate transgender people. He hates the hype of trans people.” I asked what hype, and she explained that trans people are in the news all the time now; everyone is saying they are trans for attention nowadays; it’s all hype, hype, hype. She then refused to discuss it anymore.
The end result is my daughter doesn’t really feel safe with my sister’s family. My sister hosts a lot of holidays because she has a big house, and my daughter refuses to go. She will grudgingly go if the get-togethers are at my parents’ house, even if my sister’s family is there, because she feels safer at my parents’ house. But she will not set foot in my sister’s house. My sister is annoyed because if my daughter doesn’t go, neither do I—I’m not going to leave my daughter home alone on a holiday to hang out with my sister’s kids. My sister doesn’t understand why my parents’ house is different, and I can’t really explain it; my daughter just feels safer there.
I feel like we need to have another conversation about her son’s rant about trans people and her dismissiveness. My nephew, who now knows that my daughter is trans, has never said he didn’t mean it or reversed his opinion, much less apologized. So I think it’s pretty unreasonable for anyone to think my daughter should be comfortable hanging around this kid anywhere, but especially on his territory. Unfortunately, my sister thinks her kids do no wrong and manages to twist everything until you apologize to her. This conversation cannot go that way—I owe it to my daughter to be firm about this.
So what do I say? And how do I say it? I’ve reached out to various LGBTQIA groups I’m part of for advice, but most advise cutting off contact because there wasn’t an immediate acknowledgment of responsibility for being hurtful, an apology, and a willingness to do better. I don’t want to cut contact with my sister without at least attempting another conversation. I am notoriously bad at confrontation and inevitably end up backing down.