"My Beautiful Father" in BULL
A story of a father and trans daughter engaged in masculine competition over who can be the most feminine
Read the full story at BULL
A coming-out is kind of like a reverse surprise party: the invitation is an ambush, and once you receive it, you’re at the party. I sat at the same table that I once spilled baby food on, the same one where I used to doodle dinosaurs on my math homework two decades ago, and I waited for my parents to react to the longer hair that barely tickled my earlobes, the eyeliner and mascara I had applied with a shaky hand, the dress that might look so strange to them on my body.
I wasn’t nervous about my mother, who was a soft touch. When I was a teenager, I was able to get her on board with my rampant weed smoking because I insisted it made me happy. But my father was a different story: for my whole life, he’s been very invested in the idea that he and I were locked in the quintessential masculine competition between father and son, that the son’s drive to defeat the father is what propelled him to grow into a man, and the father’s desire to stave off the son kept him from growing old and weak.
First he taught me chess, and then read a hundred chess books so I would never defeat him unless I grasped the full nuances of the Trompowsky opening. He practiced putting for an hour a day so, at the mini golf course, he could bounce the ball off a rock across the lazy river and into the hole while I was banging mine into the windmill’s blade over and over again. One evening, I remember watching him jump onto the top of a two-foot high box and wondering what my silly father was doing, only to find out the next day when he dunked on me during a game of one-on-one basketball. When it was my turn to shoot, he blocked everything hard enough that the smack of the ball echoed in our little concrete driveway, and told me to “get that weak shit out of here.” I was seven.
Read the full story at BULL
June this fucken whips, you are so good at what you do.