Unsent Letter to a Father

Attacks on linking afflict the mainstream collective unconscious, as when, to preserve power, supremist monocultures systematically mobilize hatred of a targeted Other across a community (or nation), with the violence of erasure. These attacks corrupt shared emotional relating between individuals: in the case of attacks on gender, between filial generations.

A Gender-Queer adult uses the epistolary form to elucidate linking attacks in their estranged relationship with their father, contextualized in the unfolding escalation of transphobic bigotry in the US. Here, the attacks on linking are threefold: interpersonal links between Queer children and their miscomprehending parents; internal links anchoring a person in their elaborately felt gender; and social links between an already gender-fluid society and a domineering (patriarchal) system bent on “one man and one woman” to maintain male supremacy, structural misogyny and transphobia.

Interpersonal Attacks on Linking between Child and Father

Dear Father,

This is not an easy letter to write.

I’ve had many inner dialogues with you recently but, immobilized in futility, I’ve kept them inside. Throughout my life I’ve felt unknown and misunderstood by you in my Queerness. Any reckoning seems impossible now, in a political climate where you and I fall on opposite sides of a perilous divide.

Our last contact was in 2017: in an e-mail exchange I noted how our proud-colonial family immigration story, 11 generations on, would—ironically—be thwarted had we immigrated now with Trump’s border wall. Without inviting further discussion, your blunt reply was:

Don’t be so angry!

I responded:

You have no idea how angry I am, Dad. Angry, horrified and extremely sad. Disgusted and disappointed, disturbed, offended. Terrified and anxious. This is a terrible time for our country. The US is openly expressing our nationalist bigotry to the rest of the world. It’s a time to get angry. I believe it will lead to facing some hard facts about