Why Family Abandoned Me: My Transition Was the Mirror
by Ember Leonara
“Your whole family can’t be transphobic”
“There must be two sides to the story”
“I never thought your Father/Mother/Siblings/Ex-Wife were abusive, there must be another way to explain this”
This piece will answer these confusions.
My family never calls. They never text. They’ve removed themselves from my social media friends lists. They haven’t commented on one of my posts involving the progress of my transition, or the personal triumphs of my becoming. This is erasure as weaponry, silence as systematic abuse.
But are they evil? Well, maybe in the deepest part of my sorrow I can feel that they are, when the cruelty and ostracization threaten my wellbeing at the core and steal my children from my arms, but in reality they are people who have never looked. They have never taken the variables of reality deep into their own soul for sovereign conscious processing. They have rarely, if ever, stood for themselves in the naked truth of their own existence. As a result, my transition, my becoming, my journey through the uncovering of my true self, my softest essence, threatens the scaffolding of shielding, deflection, and dismissal they have built around themselves their entire lives. When faced with my authentic vulnerability, the engine of the process I’ve been through, it exposes, consciously or unconsciously, the fact that they have never chosen that path, that for them life was something to fit themselves uncomfortably inside rather than grow through, and that pain is shielded by avoidance, deflection, dismissal, reversal, and projection.
My father told me to “kill myself” yelling three times in my face, later times calling me a roach, or Hannibal Lecture, all while trying to come out to him about my most vulnerable self. He later physically attacked me while yelling into my ear that I was “insane,” and that I “couldn’t be trans.” These acts, defended by my siblings and pardoned by extended family, are the exemplars of what the deflection-based mind does best. In other words, a father when faced with the transition of his own child, would rather yell and scream to wish that child dead, physically attack them, and try to silence the vulnerable, authentic breakthrough by literally screaming it away, trying his hardest to place it in the box of aberration so his entire schema of life wouldn’t be threatened. In other words, if I was telling the truth, then the clarity of my authentic stride in life exposed his path of consistent deflection, dismissal, fear, and containment.
My siblings haven’t called me since even before I began transition. When I spoke with my sisters, they told me the day I came out as trans was one of the “worst days of their lives.” This isn’t so much transphobic as much as it is truth-phobic, authentic-phobic. Again, the fulcrum is not my identity as a trans person, but my ability to step beyond the loop that had been imprinted in my family for generations, and break a mold that challenged every paradigm they based their lives on, both conscious and subconscious. My littlest sister broke into frantic tears when I made a comparison about my children being removed from me relating to my immutable characteristic of my identity, relating to racism and the idea that there was no personal attack that they could hoist beyond the identity I did not choose. This wasn’t a fear over my use of analogy, this was a schema-deep break that meant that if she accepted my truth, she’d have to accept that the way I was being treated, the reasons my children were being removed, had no ethical basis and would as a result force a complete rearchitecture of the way our family operated at the core. Identity wasn’t a box to fit into, but a permeable collective harmony that meant communication and love were based on true authentic vulnerability rather than assumed roles, transactional love, and containment spells.
My mother met me at a mall, about eight and a half months into transition, and although the meeting now feels more like a fishing expedition, her methods of interaction continued to reveal the incessant clinging to familial recursive structure. “Let’s not talk about anyone else,” waned into “can’t we just move on?” in various permutations. It was as if true depth, true knowing, true authentic vulnerable communication was off the table. If she looked, she’d have to reframe the entire situation, but even more deeply, have to reframe her entire life structure.
I tried to come out to my ex father-in-law, tearing open my most vulnerable truth about my gender identity, but he consistently reframed my plea to receive my truth as instability. What’s curious about this one is that his daughter is transgender, but he refused to see my situation similarly, and instead suggested I explore my own therapy, rather than accept my suggestion that what I really needed was to be seen, accepted, and loved vulnerably by my family.
There was a moment when my family got together after a baby shower to attempt to try to approach my situation collectively. This one cuts deep with hindsight. There they were, giving me hugs and accepting my diagnosis as neurodivergent, something that to this day they wield as proof of their attempts to have witnessed me. What I didn’t see then, only felt as a bad taste in my mouth from each surface-level interaction, was the startling and horrifying fact that they had never looked for themselves, so they had no true ability to look into my soul. A life based off of recursive looping, deflection, dismissal, and projection could not carry the weight of a true authentic soul-knowing, and thus the interactions remained merely skimming a surface I had dove under alone so long before. A family system that had kept me blind from the truth of my becoming, having it leak out in attire, art, performance, and experimentation long before it came to my own conscious processing, because their way of dealing with the variables of reality did not stem from sovereign-knowing, but instead stemmed from a cramped cubby-holing of self and reality that stunted a fuller processing of individuation. And because I thought for the longest time that love meant meeting certain conditions, my personal path of individuated soul had to emerge from the ash of the loop, ember by ember.
Then there is my ex, the love of my life for fifteen years. The woman with whom I share two children. She watched me cry, break, and burn in front of her eyes intensely for over a year. I would eventually have to schedule time with her to present my deepest truths, because her ‘boundaries’ wouldn't allow for me to share my path of becoming more than once or twice a week. There were times when I had to plan to share my vulnerable soul only after weeks of silence. She’d turn her phone off when I cried downstairs, begging to be held in my truth even for a moment. She’d witness me singing the saddest songs, tears streaming from my cheeks, sobbing in between verses, and just stare like we were strangers to each other. Then she’d twist all of this, all of this attempted sharing of soul to mean that I was broken. Not that I was trying to communicate, not that I was trying to find a way forward together through the becoming I could not halt, but that I was unhinged, in need of therapy, or worth removing from our own children without discussion. She’d leave me burning alone for hours, days, weeks, and when I finally ruptured after nights of not sleeping and still working criminal defense and absolute loneliness, she’d flip the scenario to suggest she should leave me, instead of opening the door to true communication.
The divorce she initiated was an extension of avoidance through litigation. While I tried to stay alive, keep working, hold the family together, and communicate with her in any way I could, trying not to lose the marriage I had built my whole world around, Shauna chose divorce. But more than that, she chose to use the legal system as an extension of her avoidance. This was not used as protection, but as deflection. Not to preserve anything, but to delay feeling. The courtroom became her boundary. The silence, her strategy. And once again, I was left burning, this time with legal filings in my lap instead of arms around my shoulders
Looking back, I know she’s not an evil person, I know she’s someone who’s been crushed by neglect and past pain that taught her to exist in a way that never allowed the light all the way in. As a result, when I entered the waterslide of my becoming, it wasn’t just a journey that she wouldn’t, couldn’t accompany me on, it was a journey that in and of itself threatened the very scaffolding, the shields she had utilized her entire life. And it was easier to discard me than to face that.
I came to the table again and again with my deepest attempts to share my most vulnerable, soft self, thinking that if they could hear it directly from my heart, they would have to understand. What I didn’t know at the time was that this looking, this communication and love through permeability and sovereignty of soul, was the one thing their personal and familial paradigms could not accept. Over and over again my myriad attempts of authentic sharing were met with weaponized silence, deflection, projection, and heated dismissal. My trans becoming was merely a vehicle for an insertion of vulnerable authenticity, of looking, into a system that for generations has maintained a matrix of functioning that depended on not looking, on deflection, projection, dismissal, and delay of the most genuine parts of soul. This doesn’t make them bad people. But nearly killing me again and again, at my lowest, most vulnerable moments, certainly deserves to be named.
Instead, my becoming unveils a much more systemic issue, that most people in reality, some worse than others, regurgitate loops of broken notions of self, distorted signals of feigned sovereignty, rather than letting the light all the way through, rather than letting their souls bare and naked to the circumstances of reality. The recursive loop is safe, planned, and previously treaded. The path of true transcursive becoming is like bushwacking into new territory, and without a grounded, anchored embodied authenticity, becoming permeable to the variables of individuation in the maze of reality is a horrible confrontation with parts of self that have been buried likely since childhood, parts that have never been given the right conditions to grow on their own in the soil of sovereignty. The most telltale sign of this type of soul is the total inability to be vulnerable and authentic to the process of personal becoming, to be able to step outside the path and hold themselves, to communicate not from the depth of the shore, but from the deep of the ocean floor of soul, becoming, and emotional development.
They didn’t leave because I changed. They left because I became coherent, the one thing that recursion cannot stand.
