EP 11: What We Can Learn About Decolonized Parenting From Transgender Day of Visibility

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. 

If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.

[EPISODE]

Welcome to the eleventh episode and the final episode of season one of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

In this episode, I’d love to invite you to get curious about the topic of visibility with me as we honor Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31st. The questions that are guiding our curiosity today are: When you look at yourself in the mirror, who do you see? What kind of parent do you see? Do you see the tendrils of capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy that are draped around your skin like a thick veil covering your dignity and humanity? How about when you look at your child, do you see them in all of who they are? Or do you see your inner child projected onto your child?

We’re asking these questions because they call for discernment, and discernment is at the heart of our decolonized parenting work.

So you and I are going to connect the dots together in this episode between Transgender Day of Visibility and decolonized parenting. 

To explore the complexity of these questions with you, I’ll share with you the story of the moment when I realized that I needed to shift from existing for other people’s comfort to survive. It was when I decided to be visible for myself so that I could live with integrity, love, and dignity from my whole heart. It was when I started my own intergenerational family healing. And it was when planted the seeds for Come Back to Care to blossom.

And it all started with my grandmother.

Since my mom and dad always worked day and night, my two siblings and I grew up with our grandma in our family home in Bangkok, Thailand. 

I loved my grandma but I didn’t like her. I didn’t like a lot of people, to be honest…because I didn’t like myself. 

I was too deep in my head trying to figure out why my gender didn’t match my biological sex as a child. 

I was too occupied with what to wear, what to sound like, and how to contort my being to fit in the gender binary box that says “woman.” At the time, passing as a quote unquote “real woman” was the best way I knew how to avoid being harassed and heckled at a mall or getting my job applications denied.  

I felt so alone and angry trying to navigate my identity, my existence, and my purpose as a young adult. 

I was so busy not believing in myself that I believed no one believed in me.

And there my grandma was smiling with pride and joy when I brought her favorite snacks to her and gave her a massage. 

I had to hide my femininity until I told my parents in high school that I was transgender.

But in the safety of my grandma’s room, I played dress up with her and did a runway walk for her in 6th grade. I picked the outfits and she accessorized. 

When I told her that I landed my first modeling gig with an upcoming fashion brand in college, she was more excited about it than I was.  

When I told her that I was going to become a teacher, I still remember the light in her eyes that beamed up with pride and joy. 

I know you know that look…it’s probably the same look you give your little one when you want them to know that they matter to you and you delight in them, no matter how burnt out you may feel. 

In that same room, I felt so free in my body when I closed my eyes and danced. My grandma clapped, heckled lovingly, and cheered me on. It felt so free because I didn’t have to hide my expressions or worry about being masculine or feminine. 

I was loved and I didn’t even have to do anything to earn it or shame my femininity away to fit in. 

I didn’t know at the time that she was witnessing all of who I was. It didn’t matter what I was gender-wise, I remembered her loving gaze that told me I was the most beautiful thing in the world in her eyes. 

I wished I opened my heart more and connected with her. I wished I asked her more about her life stories, her hopes, her regrets, and even her first love. 

Ten years later after my grandma joined our ancestors, I gradually started to unfurl and unfold my body from the pretzel-shaped contortions that I had adopted to fit into that tiny box of quote unquote real woman. I had spent 20 plus years reducing the fullness of my being to fit in this tiny binary box. So, it was a gruesomely satisfying unlearning-relearning process, one I’m still doing each day to reclaim fragments of who I am. 

I still remember that day when I looked in the mirror one morning before I headed out to see my preschoolers. I couldn’t see myself in that reflection. I saw a woman wearing her perfectly smudged eyeliner and double-swiped mascara (because you gotta be precise). But I didn’t recognize, me. That was the moment I knew that I could no longer exist for other people’s comfort purely to survive. I wanted to live my life for me as a human being who’s passionately enraged, who’s grieving, who’s learning to give and receive love from her heart and not from her head. I wanted to connect with the land and spirits, most of all to my highest good. I wanted to be, period…real woman or transwoman and every freaking thing in between. 

This is exactly why I’m so passionate about holding space for parents like you to unsubscribe from oppressive social norms and to unlearn outdated family patterns that are asking you to be anything but your full selves. It really breaks my heart when I see parents grind, grind, and grind and push, push, and push just to get gold stars from capitalism, or white supremacy, or systemic oppression. Because I know you ’re twisting and contorting yourself to fit into society’s good parenting box too and it’s done out of love for your child. 

Does that resonate with you at all? 

For me I had to disconnect with my grandmother and dissociate from my body to perform patriarchy’s rendition of the “good, real, submissive Asian woman.” I was seeing the world through the lens of oppression, oppression that I internalized too, and I missed seeing myself and my grandmother who loved me. I want parents to break free from having their noses to the grindstone so that they can see who they are and love who their children are too.  

So, my invitation for you to honor Transgender Day of Visibility is twofold. On one hand, we all need to take macro-level and community-based action to support transgender individuals. According to the Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide (TvT) research project, 53 trans and gender-diverse individuals were reported murdered last year. In addition to these hate crimes, transgender individuals face systemic oppression like houselessness, employment discrimination, and more. In Illinois, we can’t even change our legal names without having to jump through 5,000 hoops. If you’re on the stolen land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations aka Chicago like myself, we have many wonderful community-based organizations that you can support. First up is Sex Workers Outreach Project or SWOP Chicago because the importance of decriminalizing sex work can’t be overstated enough. Second is the Trans Chicago Empowerment Center where you can support local trans holistic care and businesses. The last one I’ll mention is the Chicago Therapy Collective with their advocacy for safe and equitable trans employment. I’ll drop all the links in the show notes for you. 

On the other hand, micro-level action must be taken too and that’s the whole point of this episode. I’d love to invite you to reclaim parts of yourself that at some point were too much or not enough for either your family or society. I’d love for you to reclaim these parts that you had to leave behind so that all parts of you are visible for you to witness and love up on. So that you can show up fully as the best-ish parent you know you can be. I understand that you do what you need to do to survive relentless systemic oppression. I have to do that too. My question is how do we survive without losing parts of our dignity and humanity? How do we survive without forgoing joy, beauty, pleasure, connection, and imagination? Because we need to witness our full selves before we can see others’ full humanity, right? Especially our children’s.     

From the day that I had my aha moment all through the past decade, I’ve played every day with body-based tools ranging from Qigong, to Muay Thai, to traditional Thai dancing and burlesque. I slowly came back home to my body. I slowly, and I mean slowly, came to embody the male-female binary boxes and that space in between. Now I can step into the fullness of my own humanity.

And with all of that daily body-based practice, my nervous system is still on high alert every time I’m stepping outside my home. I need my 3 P’s before going out: Pocket knife, Prayers, and Perfume…

But you know I began to love and like myself a bit more…most of the time.

I also trust myself enough to revisit my unfulfilled yearning to learn about my grandma’s life. 

So, I talked to my mom and her sister asking (more like artfully begging) them to tell stories about their mother. 

That one conversation turned into three because my mom hung up the phone twice. 

Goddesses forbid an Asian parent show her feelings and be vulnerable to her adult child. 

Then, it became a year-long project. We laughed and cried while talking about our ancestors. 

We snapped at each other some…just to test if this new way of being honest about our feelings was safe. 

My mom still hung up the phone on me from time to time …

But I learned from my mom and beloved aunt that my grandmother loved riding a jet ski, owned a durian farm, sold flower garlands in front of a temple, and served food in a hospital.

How amazing was that? The lady who accessorized my looks in our private bedroom fashion show did all of these amazing things? 

You know what else I learned? 

I learned about my mom, her childhood, her loss, her love, and her dreams.

I re-learned how to love her. I re-learned how to connect with her and my whole family…

All because of grandma’s untold stories.

In her stories, the greatest plot twist of all is that she still brings the whole family closer together. 

That’s why I created Come Back to Care.

So we can use storytelling and journaling to contextualize our caregivers and to see where they came from. For many of us when someone asks us to describe our parents, we almost have a script that we use. It’s convenient and familiar. But the downside is we don’t get curious about the other aspects of our parents’ lives or their social, political, and cultural contexts. Resmaa Menakem said that “Trauma decontextualized in a person becomes a personality.” So many of us stop our curiosity and compassion for our caregivers at “Oh, this is just how mom always is.” 

An important part of this work of decolonized parenting that we’re doing together is not weaponizing our parents’ survival strategies that they used against them… because we can honor the fact that they were trying to survive and… we can name that their survival under systemic oppression somehow put them in a position where they couldn’t give us love and care the ways we wish they would. So we can replace that blame and shame with compassion. Not to forgive them prematurely and pretend that hurt or harm didn’t happen. It did. And now the accountability is setting the boundaries we need with them so we can do the healing work we need to. 

I believe that you and I have the capacity to hold both family pain and family perseverance at the same time. 

I believe that you and I have the grit and grace to witness our family resilience and be witnessed in our authentic expressions. 

Before I go, I’d love to leave you with three reflection questions:

Which parts of you that were too much or not enough for either your caregivers or for systemic oppression do you want to reclaim and make visible?

Who in your circles, pods, or communities reflects back to you all parts of who you are so that together you can be more of yourself together? 

Which parts of your caregivers did they have to leave behind to blend into Whiteness or Cis heteronormativity to survive? How did that affect the ways they expressed love to you when you were little?  

I humbly thank you with my whole heart for being a part of this decolonized, embodied, and intergenerational parenting journey together. 

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next Season, please take care.