Dear Aunt Mary
Jesus doesn’t want you to vote for Trump.
My Aunt Mary is a conservative Evangelical Christian and a Trump supporter. She is voting for Donald Trump because God has been telling her for decades ending legal access to abortion and stopping people from being queer are the most valuable ways to spend her time and resources. I haven’t spoken to her since long before Trump was president. I haven’t seen her in over a decade. I haven’t seen her daughters, my cousins, since the mid-90s after her encounter with my mother who’d finally had enough, “Stop asking if Tara has a new boyfriend! She’s a big butch dyke! Are you an idiot?”
Aunt Mary still talks to my mother. She knows I’m now a transman. She knows I married a woman five years ago. She has never acknowledged any personal details of my life, out loud or in writing. I don’t care. It would not bother me at all if she spent the rest of her life denying my existence and relation to her entirely. I assume it causes her emotional discomfort after all of her tireless effort trying to criminalize my personhood. If she had simply cut all ties with me, I could have filed her away in my “pick your battles” brain dumpster years ago.
But every fucking Christmas, Aunt Mary sends me a $75 Amazon gift certificate and it enrages me.
