Fox and Wolf: Pack (Family)
TW: Family and loss thereof, mentions of homelessness, transphobia, parental rejection
Well shoot. I guess this is what I’m going to be doing for the evening.
I mean, it obviously means something to you.
That wasn’t the best opener.
I’m a wolf, not a comedian.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
I think for many cisgender (That is, non transgender) people, there can be a bit of confusion when it comes to family. Family means your birth family, right? Your mom and your dad (and siblings). Your grandpa and grandma and your aunts and uncles and (if Capitalist Imperialist Colonialism hasn’t sucked the life out of it) your community.
But for a lot of transgender people, that concept disappears or gets muddled and confusing. Or it gets lost entirely.
This might be unthinkable to you, particularly if you’re cisgender. You may make jokes about your parents disowning you, but you know they never would. Or, they would, but you know the conditions and have for a while. Or, you’ve just never thought about this. Or, you’ve grown up in a dysfunctional family and you’ve experienced it.
It sucks. It really, really sucks. And it leaves scars. And transgender individuals are often scarred to begin with. We don’t have easy lives.
Even if you’re not being actively bullied, it can be isolating in a way I can’t actively describe. One of those moments where I knew I was transgender was during a trip to Japan after high school. Most of the friends I made on that trip were women, and I keenly remember one night where everyone, perhaps stayed up a bit too late. With a bunch of college kids in close proximity, he made sure that the boys went to their rooms and the girls went to theirs. Lights out, everyone back to your rooms. “Welp, see you tomorrow” or something similar, one of my friends said. And it was one of those moments where the sheer knowledge that I was being gendered and I was being gendered wrong struck me in the heart. I was not a guy. But here I was, being told that I was. This thing that I largely ignored and didn’t conceptualize as having a solution was hitting me in the chest and I had no idea what to do with it. It stung.
Similarly, as a young girl growing up being told that I was a boy, I would often be judged for “opposite” gender friendships that were so close, or for being unable to act out prescribed gender roles. I didn’t fit in, and I suspect that even without the psychiatric conditions that made that even harder I still wouldn’t have fit in because I was still just pretending to be me. I had no idea what being me was like because I wasn’t allowed to nor was I aware that I could be me.
The difference is night and day, really. Childhood me was lonely, isolated, and had few meaningful friendships save a few close ones. She wanted to spend all day in books. Adult me, openly a genderfluid woman, is charismatic and struggles to find time for all the socializing she wants to do. Not because of any numerical difference, but because she finds it easier and more desirable to socialize now that she can be herself.
But all that isolation, all those years of betrayal and bullying and confrontations with one's birth family. They leave scars.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
It took me a long while to realize the attachments I formed were not a glitch. I thought for ages they were too close, I struggled to explain them to others and to myself. I realized, slowly over a period of several years, that there are reasons for them. And the main one is family.
I could, go into the reasons why, but I am trying not to write about myself here. I’m trying to write about a concept. I’m trying to explain pack and how it operates in my life. I’m trying to explain why, despite the very angry wishes of a part of myself and my tendency towards self preservation at all costs, I’m willing to continue going over every week to see my pack. I’m trying to explain what it feels like to be stripped of family and I’m trying to explain how it fucks you up so much.
Families are supposed to be stability, a place you can always go. Lin Manuel Miranda’s song Enough in his excellent in the heights captures the complexities so well. I’d encourage you to listen to it, but if you don’t have the time, here’s one of the best verses (well, a combination of them)…
“ No no no no no! No, you don’t! When you have a problem you come home..You hear me? When you have a problem, you come home. As long as we’re alive, you’re never on your own!”
But when you’re told by the people who love you that who you are means the opposite, that as long as you’re alive, you’re on your own. It fucks you up in a deep, traumatic way. When you reveal your most authentic self to someone, often but not always after years and years of hiding it or of denying it to yourself or of finally realizing it has been what has been wrong with your life:
and they reject you?
Your moment of happiness, your moment where they need to see you and do what you have been told by society and your own parents since you were a kid.
And they reject you?
That breaks you. And the science proves it:
Transgender people, and I would think any people, are at a much higher risk of suicide and homelessness when rejected by their family. And it makes sense. What do you have if not your family? Families play a crucial role in all cultures, in all societies. Family, no matter how we define it, is one of those things that we recognize as innately something that makes us, us.
And we’re told that our birth or adoption families are the crux of that. And in many ways they are. They raise us, after all. And ideally, we learn a lot of things about life from them. We learn key lessons and pillars that we carry throughout our lives. Or we shed them off entirely if they’re abusive and we have the opportunity to and decide that that is how it has to be. But they are where we start, and even if we don’t have children of our own they oftentimes are what we end up creating. Whether that be a family of two, or a family of two hundred. The childless couple or the queer subcultures we contribute to.
But here’s the rough thing.
Our families can hurt each other, too. The scars we carry, the things we’ve learned, the burdens we bear. They can break us, and they can break our families. We’ve all seen this in queer circles. We’ve seen polycules fall apart as the result of trauma inflicted on a new member, we’ve seen friend groups and other social circles filled with the feuding of those who called themselves metamours or lovers even a few years earlier. And, perhaps that is life. Perhaps the breaking of families and the creation of new ones is just a matter of fact. A thing that people are capable of getting through without being crushed. Something that we can work through. Something that we can learn to deal with. Maybe the myth of the perfect happy family is just that, a myth. But what isn’t a myth is that there are families less harmful than the ones some of us grew up in, and that the state of the ones we grew up in affects how we view the families we join in the future.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Pack. If you don’t know, it’s a word with a lot of inaccuracies. Alpha, Beta, and Omega are junk science. But the concept is still there. Similarly, the concepts I was taught as a child, even if they weren’t the most true in my own family, are still there. Loyalty, Trust, Kindness.
Pack. Family. I met another wolf and I love her very much. I love her so much I agreed to spend my life with her. I call her my Alpha. And much like the Alpha of a pack of wolf shaped wolves, I enrich her life and she enriches mine. We make decisions together, we go through time together. And like fictional wolf packs, there is a hierarchy and she is the glue that holds the motley band of people who I view as my pack together. This pack has a name, and I am honoured to be a part of it. I love to spend time with my lover’s loved ones. I can think of nowhere else I would rather be than eating dinner and watching Star Trek with them. They mean the world to me.
But family isn’t just present. It’s past. It’s the people who rescued and saved me from being on the streets. It’s the people who bore the brunt of me rebuilding my life. It’s my ex. It’s the relationships she forms. It’s, even through the pain, respecting and cheering for those who are no longer one’s pack. It’s hearing about them from mutual friends and feeling sadness, but also joy. Happyness. It’s watering the parts of you they helped you grow, rather than letting them wither. And it’s hoping you were able to help them grow as well. Paths have diverged, but you hope they make it to the stars too.
It is my communities. It is expanded family. It is being in community with others and helping them to grow. It is understanding that being in community is a revolutionary act and that as much as Colonialist Capitalism tries to destroy it, community is one of the most vital parts of human experience and will persist and outlive the systems of oppression that seek to tear it down.
It is those I love and those who love them. Love is one of the most powerful forces in the universe and I am honoured to share in it.
It’s every friend I have ever made. This one is hard to explain. I love my friends. I didn’t use to have many. They are, each and every one of them, a shining part of my life. Every memory made with them, every second spent with them. It is going through life with them. Learning from them and passing time with them and fighting alongside them. It is accepting them and trusting them and being there for them. Friends are pack.
It is spiritual family and ancestors. It is living in kinship with those who are ancestors and those spirits who we work with. It is respecting them and remembering them and honouring them and walking in their footsteps and understanding that they are not lost. They are here with us.
And it is those who I have learned to call brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles. Both birth family and not.
It is howling, late at night. And it is hearing the countless howls echoing back in the night. Of pack. Of family. Echoing back in the darkness.
