I recently got outted as trans to my immediate family and some of my extended family through the one person I did end up telling. I don’t hold it against them that much but my mom who I already have a strained relationship with has told me “her real child would never do this to her” and basically I’m no longer allowed to come over. Some of my other folks are convinced it happened to me because we immigrated and I didn’t grow up chinese. I still live in the same town I grew up in and a lot of my fam live here too and a few of them are still sympathetic to me but no one has really fought my mom on it.
Getting to the point of the post my sister is really into keeping family photos/videos and she has all of them in her possession. She also rescued the ones of me from my moms house and asked if I wanted to look at them/the rest of the ones she had of me. I said sure because it doesn’t make me dysphoric to look at myself pretransition as a little kid and maybe I could just. feel a little better about how far I’ve come even. So I look through like the huge pack of photos she has from about the late 90s to early 2000s starting the year I was born.
And I don’t recognize that kid. Like it seems crazy because babies all look the same but that’s not me. I don’t show up in these pictures until I look about 3 years old. I can’t describe it but looking at those pictures of that baby in the hospital and in the crib and crawling around is like…that’s just not my face?
And like. I don’t know maybe I’m reading into it because she hates me now anyway but my mom stopped looking happy after I was 3. I think my popo (gran on my mom’s side) stopped showing up in pictures with me too but she died the year I was 15. Did something happen to us? To me? To the other kid? I want to look up if a kid went missing around that time, it might be me or whoever’s in the picture. It’s bad but I seriously can’t stop thinking about the possibility of what my mom said being literal.
I’m just wracking my brain about my earliest memory and I think it is from the year I was 3. We still lived in China at the time because we moved when I was 5. It was someone pulling me out of a lake because I swallowed a bunch of water. I remember throwing up a ton and like so many people just yelling and crying and panicking? It made me also just completely melt down too and that’s all I remember about that day. Did someone already know then that I’d turn out wrong? Did something else happen when I was drowning?