In April 2023, I ended my relationship with my father and his entire side of the family. There were many reasons why, but one of the most defining was his political views. I never had a strong connection with my father, as my parents split up when I was young. Due to his job, I only saw him on holidays or during summer break. Even then, most of the visits were spent with my stepmother rather than him.
Whenever I did visit him, the environment was always the same. Fox News played on the television from morning to night. He recommended right-wing books like they were required reading, and he shouted slurs as casually as if they were part of his everyday vocabulary. I still remember in fourth grade, when I told him that my teacher had given me an unfair grade, the only consolation he could offer over the phone was, “She’s just a no-good Democrat.” It wasn’t until high school that I realized the word Democrat wasn’t actually an insult; it was simply a political party he disagreed with, one he taught me to hate without understanding.
When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, I celebrated just like he did. I thought the country would change for the better. I walked through the halls of my middle school defending Trump and mocking Hillary Clinton. I repeated arguments I didn’t understand, and I believed that a woman couldn’t lead the country as well as a man like Donald Trump would. My father adored the political mini-version of himself that I became, and that’s all I ever wanted: for my father to notice and love me. It was the validation that I had chased my entire childhood, validation from a man who voted for someone who opposed nearly every part of who I would eventually realize I was.
Today, as a bisexual woman, I am ashamed of my younger self. I know I didn’t fully understand what I was saying then, but that doesn’t erase how it feels now. It doesn’t erase the immense amount of work I had to do to unlearn the behaviors and views that were hammered into me. Many of my closest friends from middle school, high school, and even the current day are LGBTQ+ or belong to diverse communities. Keeping them in mind, when I think about the things I used to say, the things I used to laugh at my dad for saying, the views I used to echo, it makes me sick. I grew up surrounded by red: red politics, red anger, red warnings disguised as faith and patriotism. It didn’t help that the church reinforced those ideas, pressing them into my mind during the years when I was most impressionable.
Realization didn’t fully hit me until high school, during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the George Floyd incident, I began going down a rabbit hole of videos and media showcasing police brutality, LGBTQ+ rights coming under constant attack, and hatred in politics rippling out into real people’s lives. My dad’s validation no longer mattered to me. I realized that the people I truly cared about were the same ones being hurt by the beliefs I had once repeated to make my family proud.
Every Thanksgiving, I sat quietly as my dad’s side of the family argued about why Trump should build the wall or why LGBTQ+ marriage was wrong. I never fought back, not because I necessarily agreed, but because my father scared me. He was an angry man, and for a long time, he made me an angry person too.
I’ve learned that my anger doesn’t have to be his anger, though. I’m proud of my rage now, because it comes from compassion. It means I care deeply about the issues at hand, and now more than ever, that rage matters. My boyfriend and his family are of Hispanic descent. My best friends and I are part of the LGBTQ+ community. I’m an adult struggling to stay afloat in a world where hatred is consistently on the rise. I grew exhausted from battling not only the world’s politics, but also my own father. I could no longer remain silent as he spoke harshly about the people I love and those who deserve the same rights as everyone else.
It took a long time to unravel the beliefs I had been raised on. The distance I’ve created from my father’s world has given me room to grow, and room to finally become the person I should have been allowed to be all along.
I will never stop fighting for human rights. I will always be a strong believer in cutting people out of my life who fight against everything I believe in. My political views aren’t a weakness; they’re a strength that gives me hope in a world that constantly feels against me.