On Not Attending My High School Reunion — Transgender With a Touch of ADHD Edition
(A letter semi-anonymously published rather than sent)
To the organizers of the reunion event:
I convey my regrets. I will not be attending the celebratory alumni event you have graciously organized. It’s not just that I no longer live in my hometown. There are several reasons, actually.
Let’s start with the common reasons, as true for me as they for many others.
First, I never felt embraced or even welcomed at our school (I attended grades 3 through 12). The 1981 Vintage was a heavily apathetic class. People either just didn’t care at all or didn’t care for me. I rarely if ever fit in. And as an adult it’s not necessarily an experience I want to be reminded of forty years later.
Next, going out of my way to reunite with some people I was once close to but don’t necessarily fit in my life anymore is awkward. Further, doing so with yet other folks I was never close to, to begin with, seems odd and insincere. And regarding those others in the class with whom I was friendly and with whom I have remained close, what, after all, is the point of a class reunion?
Beyond that, I think for a few too many of us, there occurs some rankling sense of competition related to career and even family life. I presume this is so because there are those who want to flaunt it because they have “killed it” in their careers (or elsewhere) but who end up off-putting their classmates who didn’t. Or because there are those who didn’t win the career lottery but want to exploit the occasion to network for business, which tends to rub others, myself included, wrong.
Among the last of the common reasons that hold true for me and many others is dread of insincere interest followed by ghosting. Kind of like the beginning of the movie Animal House (1978). Although this happens in just about any social setting, in my experience the rate at which it does, based on prior reunions I attended, offends sensibility. Why would I or others attend an event where the likelihood of reconnecting and staying reconnected is marginal?
So let’s move on to issues particular to me that I just assume avoid:
Memories of Living With Undiagnosed ADHD. Do I really want to trigger memories of being an object of derision owing to undiagnosed ADHD — rather than to moral turpitude or intellectual vacuity, as so many teachers alleged. Classmates all too often rebuffed me if I reached out for help. Teachers browbeat me if they caught me doing so. I received so many report cards with “day dreaming” listed as a defect. In retrospect, it strikes me as plain wrong. I struggled mightily but only managed to deliver a thin harvest of good grades. There were so many late papers — sometimes, I would just get a zero, other times it was little better, with a formula composed of the baseline grade for the work (often A’s) divided by the number of days late (plus 1). Zero accommodation. Somehow, I got through high school, college, graduate school, and even a decade on Wall Street before my ADHD was finally diagnosed and treated. The result: recurrent poor self-image, fragile self-confidence, recurrent sadness, a good bit of unrealized potential. Not sure anyone would wish to be regaled with that kind of storyline.
That I did more than survive despite ADHD, that I thrived, once I left my high school doesn’t make me feel any more ecumenical about attending the reunion, however. I have nothing to prove, nor do I feel I do, nor do I have much they would care to know. And nothing makes up for the unpleasantness I endured.
Saving the best for last…
Being Transgender Now, and Then. As a trans woman, I do not think I would be genuinely welcome at the reunion. This is really the heart of the matter. I might be willing stomach all the other objections, general to many or specific to me, but for this. But not being welcome just because of who I am… What am I talking about? After all, I received an invitation, more remarkable because the event is school-related not school-sponsored. To this I retort that being invited isn’t the same thing as being made to feel genuinely included. Do the organizers have a responsibility to go out of their way to do so? I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t know. But that doesn’t answer my point.
Why do I think I would not be welcome?
When I finally came out as a transgender woman in middle age, after first coming out to family, I notified friends with whom I wanted to share my good news, some number of whom were former classmates. Most said they were fine with my being trans, but silence ensued. As well as being one of the kindest things I have ever done for myself, transitioning was also one of the most difficult and painful things I have ever done in my life, and keeping one’s head on straight takes incredible intestinal fortitude. In my view anyone with empathy would realize they need to be supportive of their trans friends beyond simply expressing shock and surprise over a single meeting or phone call. In plain speak, they should stay engaged. Yes, I realize that we all have our own lives. Parents, spouses, and children who have gone through trauma and/or death — all requiring devotion, crimping our ability to be there for others in our lives. And there are vicissitudes in our careers. Etc. I am grateful for the handful of classmates who actually kept in touch following my coming out. But most of the people I thought were my friends, even good friends, went silent at a time when I needed a lot of the opposite. The most offending case was that of a friend who was then living with his aging mother, both whom I knew well. He asked me not to visit because he thought the shock would harm his mom, on what basis I can hardly credit.
We 1981 high school graduates were born in a generation largely unaccepting of transgender people, let alone other LGBT+ people. Look no farther than the country’s desultory, unmitigated disaster of a response to the AIDS pandemic when it was thought to be a disease afflicting almost only gay men. Between our parents’ generation and our own, it is wholly unsurprising why it took me and many others in my generation so long to recognize and live our truths. I believe we classmates belong to a luddite generation that largely would be fine oppressing young trans people and denying them basic respect, true inclusion and appropriate healthcare.
What trauma might be conjured?
I also carry with me loads of unpleasant memories, as do a ton of trans people of my generation. Being called a “faggot” and the like. Subjected to violence in the form of “smear the queer” dogpiles. (My experience is relatively tame. One trans girl friend about the same age was assaulted with a steel trashcan — no, not the lid but the can itself — and she was tossed through a car windshield.) All the misogyny, homophobia, classism, racism, and in my case anti-Semitism. All of the baiting.
I also carry memories of disappointment and self-loathing: I prayed each night in increasingly forlorn hope, that I would miraculously awaken as a girl. That not being the case, my regular escape was to experience my femme self in my imagination, in scifi, and so forth. Yet I wasn’t able to do that without also experiencing deep shame and self-hatred. And by the same token, I never felt safe sharing such feelings — not even with best friends, therapists, parents — nobody. Almost as bad, for much of my time at school, I was petrified that peers would somehow unmask my secret. These experiences, many of which occurred at school or related to school life, ultimately led to a decades long suppression of my truth, a feeling of suffocation or even being dead inside. Nowadays, I experience the deep regret of never having got to experience the whole panoply of my formative years presenting as my true gender.
To cap it off, all I will be ever remembered for by most of my classmates is the male mask I gratefully dispensed with almost a decade ago. I really don’t look forward to explaining myself when I encounter former classmates. I just cannot countenance the idea of doing so repeatedly at a reunion.
Who in their right mind would willingly subject themselves to triggering such stinging memories and regrets, let alone to such novelty-seeking gawkery or even mean-spirited scorn of one’s former classmates?
Why did I bother to write something so seemingly unnecessarily long? I suppose it’s that back in the day, I deeply wanted to be school-spirited, I deeply strove to be included, even while I was experiencing all that ostracism and unpleasantness. I concede that there are sometimes some good reasons for attending reunions. Occasionally, they are venues for resolving past trauma, when we discover that our tormentors are real people who matured and regret their past abusiveness. But I think I’m right to deeply question whether I want to hang out with former private school classmates who are mostly white, and who too often probably voted wallet over ethical civics.
If you somehow managed to read this all the way through, I convey
My cordial if frosty regards,
Brooke
P.S. This is more about how I feel right now. I haven’t sat on it long and let it percolate through a good filter. But something tells me it’s worthwhile posting. That said, I encourage feedback. I am not afraid of being disabused of untenable logic. Lastly, I haven’t mentioned my high school by name, nor do I plan to formally confirm it, but I’ve made no effort to prevent those who wish to fish out its identity from doing so.
