r/AITAH•
Leah_Thorne

AITAH for cutting out my parents from my life after my father said awful things to me?

So here is the back story here. I am a 39 yr old trans woman. I came out to my family back in January 2023. One of the most awkward moments of my life. They weren't even looking at me as I was talking and there were a few questions asked but I gave them grace. I was married at the time and I was still male presenting most of the time. I had just started hormones on December 2022. So my marriage fell apart due to me (completely unrelated but I take responsibility for it). I also have a 7 yr old daughter so i wasn't presenting female around her as I moved out and my ex and I sold the house. We ended up in a much more queer friendly town less than 5 minutes apart and I get to see her on a regular basis. So summer of 2023 while on my own I became myself full time and this was the first time my parents got to see me as my real self. I mean it was early in transition and I was still learning a lot about myself and how to be a woman in the world. The first time I came over to their place dressed and in makeup my mother refused to look at me and left the house to get food and didn't speak to me. That visit has always hurt. She's a passive aggressive person and I knew that this was always going to upset her. I was named for her brother who had died at age 2 from illness as a child which is super sad but I was supposed to carry on for him. I think she viewed me as taking that away from her. I went ahead and did a thing a lot of trans people do and I had my name changed Legally. I didn't talk to them about this but I also changed my last name as well. Changed it to something unrelated to the family that I had always loved. This upset them and my mom sent me a screen shot of my Facebook profile and asked if I had changed my name. I told her yes. That was the last I heard about it for a while. My next big life change was I had scheduled gender affirming surgery aka bottom surgery for November that year. I thought I would let me father know because I would be absent for a few months while I recovered. I don't really remember the conversation very well other than he said some transphobic shit he had heard on the plethora of right wing media he consumed on a daily basis. He had also cautioned me if I knew what I was doing and if I had talked to my therapists about this? For context me being trans had been a focal point of my therapy up to that point and I had to talk to my therapist and 2 separate psychiatrists to get approved for surgery. I was on the verge of cutting them out of my life then. But something happened while I was recovering in the hospital after surgery. My father began texting me saying things like he was proud of how brave of a woman I was and that he was proud of his daughter. He called me his daughter which almost made me cry. So I decided to give him and my mom another chance. My mother continued to be a passive aggressive asshole this whole time. She has never used my new name around me. She has sent me the same presents of cheap stuff in the mail but every letter or package she sent It was to a shortened version of my first name and the first letter on my last name. So I was never fully acknowledged by her and she's not going to confront me on anything. My dad on the other hand will. So I would say around last summer 2025 my dad started slipping. He started dead naming me more, misgendering me more and referring to me occasionally as his son. This came to a head a few weeks back when I went over there to drop off my daughter and help him with his computer. I work in IT and he has always relied on me for tech support. After I was done he wanted to have a conversation with me. He told me in this conversation that he would never see me as his daughter that I would always be his son. Also I'm in a state with trans bathroom bans in schools and public buildings. So I vocalized my stress and concerns over that. He promptly told me he didn't want me in the women's bathroom because of "The Trans" he claimed to have encountered working as a security guard at a mall in a major city. He brought up the name change thing again but I had a conversation with him a year and a half ago and explained everything to him and he seemed to be ok with that. He said he was worried about my daughter and that she'd learn to be trans because of me. There was other transphobic right wing talking points he made as well. I don't recall everything but he was parroting a lot of shit I've heard anti trans activists say. He also on multiple occasions during the conversation tried to play the pity card. when I was telling him about the hardships I had experienced as a trans woman in this society he compared it to him being in the army during the end of the Vietnam war and having people call him names for something he chose to do with his life. Oh and for good measure to point out just how far down the rabbit hole the man has gone he told me that civil war was coming and that China was funding antifa. So clearly there's no pulling that man out of the rabbit hole. I was hurt and numb as I drove off. I wrote a very angry emotional text message that I didn't send because my nesting partner insisted I sleep on it. So I did. I ended up texting him a few days later telling him our relationship was over because he was refusing to see me as who I am and that I was not willing to debate my humanity or right to exist. He gave me the excuse that he has a right to disagree and that the relationship is a two way street and why did he have to accept me without questions but also that I had not been considering how hard me transitioning had been on them. At that point the conversation ended I just finished my last bit of official business with my mother yesterday and I'm ready to bury the relationship. To be clear as well. I am not taking away their access to my daughter. My ex is handling that. Unless they start feeding her right wing propaganda I will continue to let them see her. Am I the asshole for having a line that's too far with my parents?

Posted Feb 25, 2026, 8:57 PM UTC

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