My dad and I were sitting in Starbucks about a year after he learned he had Alzheimer’s when he looked me up and down with his right eye and said to the barista, “This young – ahem – man will have a latte.
I laughed, not sure if he was joking. Until then, I had always been his daughter.
Admittedly, I was never a typical daughter. Growing up, I was a tomboy — or what Larry David would later call “pre-gay.” I had short, tousled hair and wore my older brother’s hand-me-downs; people often thought I was his little brother.
As an adult, I was still mistaken for a cisgender man. I’ve been called “sir” more times than I can count, which I honestly never minded. I’ve generally been content with people considering me a man, even before my recent top surgery and the low dose of testosterone I started taking a few years ago.
It soon became clear that four years ago my father was not joking when he called me a young man. After that moment at Starbucks, he almost exclusively used the pronouns “he/him” for me and even started collectively referring to me and my brother as his sons.
Of course it has been bittersweet. While he technically forgot who I am, there is also something affirmative about his honest assessment of my gender. It’s like every time he studies me with fresh eyes and takes me in again. Paradoxically, I felt seen.
The truth is that I have always felt seen by my father, Teddy. According to family lore, he was convinced I was a boy right after I was born. When he took in all 10 pounds of mine, he immediately thought, “Our little football player!” and yelled to everyone in the room, “It’s a boy!” (The doctor quickly informed him otherwise.)
Sure, it was probably a little sexist for him to assume his buff new baby had to be a boy, but I like to think he picked up on my straight-up transmasculine vibes.
When I was little, my dad and I were best friends. Like him – and unlike my brother – I was a jock. We spent hours catching in the park and he drove me to all my different sports games. When I decided to join the boys’ neighborhood hockey league at the age of 7, he supported me. As a judge, he sometimes even adjourned the court early to get me to a game on time.
He bought me transformers and other so-called “boy toys” I wanted and never looked at the ripped jeans and T-shirts I insisted on wearing. Both my parents were progressive, but given that they had no real understanding or roadmap for raising a gender non-conforming child in the 1980s (especially by today’s standards), they did well not to force “girly” things on me. And while my father was apprehensive when I first came out as gay when I was 19, I have felt nothing but support from him. When I finally told him I had a girlfriend, he just asked, “What’s her name?”
There have been so many painful moments when I lost my father to Alzheimer’s in my late 70’s and early 80’s. Seeing him no longer able to do all the things he loves so much – biking, playing tennis, driving, traveling with his partner, Barbara – and witnessing his utter confusion and frustration as his world becomes unfamiliar to him is heartbreaking. But the only silver lining was the kick I got every time he referred to me as his son.
It was an adjustment for certain friends and relatives when I started using the pronouns “she/it” three years ago, but not for him. We may have skipped over the nuances of what it means to live on the genderqueer spectrum, but he’s been unequivocal in his heartfelt Alzheimer’s-induced embrace of my increasingly masculine presence. He quickly adjusted to say: “He this – ” “He that…” “What is He talk about?”
Last fall I immediately asked my father: “Do you see me more as a man or as a woman?”
He looked at me for a long time and then made a circular motion with his hand. “Both,” he said, looking straight at me. “Most of the time I just see you as… lively.”
I laughed. He couldn’t have handled it better. Besides being male or female, I wish we could all see gender that way – as dynamic, alive, alive, alive.
Last November, my father was finally admitted to a memory care center – and I finally got my funding approved for a top surgery in Ontario. I booked my breast augmentation procedure for a few weeks after we planned to move it. But it turned out that a Covid outbreak on his floor postponed his move-in date to the same day I was due for surgery. I now joke that my dad and I switched at the same time.
More than funny, his acknowledgment of my gender is healing. My dad and I never got to have a real conversation about my current gender journey – how I started taking testosterone shortly after he clocked me as a man; how I now identify as “queer/non-binary” and “transmasculine”; how I still call myself “Rachel” but sometimes use “Noah,” the name my parents would give me when I was a boy.
But I joke that he is the most gender-affirming dad I could have ever wished for. Perhaps the ability to forget assigned gender is a positive lesson we can learn from the havoc Alzheimer’s otherwise wreaks on people’s brains and families.
When he recently met my new girlfriend, he asked her, “How did you get him, her, It?”
In someone else’s mouth, “it” would sound disgustingly bigoted. And yet, coming from this tender 83-year-old with dementia who never learned the new rules of contemporary pronouns, there was only one way I could hear it – as his sincere effort to lovingly (and playfully) recognize who I am.
Not long ago my father introduced me to one of his caretakers like this: “This is my nephew, my cousin, my niece, my… everything.” He was no longer sure how we were related. More recently, he also told me that he loves me “like a brother.” But he recognized me, or at least intuitively knew I was someone he liked—his human “everything bagel.” He often referred to me as “smiley,” noting what a great smile I have. Usually his face lit up when he saw me: “It is you!” he would say.
The shock of death still comes even if you have prepared for it. Weeks ago, on July 6, my father was transferred to palliative care, where he passed away three days later.
I barely got over his death, but the heartbreaking irony of my father slowly losing his sense of self at the very moment I was becoming more and more who I am didn’t pass me by, even as it unfolded.
I was very close to my mother, who passed away in July 2015 from medically untreated rectal cancer (it’s a long story, about which I wrote a book). In my teenage years I started to develop more of her interests in art and culture, feminism, good food, hiking and dark humor. But in many ways, I’ve always identified more with my father. We were the most alike of anyone in our family (although I had more hair), and I inherited his super logic brain and old Jewish man approach to life.
Watching him decline and die, I felt like an extension of me was dying too. At his funeral, I mentioned that he was the closest thing to having twins. But I take comfort in the knowledge that I will carry a part of him forward in me. Among his many admirable qualities – integrity, kindness, generosity, humor – he has been a role model for the kind of masculinity I want to embody: strong and gentle, confident and self-deprecating, tough and affectionate, dependable and caring, nerdy and cute.
When I visited him last month, I experienced a familiar fear: There will only be a little bit more time before any memory is gone. He smiled when he saw me – a spark of recognition! — but then looked confused and said, “Remind me, how do we know each other?”
“I’m Rachel,” I said back with a smile. “Your child.”
And no matter how I continue to grow and identify, I always will.
