Blog post. I wish this shit was fiction.
As you may have seen on my socials, I was visiting my grandfather in Greece and was meant to fly back home tonight, but my uncle flipped his lid, started screaming at me, tried to fight me in the kitchen, blurted out half an hour’s worth of transphobic abuse, and culminated in declaring that it would be easy to kill me, and he would feel fine about doing so.
As you can imagine, following this, I went to pack all my bags, lock myself in my bedroom overnight, and then go for the next bus to the airport very early on Saturday morning.
First thing’s first: I am fine, I am safe, I am uninjured, and I am now safely home.
I have talked a bit about my shitty uncle before – a few years ago, I mentioned visiting my family for their Christmas celebrations and leaving early after he threatened to punch me.
He got upset about something or other, I corrected him on my pronouns, he said, “Well, if you were a man, I could hit you,” and I said, “Like a baby? You’re mad and you want to hit me? Like an actual child?”
And he took his tantrum outside to tire himself out.
Like many abusers, he’s the sort of person who will constantly sing his own praises and talk at length as to his own virtues, but blame everyone around him for his own flaws. He needs to believe that anything and everything he is doing is the only way, the right and correct way, to do anything, so he becomes controlling and increasingly angry if he feels that his self-appointed authority isn’t being respected or given what he feels is its appropriate due.
This man is in his 50s, and as you can imagine, he can’t maintain friendships or work very well – he is a painter and decorator when not spending his time drinking copious amounts of beer and sharing racist memes on Facebook, and despite his attempts to convince the Canadian government when applying for his visa, this is not considered a skilled profession…
So he got deported from Canada.
And then again.
And then a third time.
Earlier this week, a family member tried to go to me, “Oh, well, he had such a traumatic time being deported from Canada the third time, they sent him on the plane in chains,” and I would perhaps have some sort of sympathy for that, were it not for the fact that this man is so virulently racist and anti-immigration when it comes to other people.
I have said for several years that his lack of impulse control and particularly the extent to which he cannot control his temper is potentially indicative of brain damage, maybe from prior traumatic brain injury – I don’t say that as an insult, but because the extent to which he gets angry, and the things he gets angry about, are extremely minor, and while he’s been pushed through all manner of anger management programmes in the course of his life, breathing exercises and mindfulness can only do so much to help with a problem that’s neurochemical.
And, you know, I’ve got ADHD – that shit is genetic, it’s not like he doesn’t show similar traits, even without further hormonal or neurochemical imbalances. He tried a mood stabiliser the past few years, recently, and family told me that it helped a lot with his instability, but unfortunately it led to fits.
Medication like this can have nasty side effects, and especially when you’re taking them later in life or when they’re contraindicated by stuff like habitual and long-life alcoholism.
And that sucks!
It sucks for him, and it sucks for everyone he has to live with.
Why do I say all this? Am I making excuses for him?
God, no.
In fact, I probably make the fewest excuses for him in the whole of my family, which is part of, I’m sure, why I make him so very angry, on top of, you know, the being transgender without his permission and blessing.
My grandfather tried to say to me the last day, “You have to understand, he just thinks that being transgender is wrong.”
I said, “Well, I think people with those views should kill themselves, but I don’t feel the need to tell everybody about it.”
This was not the desired response – people often desire that queer people, trans people, disabled people, people of colour, anybody who is marginalised or abused or minoritised, should effectively act neutrally or be passive in response to bigoted views. Those people are hateful, and we shouldn’t respond with hate – because the people that espouse this interesting idea of pacifism are often not the targets of bigoted abuse, they struggle to meaningfully assess the real life risk.
The thing about dealing with this particular man is that I spend any time I am forced to exist in his country being as passive and uninteresting as possible – I ignore basically everything he says, I grey rock, I generally avoid doing anything that might “provoke” him, and again, because this is an irrational man with anger issues and nothing going for him, that means doing anything.
I spent a week in Greece to visit my grandfather – the only reason I spent any time in my uncle’s company was because he has been deported from Canada, he is too unskilled and too unable to make enough money to live in the UK, and my grandfather is the only person left who feels obligated to give him any slack.
Most of my time visiting, I sat in my room, because if I tried to sit at the kitchen table or in the living room, my uncle would try to talk to me, or complain about me, or otherwise make himself a nuisance in my presence. As it stood, he knocked on my door and burst in to complain about something or “ask me a favour” that he didn’t need to actually talk to me about three or four times a day.
The lovely little dog I posted pictures of, Georgia, actually belongs to him – unfortunately for her, my uncle doesn’t understand anything about canine behaviour, and while he doesn’t hit the dog or, for the most part, scream at the dog, he is extremely possessive of the dog and gets very upset with her when she acts like a dog.
As I said, I spent most of the time I was in Greece in bed working on my laptop, and my grandfather’s fat little cat, Kaluki, was hanging out with me a lot – Georgia would often creep into the room to try to cuddle in the bed with us, because it’s winter, and she’s a very thin little dog with a very light coat, and she’s not made for the cold.
He would become very angry when he realised that Georgia was curled up on my feet or sprawled next to the cat, because he’s very jealous and angry at the idea that the dog should spend any time with me or enjoy my company. The fact that it’s not really about me at all but just about being a 5 kilo animal shivering in the cold with no enclosed bed was irrelevant.
He also feeds this dog exclusively on cat food instead of dog food, and I had to intervene to prevent her from being allowed to eat a chunk of vanilla fudge bigger than her fucking paw.
Multiple times I would literally be about to fall asleep or be sleeping in my room and he would burst in to look for and then remove the fucking dog rather than just, I don’t know… calling her name, or doing the unthinkable and just leaving her be.
And this is just the stuff directed at me, obviously – he screams and shouts and yells during quiz shows because he gets angry at contestants that don’t get answers right; he plays bad music loudly through the tinny speakers of his phone; he drinks and drives; he’s rude to my grandfather and to anybody else, blah, blah, blah.
My grandfather commented that I hadn’t been eating as much as I usually would while I was staying with him, and part of it was lacking my usual accessibility tools in his kitchen and lacking the normal ingredients I would get, but also, whenever I was cooking, my uncle would repeatedly get angry about things not being left in the correct place, or me not cooking in the way that he wanted things to be cooked, or something equally stupid and absurd.
On Friday, I’d actually had a wonderful day. I’d watched the new episode of The Pitt from the night before, I’d done a load of laundry, I’d written a bunch of Pitt fanfic, I’d had a wonderful lunch, we’d gone to dinner, and I’d been to the bakery to get some little cakes.
For lunch, I’d cooked a whole chicken with paprika, oregano, and garlic, and also baked potatoes with feta cheese and the same.
After waiting for my uncle to fuck off and finally go to bed so I could use the kitchen in peace, I started breaking down the chicken I had cooked at lunch. I’d only eaten the leg and was planning on making a coconut and lemongrass chicken curry on the Saturday, so I leaned against the counter and put the meat into a tupperwear whilst stripping off and breaking down the bones.
I had a bit of difficulty finding the Tupperware in my grandfather’s kitchen, and ditto finding an appropriately large pot. A few times when I was breaking the chicken down, my uncle stomped into the room like a child and loomed to look over my shoulder, which I ignored each time – I expect he wanted to complain that I was eating some of the chicken as I was stripping the carcass, but given that it was my chicken that I had cooked, he then felt he couldn’t do that.
I had my headphones in and was just listening to tunes, and then I washed up the stuff that had been left aside as I put the bones on to boil with the chicken fat and an onion.
My uncle becomes very angry whenever anything is left in the sink for “too long”, which is basically any length of time at all where he notices it and has enough time to become fixated on it.
As I was drying my hands, he stomped into the room and virtually shouted into my face, “Could you make ANY more noise?”
And I sort of looked at him flatly and went, “Sorry, I didn’t realise I was being loud.” (I wasn’t.) “I’m just putting this stock on and then I’m going to bed.”
Obviously, this wasn’t enough.
He went on shouting, “You’re making too much noise, why are you doing this,” and so on, and I said, “Just leave me alone, I’m going to put this stock on, and then I’m going to bed.”
He became more explosive and more pathetically angrily. Screaming that I was making too much noise, whatever, and I snapped at him to just leave me alone and mind his own business – whereupon he tried to get into my space and grabbed me, and I shoved him back.
I’m not a particularly well man. I walk with a cane, I’m asthmatic, I have EDS and MCAS, I’m chronically fatigued and in pain. I had a great time in Greece, because the humidity and warmer temperatures even in winter obviously did wonders for my inflammation, but I’m still, you know, sick.
With that said, I’m not a man in my mid-fifties who’s been drinking and smoking since I was like twelve. I’m a young man in my twenties, and so when my uncle started beginning to impotently grapple with me, it was not actually that difficult to keep shoving him back from me.
I kept snapping at him to just leave me be, but what he needed from this situation was a win, so he kept trying to reach for my throat or grab my hands to pin me. I twisted out of his grip and kicked him at one point, and while it probably wouldn’t have been difficult to hurt him more seriously, to smack him with a pan or throw the boiling stock over him or even just punch him, I didn’t particularly want to do any of that.
I got in a few physical fights as a teenager, but as a grown man, I don’t want to hurt a man even when he’s moronic and hateful – the more I escalated the fight, the more he would feel justified in trying to hurt me back, and the more he would be able to scream and tantrum and whatever.
Or, if I knocked him down or out, I’d have to help clean up the situation, call an ambulance, help him, whatever – I wasn’t going to do any of that.
My grandfather was woken up by the shouting after about five minutes and came in – I admit, I was quite pissed off at this point, and did point out to my uncle that he was pathetic, and that everyone he knows thinks he is worthless.
This is true, but as you can imagine, was not particularly helpful in the situation.
He started off on a transphobic tirade, then – “I don’t have any problems with trans people or gays, but—” and then everything under the sun. Calling me it, calling me she, calling me cunt, calling me that thing.
I remarked that it was quite funny to be worried about if people believed I was a man, given the state of his manhood. Again, not particularly conducive to him calming down, but it was mildly satisfying in the moment, and he wheeled toward the kitchen before being shoved back to sit down by my grandfather.
The screaming tirade went on – I’m selfish, I’m stupid, no one believes I’m a gay man, I don’t have any prospects in life, I’m ugly, blah blah blah.
I recorded quite a lot of it for posterity’s sake and sent it to my partner and my mother as it was happening, and at one point he did scream about me texting about his pathetic meltdown while it was happening, which I did ignore. For most of his tirade, barring my few nasty comments toward the beginning, I just stood there recording it subtly on my phone and waiting for my stock to come to the boil, because, you know, that was my fucking priority rather than whatever the fuck this was.
The thing is, it’s very easy for someone like me to hurt someone like him – I don’t mean physically, but emotionally. Virtually any comment I make – about his masculinity, about his drinking, about his lack of friendships or relationships, about his lack of skills, anything I can say can cut him to the core.
He has a lot of insecurities, because he’s a very sad and lonely man. He doesn’t have any meaningful hobbies beyond watching sports and arguing in the comments on Facebook. He can’t maintain any friendships or other relationships because of his instability and his abusive behaviour. Even his dog doesn’t like him as much as she likes other people, and for the large part, he cannot understand why, because he can’t cope with sitting with his own faults and insecurities enough to actually extend empathy to other people or engage in a meaningful way with their emotions unless he’s decided that their particular emotion is acceptable.
His abusive behaviour is an extension of his bigotry – the ideology that commands a lot of his behaviour is centred in the idea that he is the first and only judge of any situation. He decides if he has hurt somebody else, and therefore if they are permitted to expect an apology or guilt from him; at the same time, he is the arbiter of if other people mean to hurt or inconvenience him, and he has an extremely small threshold for these things.
That doesn’t mean that I should say these hurtful things to him, because it’s ultimately quite pointless. Punishing a man like this doesn’t change his behaviour: it just makes him lash out more. It’s satisfying in the moment, perhaps, but mostly it just adds more inconvenience to an already irritating situation.
What he tries to say about me, though?
Well.
A lonely heterosexual man screaming that I’m not truly a gay man doesn’t really mean anything.
Even were I not a professional author of gay romance with a lot of queer friends, I do very well at sauna and cruising events when I go to them – even with a cane and a swiftly receding hairline, I remain quite the caked-up white boy. This much ass transcends many barriers, and my face isn’t bad to look at either.
Moreover, I pass pretty well. When he tries to misgender me in public – when any of my older family members do – they just end up coming off as potentially suffering from sort of dementia or otherwise being confused.
The bigotry wouldn’t be excusable even if I didn’t pass, even if I wasn’t quite involved in many aspects of queer life and especially in other queer men’s spaces, but my point is that like… These are things he’s insecure about. He doesn’t like the idea that other people see me as a gay man when he doesn’t agree that I should be allowed to be.
And, well, it’s fine to say I’m stupid, but I’m not insecure about that either.
As for calling me an it or a she or whatever, well. You can call a cat a coffee table or say the moon is made of cheese. Coming from a man like him, those comments would be about as hurtful to me.
When he starts off on a rant like that, I normally just ignore him, but I was in the kitchen to get this fucking stock cooking.
He went to my grandfather at one point, “You can stop refereeing us,” and my grandfather was like, “Yeah, no, I’m gonna just stay here until you go to bed.”
Given that my uncle had attempted to wheel back into the kitchen to physically fight me about four more times in the course of his rant, this wasn’t unreasonable.
I then said, “I’m just putting this stock on to boil, and then I’ll just go to bed and lock the door, and you can go to bed.”
And then my uncle said, “There’s no point locking the door. If I want to fucking kill you, I can, and I wouldn’t feel bad about it.”
Cool! Normal thing to say!
I did go to my room. I did lock the door.
I spent quite a lot of time, to be honest, behind the locked bedroom door and then behind my locked bathroom door, sitting on the floor on the phone with Lorenzo, and then on the phone with my mother, and then on the phone with Lorenzo again until I finally managed to go to sleep at about 3am in the morning until 7:30.
Several times, my grandfather, who was in quite a lot of denial of the reality of the situation, tried to demand I unlock the door just to talk to him, but I said no. As I said to my mother, like…
This is how trans people get killed by family members.
He’d already tried to put his fucking hands around my throat – the fact that he was unsuccessful isn’t the point. It was the fact that he wanted to and was motivated to, and I was not exactly in a position to chill about someone not taking that threat of violence seriously.
But for my grandfather? He’s heavily reliant on my uncle for help in the house with my grandmother several years deceased, and no one else in the family – like me – will come and help him… because my uncle is there.
I didn’t wait to talk to him in the morning – I went for the earliest bus I could and got the fuck out of there.
I had to book two buses across the island to get the airport, fly from Heraklion to Athens, and then there weren’t any flights from Athens to Manchester or Leeds-Bradford for less than about £800, so I had to get a flight from Athens to Heathrow, get a train into the city proper, get an Uber to Victoria Coach Station, get the night coach north to Leeds, and then finally get an Uber home to Bradford.
I spent all the fucking money I had booking my transport back to the airport – in winter, especially on the islands, rural areas of Greece don’t really have much of a taxi service, let alone late-night or weekend public transport, so I was very scared and upset for hours and hours, and felt very trapped, because, you know, I was.
Like I said, I’d had a fucking wonderful day up to that point, and moreover, I have a lot of fucking bills due at the end of this month and the beginning of next month, but was feeling alright about them, because I’d saved money for them!
Well.
There goes all those fucking savings, because some moron just had to threaten to fucking murder me, and I couldn’t really relax and believe it wasn’t serious, because frankly, it was.
The thing about someone with an ideology like my uncle’s is that they believe that the violence they’re doing to correct or punish behaviour they don’t approve of is justified and acceptable – even if I trusted police at any time, as a trans man, to protect me from violence rather than to join in, this was Greece, and I didn’t have any other nearby friends or family to call in other than my grandfather, who my uncle could easily overpower or even hurt accidentally wanting to hurt me.
I was very scared the night of, mostly just couldn’t fucking sleep because I was anticipant of more of a fucking fight, ditto when I went out in the morning to hurriedly get together my things and go for the bus, but thankfully my uncle had already fucked off elsewhere.
The important thing is that I’m now home safe, and several people helped a lot with the cost of getting home. I basically had to wipe out all my savings, borrow a few hundred quid from a friend, and also rely on money followers and fans sent via Ko-Fi, and I got home with about £30 left in my bank account.
It sucks! Sucks like Hell!
I did say to Lorenzo while it was happening like, at the very least, I did know that I had a lot of people that would work to help and support me, and I was right – apart from the monetary support I received, so many people reached out and offered to meet me in London or once I was in Yorkshire to help get me home, and I appreciated it so fucking much.
So… Yeah.
That’s the long and short of it.
I do feel a lot fucking better for writing it all out, and the thing is, I’ve known my uncle was exactly this fucking dangerous since I started my transition – no one believed it was that serious until last night, because it was easy to dismiss my anxieties as just being sensitive about his hateful beliefs, rather than seeing those beliefs as obvious warning signs of future violence.
Again, this is how trans people get fucking murdered by family members or other people in their vicinities. Other people dismiss the beliefs and the violence associated with them as just talk, even when someone’s literally getting physical and threatening murder.
I’m not unaware of the fact that this is also a disability issue.
My uncle is a liability who is unable to maintain friendships or relationships, and he cannot rely on basically any social programme designed for people without safety nets because his personality deficits and especially his temper get him kicked out – and so family members end up having to take him in, because the alternative is letting him live on the streets or die, or whatever else.
So, what’s the trade-off?
Who else will look after and put up with my uncle if they don’t, right?
I’m not unlovable or detestable in the way he is – I don’t need the same level of support.
And that turns me into, what, collateral damage?
Like I said, it’s shitty, and I will be having some conversations with my family about it – part of the reason I’m talking about it so publicly is because I’m very much not of a mind to let this shit be swept under the rug or ignored. If he wants to threaten to kill somebody or impotently attempt to fight them, I’ll shout it from the fucking rooftops.
In the meantime, if you feel you are able to support me and would like to, it would of course be immensely appreciated. A Coup of Owls has just released Light Paths, a novelette duology of which I am a part and will talk about more later this week – my contribution is called Eyes of Magic, and it’s about autism and food and purpose and queerness. If you enjoy my long ramblings about animal butchery or cooking, or how I talk about Dungeon Meshi, I expect you’ll enjoy it!
Otherwise, you can of course subscribe to me on the website or buy things from my shop, or my Ko-Fi is here if you’d like to just tip me directly.
In more positive news, I have written 33k of Hucklerobby fanfic now, and no number of attempts on my life could possibly prevent me from writing more. The most recent instalment is Dennis fixing random shit in Robby’s apartment, so the next one will have Robby having a mental break-down about that before deciding to get a bit self-destructive about the whole situation. There will be blowjobs and some deliciously dubious consent, so get ready to feast your eyes.
I am anticipating my body being sore as fuck as I accustom to the nasty weather here again, but I am feeling full of juice from all my delicious awful medical shows of recent, so I am planning to update a few things this week – Little Devils is at the top of my hopeful roster, as well as writing an update for Valorous King. I will be trying to intersperse my horny fanfic with original updates and some original stuff as I get back into my regular routine.
I am home to my lovely beasties, who are very happy to have their second dad back, and to my lovely lover, and to my lovely home, and its lovely electric blankets and large amounts of Pepsi Max and other autism foods and drinks. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.
Thank you to everyone for your support and lovely wishes, and I can just assure you again that I genuinely am pretty much fine, just mightily pissed off and down half a grand. I know this is a trauma and I know it will take time to digest and fully engage with it, which is part of why I’ve written it out this way for the catharsis, but in the scheme of things, I’ve suffered a lot worse stuff and gotten out the other side just fine.
As a palate cleanser after this miserable report, please enjoy: him face
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