My father and I were at Starbucks about a year after he found out he had Alzheimer’s when he looked me up and down with his judging eye and said to the barista, “This, ahem…man wants a latte.” I laughed, not knowing if he was joking. Until that moment, I had always been his daughter.
It’s true that I was never a typical daughter. When I was younger, I was a tomboy, or what Larry David would later call “pre-gay”. I had short, messy hair and wore hand-me-down clothes from my older brother; people often thought I was his little brother.
Even as I grew older, I continued to be mistaken for a cisgender man. I’ve been called “sir” more times than I can count, which, frankly, has never bothered me. In fact, I have often been pleased that people perceive me as male, even before my recent chest reconstruction surgery and low-dose testosterone.
It soon became evident that my father wasn’t joking four years ago when he referred to me as a young man. After that moment in Starbucks, he almost exclusively used the pronoun “he” for me and even started referring to me and my brother collectively as his sons.
Of course, it has been bittersweet. While he’s technically forgetting who I am, there is also a sense of affirmation in his honest evaluation of my gender. It’s as if he’s studying me with new eyes every time he sees me and assimilating me once again. Paradoxically, I have felt recognized.
The truth is, I have always felt recognized by my father, Teddy. According to family tradition, as soon as I was born, he was convinced that I was a boy. When he held my three-kilogram weight, he immediately thought, “Our little football player!” and shouted to everyone present, “It’s a boy!” (The doctor quickly informed him otherwise).
It was undoubtedly a bit sexist of him to assume that his muscular new baby should be a boy, but I like to think that he picked up on my transmasculine vibes as soon as I emerged from the womb.
When I was young, my father and I were best friends. Like him, and unlike my brother, I was athletic. We would spend hours playing in the park, and he would drive me to all my sports games. When I decided to join the neighborhood boys’ hockey league at the age of 7, he supported me. As a judge, he would sometimes end the session early just to get me to a game on time.
He bought me Transformers and other “boy” toys that I wanted, and he didn’t bat an eye at the ripped jeans and T-shirts I insisted on wearing. My parents were progressive, and considering that in the 80s they didn’t know how to raise a child who didn’t conform to gender norms (especially by today’s standards), they did a good job of not forcing me to wear “girly” things. And even though my father was nervous when I came out as gay at 19, I have always felt his support. When I finally told him I had a girlfriend, he simply asked, “What’s her name?”
Losing my father to Alzheimer’s in his late 70s and early 80s has been painful in many ways. Seeing him unable to do all the things he loved—riding his bike, playing tennis, driving, traveling with his partner, Barbara—and witnessing his utter confusion and frustration as his world becomes unfamiliar has been devastating. But the one glimmer of hope has been the joy I felt every time he referred to me as his son.
Three years ago, when I started using the pronoun “they,” some friends and family had to adjust, but not him. Maybe we skipped over the nuances of what it means to live on the queer spectrum, but he has been unequivocal in his unconditional acceptance, induced by Alzheimer’s, of my increasingly masculine presence. He quickly got used to saying, “he…this,” “he…that,” “what is he talking about?”
Last fall, I asked my father directly, “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 gesture with his hand. “Both,” he said, still looking at me. “Most of all, I see you as…someone full of life.”
I laughed. He couldn’t have said it better. Beyond masculine or feminine, I wish everyone could see gender that way: as something dynamic, animated, vibrant, alive.
Last November, my father was finally accepted into a nursing home, and I managed to get funding approved for a surgery in Ontario. I scheduled my chest masculinization operation for a couple of weeks after his planned move. But a COVID outbreak in his ward delayed the date of his move to the same day I had the surgery. Now I joke that my father and I transitioned at the same time.
His recognition of my gender has been more than just amusing; it has been healing. My father and I were never able to have a serious conversation about my current gender journey: how I started taking testosterone shortly after he began seeing me as a man; how I now identify as “queer/non-binary” and “transmasculine”; how I still call myself “Rachel” but sometimes prefer “Noah,” the name my parents would have given me if I were a boy.
But I joke that he’s the most capable father of validating my gender that I could have wished for. Perhaps the ability to forget assigned gender is a positive lesson we can learn from the havoc Alzheimer’s wreaks on people’s brains and families.
When he recently met my new girlfriend, he asked, “How did you find…her, him, them?”
Coming from any other person, “them” would sound disgustingly intolerant. And yet, coming from this sweet 83-year-old with dementia who never learned the new rules of contemporary pronouns, I could only hear it one way: as his sincere attempt to lovingly (and playfully) recognize who I am.
Not long ago, my father introduced me to one of his caregivers as “This is my cousin, my nephew, my niece, my cousin—everything.” He wasn’t sure of our relationship anymore. More recently, he also told me he loves me “like a brother.” But he recognized me, or at least sensed that I was someone who brought him joy: his human “bagel with everything.” He often called me “Smiley face,” referring to my big smile. Most of all, his face would light up when he saw me and he would say, “It’s you!”
The impact of death still hits even when you’ve been preparing for it. A few weeks ago, on July 6, my father was moved to palliative care, where he passed away three days later.
I have barely been able to process his death, but I can’t overlook the heartbreaking irony of my father slowly losing his sense of self at the same time that I was becoming more and more who I am.
I had a very close relationship with my mother, who died in July 2015 from untreated rectal cancer (it’s a long story, which I wrote a book about). In my teenage years, I started leaning more towards her interests in art and culture, feminism, good food, hiking, and dark humor. But in many ways, I have always identified more with my father. We were the most alike in the family (while I had more hair), and I inherited his super-logical brain and his old Jewish way of approaching life.
Watching him deteriorate and die, I felt like a part of me was also dying. At his funeral, I spoke about him as if he were the closest thing to a twin I’ve ever had in my life. But I am comforted knowing that I will carry a part of him inside me. Among his many admirable traits—integrity, kindness, generosity, wit—he has been a model for the kind of masculinity I want to embody: strong…
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