Four years ago today, my father, James Herman Hanson, left this word, about three weeks shy of what would have been his 84th birthday.
If he's looking down from heaven at me, I think he'd be happy with what's happened in the last 18 months with my body, and my identity.
After all, he deserves much of the credit for it.
My dad never treated me, his daughter, like "Daddy's little girl," like a quasi-girlfriend, or like something he owned.
If he's looking down from heaven at me, I think he'd be happy with what's happened in the last 18 months with my body, and my identity.
After all, he deserves much of the credit for it.
My dad never treated me, his daughter, like "Daddy's little girl," like a quasi-girlfriend, or like something he owned.
He treated me as an equal, from the very beginning.
My father modeled the way I want to be treated by all the men (and women) in my life, including my brothers, my bosses, my health care providers and yes, the many men I love and have loved, in many different ways.
I want to be treated as a person who is competent and capable, as someone with something important to say, as someone to regard and not dismiss or patronize, as someone to take seriously, as someone who is not an eternal child just because she's female.
Freud (whom Dad revered) was famous for asking, "What do women want?"
My dad knew what they want, and it isn't to be male.
My dad knew what they want, and it isn't to be male.
Female humans want what male humans want, and what males have, for centuries, regarded as an entitlement. They want to be treated as human, with all the decency and respect that being human is supposed to entail.
In the times I grew up, many males understood that desire as Freud did -- namely, that women envy men for that appendage between their legs.
Not so.
My dad "got it," from the beginning. And I measure every man in my life, in terms of how he treats me, against the standard my dad set.
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, my circle of friends was predominantly male, because I found, in the brilliant and "nerdy" boys and men to whom I was (and still am) drawn, people who treated me as my father treated me -- as a complete, thinking, capable human being. Eventually, I met and married a man much like my dad; I know Jay would take that as the highest of compliments.
Here are images of my father. Part of me hopes he's so happy in heaven, reunited with Mom and his vast Swedish and Danish clans, that he doesn't worry about me and my brothers the way he did when he was alive. But just in case he does: Dad, I'm doing OK. and I owe it to you.
For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, my circle of friends was predominantly male, because I found, in the brilliant and "nerdy" boys and men to whom I was (and still am) drawn, people who treated me as my father treated me -- as a complete, thinking, capable human being. Eventually, I met and married a man much like my dad; I know Jay would take that as the highest of compliments.
Here are images of my father. Part of me hopes he's so happy in heaven, reunited with Mom and his vast Swedish and Danish clans, that he doesn't worry about me and my brothers the way he did when he was alive. But just in case he does: Dad, I'm doing OK. and I owe it to you.
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