(CW: rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, homophobia, religious fundamentalism)

I hate you. I do not regret my existence, but I hate you. I hate you with the fury of a thousand suns. I have never in my thirty-eight years met another human being as contemptible as you are.

Why, pray tell, do I hate you? Here are thirty-eight reasons why, one for each year of my life.

  1. You took an intelligent, inquisitive, thoughtful woman—Mom—and turned her into a pod person, devoted entirely to you and your regressive agenda. You led directly to her right-wing radicalisation, in which she spouts conspiracy theories and empty slogans and abandons her critical faculties.
  2. You kept my sister under lock and key, sharply restricting her exposure to the outside world.
  3. You used religion as a tool to subjugate your family and force them to adopt your benighted worldview. Ironically, when it came to “training up a child,” neither of your children have retrained your beliefs. You have a 100% child-indoctrination failure rate, and yet you are still a preacher. Have you no shame, man?
  4. You molested and raped me for years. Many of the developmental “issues,” as Mom characterised them, were caused directly by your abuses. After you ceased your contact rapes, you continued to sexually abuse me under the guise of “hygiene” and “play.”
  5. It is because of you that I have had dissociative retrograde amnesia for thirty-five years, which finally lifted in January 2024. When I was three, I lost my memories after you brutally raped me for correcting your spelling, hurling all kinds of cruelties as you violated my body. A day or so earlier, I had hit the ceiling on a Stanford-Binet IQ test and was declared “the most intelligent child we’ve ever tested.” After this assault, I lost my memories. Because of your insecurity, because of your misogyny, because of your anti-intellectualism, you inflicted lifelong trauma on an innocent child.
  6. You taunted me for my dissociative amnesia after I acquired it, going between two personalities: Daddy and an “evil doctor.” When the evil doctor went away and Daddy returned, you “didn’t remember” what was said while you were in doctor mode.
  7. You used my autism diagnosis to enforce rigid gender conformity, get away with continuing to sexually abuse me, hide your culpability, restrict my intellectual development, and destroy my self-confidence. I am not ashamed of being autistic, but I am furious that you used this diagnosis for your own perverse ends.
  8. You tried to scare me about contracting Huntington’s disease when I was a mere three- or four-year-old reading medical pamphlets at the doctor’s. Huntington’s is a terrifying—and exceedingly rare—neurodegenerative disease. This was not funny; it was emotional abuse designed to terrify a preschooler who was intelligent enough to understand the import of a serious disease. If you knew yourself to be at risk for it, even you would not joke about it. Even now, I am terrified of developing it, even though it is highly unlikely that you are a carrier.
  9. You deprived me of appropriate educational opportunities for years. I had some token support in the form of gifted pull-out classes, a single grade-skip, and some advanced classes, but I did not get the comprehensive adjustments I needed to thrive educationally. I should have been accelerated further—much further. I had a lot of books, but every single one of them was significantly below my reading level. There was next to nothing for me to learn, especially in the first few years of my education, when I was surrounded by children unable to read, write, or count, much less do what I was capable of doing. Special education merely made this worse.
  10. When I was a teenager and young adult, you would constantly leer at me, talking about my “beautiful face.” Although I did not remember your sexual abuse at the time, I was still uncomfortable with your behaviour, to say the least.
  11. Divide-and-conquer tactics characterised your rule: you presented Mom as an irrational martinet who had to be appeased on pain of severe punishment. (No, that was you using her as a shield for criticism.) As for me, you convinced Mom that I was selfish and antisocial for wanting to avoid you. Hardly. I was just repulsed by you because you are a child molester and a rapist.
  12. Your sexually deviant behaviour is not the only reason I avoided you. It was difficult to have a fulfilling conversation with an anti-intellectual Philistine. Dinnertime conversations were particularly torturous, which is why I asked to be excused as soon as I finished eating.
  13. You bragged about God “bringing your family back” when I was about thirteen and you were delivering a sermon in your friend’s church. But ultimately you have driven your family apart: I no longer speak to you and my sister has become distant. It is only you and Mom now. So much for “bringing your family back.”
  14. You are a hypocritical slimeball who thinks that he is completely redeemed because you said the Sinner’s Prayer. But you have not sought restitution from your primary victims: your wife and children.
  15. You walked around wearing fancy Starter jackets, licensed sports shirts and jerseys, and name-brand sneakers while the rest of the family wore Walmart. When I was thirteen and Mom bought Nikes on sale for my sister and me, you said, “Have you lost your Nike mind?” It was the first time I had name-brand sneakers. Before that, I was routinely mocked by my middle-school peers for wearing Payless sneakers. You tried to “console” me by saying you wore Pro Wings as a kid, but those shoes did not come out until you were twenty and in community college.
  16. You laugh like a cartoon villain. (Though even Disney villains look like saints compared with you. At least they don’t sexually abuse preschoolers for being “too smart for their own good.”)
  17. Mom had to adjust her cooking to accommodate your insipid tastes, so we constantly had lightly seasoned chicken breasts with microwaved corn and broccoli. She’s an excellent cook, but she had to abandon her talents to appeal to the lowest common denominator—you.
  18. You pushed me to get retail and food-service jobs for which I was unsuited.
  19. When my room was too messy for your absurd standards, you and Mom would barge in to ostensibly help me clean it, but it was really a way for you to yell at me and degrade me for hours on end.
  20. Despite your crimes, you have become a preacher. But you are no man of God.
  21. When I was about nine or ten, you’d lope around the house wearing a “Take a Bite Out of Crime” T-shirt and dress as McGruff the Crime Dog for events on base. You’re a criminal yourself, you hypocritical scumbag.
  22. You never bothered to learn a word of the local language when we lived in a foreign country. (Though that could be because you’re too stupid.)
  23. Your breath smells like decay and vomit.
  24. I had to kiss you on your icy lips when I was young.
  25. As I hit my teen years, I had more and more periods in which I felt revulsion at your presence, though I couldn’t place them at the time.
  26. You tried to “help” me with my math homework, but you are not the math whiz that you claimed to be. Your confusing explanations actually made it harder for me to complete my homework correctly. (But then again, your rape made me forget how to do efficient mental arithmetic.)
  27. You gave me a dumb name that made me sound like a stripper or porn star, and you were affronted every time I mentioned wanting to change it. It’s my right to be called what I want to be called.
  28. You treat your wife and children like property.
  29. You spout trite bullshit and cannot give a substantive explanation of your beliefs or stances.
  30. You often quoted younger me in an effort to sound more intelligent. Because I didn’t remember, I thought this knowledge was original to you and that I was learning something new.
  31. When you read a book to me in 1990 or 1991, you pronounced “chimera” with the “ch” in “cheese.” (I know that’s petty, but it’s true.)
  32. You gaslit Mom and me by calling us “nuts.”
  33. You are the reason why I have PTSD.
  34. You portrayed yourself and Mom as miracle-worker parents who “unlocked my autism” through the magic of ASL. This is bullshit, since my “speech delay” was a choice. It was a conscious decision made because of my fear and distrust of you. You are no miracle worker. You are a piece of shit whose abuse made me look “developmentally delayed” and ultimately thrust me into the world of special education. Mom should have dumped you and deprived you of custody over me. That would have probably solved a lot of my behaviour problems.
  35. You are a pitiful male role model. I knew I was trans from a young age, and after the amnesia hit and I started to trust you, I looked up to you. But you let me down again and again.
  36. Before the amnesia, though, I distrusted and disliked you. I even called you “stupid,” though I deliberately mispronounced it as “toofid” so that I could get away with it. (You thought this was “two-fit.”) I was right to do so.
  37. I devalued my intelligence, my creativity, and my ambitions because of you. I sold myself short, thought I was stupid, thought I had a broken brain. I saw myself as the “special-ed kid.” It took me until I was in my twenties to start seeing myself otherwise, though even then it has been difficult.
  38. You said that my IQ is worthless. I do not see IQ as a sign of human worth, or even as a perfect measure of intelligence, but do not tell me that my intelligence is worthless. I am proud to be intelligent, but I am ashamed to be your son.

Granted, you were abused terribly as a child. Spending two years in an institutional “school,” as you called it, after a traumatic brain injury doubtless had an influence on your views about intelligence and learning. Your foster father struggled with alcoholism and physically abused you. You deserved none of that. I have all the compassion in the world for the terrified little boy you were, but I have nothing but contempt for the putrid, disgusting, repulsive, child-molesting, toddler-raping, misogynistic, hateful, hypocritical, sanctimonious, slimy, stupid, smarmy, phoney, thoughtless, wilfully ignorant, childish, malicious, vacuous, dull, empty-headed, lecherous, macho, creepy, gross, uneducated, anti-intellectual, odious, revolting, scummy, vile, nasty, selfish, narcissistic, arrogant, entitled, vicious, cruel, far-right, benighted, intolerant, bigoted, inconsiderate, mean-spirited, reactionary, immature, self-hating, unpleasant, tyrannical, authoritarian, controlling, manipulative, abusive manchild you grew up to be.

You refused to face your past and deal with your trauma in a healthy, thoughtful way. You used machismo and manipulation to maintain control in a chaotic world. You drowned your sorrows in cheap beer. You raped a three-year-old child for his intelligence, which you saw as a threat to your masculinity and your ability to sexually abuse him with impunity. You brainwashed a bright woman with ambitions into becoming a meek household slave, and you attempted to do the same with your daughter. Fuck you, asshole. I am ten thousand times the man you will ever be.

Sincerely,

The Woke Contrarian