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

I know you’ll never see this letter. But I’ve got to write it anyway.

I have been deeply concerned about you since I left home nearly twenty years ago.

It’s about Dad. He has been the worst thing to happen to you in your sixty-two years of existence. You have thrown away your ambitions, your intellectual curiosity, your wit and humour, your very soul. You told me that you wanted to study forensic science, that you wanted to go into a law-focused undergraduate programme. Instead, you threw all that aside for Dad. Dad has brought pain, suffering, and alienation to the women in his life—and one man. My sister and I have pulled away from him, but you are still trapped in his net.

  • When he joined the military, he took you away from your biggest support network: your large family, especially your parents and older sister. I do not think he joined just for those reasons, but it could have played a role in why he did it.
  • He repeatedly called you a “nut.”
  • Dad drank and drank and drank some more. Your father struggled with drinking when you were growing up. Why bring that back into your life?
  • When I was eleven, you seemed to regain some of your gumption. You decided to legally separate yourself from Dad and regain some of your autonomy, which you did. But you stayed in the Deep South. You lived across the road from him. These conditions made it easier for Dad to worm his way back into your gullible heart.
  • Taking Dad back when I was a few months away from twelve was probably one of the worst decisions you have made in your life. The first is forgivable; you were only twenty-one and probably couldn’t tell how toxic Dad would become. But the second is a “fool me twice” scenario.
  • You are reasonably intelligent, but you are also extraordinarily naïve and gullible. This gullibility became apparent when you adopted his anti-intellectual, patriarchal, racist, far-right faith, even after you had mocked this ideology a year earlier. Suddenly you started to believe outlandish conspiracy theories unmoored from evidence or critical thinking. It was as though your logical faculties had eroded just on contact with Dad. You flip-flopped and suddenly thought that being LGBTQ was a choice, even after I angrily told you that it was not. You started to believe that the world was created in six literal days and took the word of charlatans like Kent Hovind over your own son, who had read far more about evolution and the universe’s origins than you (or Hovind) had. I believed the scientific consensus when I was five, even though I also had a children’s Bible. You ordered magazines from end-times cults. I would not be surprised if you believed in QAnon. You are a Black female immigrant and a Republican who watches Fox News and listens to right-wing talk radio ad nauseam. You are surprised when your white evangelical friends’ children are racist. When I was looking at your Facebook profile a few years ago, I saw that one of your friends had a Confederate flag as their icon. You are Black. What are you doing with these people in your life?
  • I noticed later on that you tended to make friends with other bright women who were cut off from their ambitions by patriarchal military husbands who just wanted their wives to cook and clean and homeschool their kids. There was a particular friend whom I remember fondly—and her suffering, far less fondly. Her husband didn’t seem anywhere near as bright as she was. She was wasting away from anorexia. She’d had multiple miscarriages. She’d studied French at an elite women’s college but had no use for her degree while married to her husband.
  • When I was twenty, you said about a woman I knew that victims often go back to abusive husbands and boyfriends even when they want to leave. I didn’t appreciate then that you were talking about yourself.
  • When he preached a year or two later after you’d patched up your relationship, Dad bragged that God had “brought his family back.” But instead, he ended up with a daughter who pulled back from him dramatically, and a transgender son who cut him off altogether. He did not bring his family back; he tore it apart through his wilful ignorance and oppressive presence. You are the only one he has left.
  • Like other domestic abusers, Dad used divide-and-conquer tactics to poison our relationships with one another and lead us to rely only on him. For example, he would often attribute his draconian standards to you and often portrayed you as the irrational partner. He wanted the house to be immaculate. I believed him when he said it was to “Mom’s standards.” But when you were separated, your apartment was cluttered. His apartment, on the other hand, was spick and span. I know now that he probably places you under extreme pressure to be the perfect housewife. He turned you against me, on the other hand, by characterising me as being selfish for thinking independently or wanting to avoid his stifling control. I wanted to avoid Dad because he had severely abused me, even when I could not consciously remember it. He tried to get me to resent my sister by foisting her on me at an age when I was more likely to want to branch out and spend time with people outside the family.
  • I thought for years that you had some kind of personality disorder because of your behaviour toward me when we were living together. I have changed my mind: it is the consequences of living with an abusive man who has turned you into a Stepford wife.
  • Dad must have put immense pressure on you to lose weight when I was growing up. You went on diet after diet, adopted programme after programme—Weight Watchers, Richard Simmons Deal-a-Meal, that doctor you saw who gave you the nutritional shakes—only for you to regain the pounds every single time. I know he was trying to pressure me, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was pressuring you. Like you, I have developed disordered eating patterns, which may have given both you and me diabetes. Weight cycling is dangerous for people’s health.

Over the course of twenty years, I saw a bright, curious, but often naïve woman turn into a bitter, self-hating, intolerant, irrational, anti-intellectual, right-wing bigot who spews platitudes and slogans. In short, you have turned into a Dad clone. I am heartbroken to see what he has done to you.

Dad is a misogynistic prick who doesn’t deserve you. He is an emotional abuser who will not let you have any control over your life. But you’re so up his ass that you won’t listen to a damn word I say.

And you are not Dad’s only victim. Dad sexually abused me for the first few years of my life, give or take, and he continued to emotionally abuse me until I left.

  • Even though it was you who was the more enthusiastic about your pregnancy with me, you still allowed him to call the shots. You hated my deadname. You and your sister thought it sounded like a stripper or porn name. You wanted to call me Elizabeth, drawn from your favourite Jane Austen novel. But you let him pick it anyway, and later bowdlerised it to say that it “sounded like a famous actress.”
  • From toddlerhood up to the age of six or seven, he would force me to perform sexual acts with him, some mild and others less so. Since I was enjoined not to tell you or any other adult, I said nothing. After all, he was a large, athletic man with infinite control over me. Many of the supposed developmental delays—delays that you did not document in my baby book—that appeared were a consequence of his abuse, not of autistic regression. I refused to speak. It was a choice. I was terrified of him and didn’t want to dignify anything he said with a response. Other adults were a threat because any one of you, whether it was you, your siblings, or your parents, could hand me back to Dad at any moment. He was omnipresent in my early life, much more than he was in later childhood and adolescence.
  • When I was three, the day after I took the IQ test and was declared the “most intelligent child they’d ever tested,” I corrected Dad’s spelling. He lost his shit and angrily raped me, yelling at me to say my IQ was worthless, that I was a witch, that I was a piece of shit, that he wanted to abort me, that he never wanted me anyway (but you did), that girls should be sucking dick and not doing math. I promptly developed dissociative retrograde amnesia after this trauma. Only now, thirty-five years later, has this amnesia lifted. Now that I remember, I have more clarity about not just my life, but about yours.
  • Thanks to Dad, I was deprived of an appropriate education. A child as advanced as I was when I was three did not need books about the ABCs when I read as well as an adult. I was put into special education under spurious grounds, and was even made to repeat prekindergarten, presumably for “social reasons.” I needed an education that was suitable for my abilities, but Dad’s misogyny and anti-intellectual attitudes made that impossible. This is why I checked out at school—I was being beaten up and harassed for being a “nerd” and was supremely bored when the class was covering content I had learned about when I was four or five. The autism diagnosis was a fig-leaf for Dad to get away with starving me of intellectual stimulation. (Note that I am not saying that I am not autistic; I am saying that my intellectual development was just as important as my social development. Moreover, if I had more opportunities to interact with intelligent children, my social skills could have improved.)
  • Every time you and Dad (and I know Dad was the instigator) burst into my room to get me to clean it while you both yelled at me for hours on end, I felt dirty and violated for some inexplicable reason. I know now that I feared being sexually assaulted again and even felt raped, even though he had stopped all contact sexual abuse in the early nineties.
  • By the time I reached adulthood and had developed my own opinions independent of his, your attitude toward me started to transmogrify into his. You turned intelligent into a dirty word, something you would never have considered when you were in your twenties. When I had my then-girlfriend contact you for support when I’d hit a rough patch, you characterised me as a twenty-year burden. What healthy parent calls their child a burden? You have become nothing but a mouthpiece for a man who despises intelligent women and cannot bear to have his authority challenged.
  • I don’t know whether you’d ever believe me if I told you about Dad’s sexual abuse. But I can assure you that it happened, and I continue to suffer the consequences of his cruelties nearly four decades later.
  • You engaged in sexually inappropriate behaviour with me in my late childhood and early adolescence, but you did not approach this with the same gusto as Dad did. Since you refrained from this behaviour while you were separated, I assume that he put you up to it, under the guise of “hygiene.”

Dad’s abuse cannot be limited to his treatment of you and me. Although it was less apparent than his psychological abuse of you or his sexual abuse of me, he also abused my sister.

  • Through you, he tightly controlled her education from second to twelfth grade through Christian homeschooling, for which you and I were the vehicles. Although some of the material was more challenging than what would be found in ordinary schools, a lot of it wasn’t, and the “science” and history she was being taught were utter bunk. This is a kind of educational abuse.
  • Fortunately, I do not know of any sexual abuse he committed against her, and I hope to God that he has not laid a hand on her.

If this were a piece of literature or a feature film, you would make a fantastic tragic figure. Unfortunately, this is real life. I sometimes fantasise about having a showdown with you and delivering the show-winning speech that breaks you from your spell and reminds you that you are worth far more than what Dad thinks of you. But it is more likely that you’ll double down. After all, Dad has had you under his thumb for forty years.

I know you love Dad. But he doesn’t love you back. He says he does, but he merely loves the idea of having a wife that he can control and manipulate, a wife that can flatter him, a wife that can keep him happy. He is a child molester, a rapist, a phoney, a liar, a control freak, an abuser, a narcissist, a Philistine, a sanctimonious sleazebag. His insincerity was plain as day to me when I was a teenager, but I shelved my thoughts until I was an adult and had gained a healthy distance from both of you. He talks of Jesus and family values, but he exemplifies none of this. He even laughs like a Saturday-morning-cartoon villain.

Despite my quarrels with you, I cannot bring myself to hate you. Oh, I may have said it in the heat of anger, but I did not mean it deep down. I still consider you abusive. But I know you are also a victim of Dad, and for that you have earned my sympathy.

I still love you more than anyone else I know. Or, rather, I love the person you could be. I know that somehow, somewhere, there is the intelligent, compassionate, witty woman I looked up to.

But I can’t bring her back. Only you can.

Love,

Woke Contrarian