How Do I Forgive My Republican Gay Cousin?

my cousin and i were super close growing up, but then my family moved away from where we grew up which’s where my basically whole extended family lives. so we only saw the whole entire fam a few times a year. but now my dad is sick and so we decided to all move back there this year (like i don’t live in the same house as my family but we all moved back to the same area, this isn’t the important part but it feels like i have to explain that part because it confuses people!!!)

so now we are having sunday dinners with the whole gang and everything, et cetera, and so, my cousin is gay and has a girlfriend. and we have stayed in touch and have seen each other on holidays, but now that we’re all living in the same area again, she wants to hang out, like outside of family gatherings, and it seems like my family expects this of me too, that we would automatically be friends because she is gay.

but she also voted for trump! she and her parents and her brother all did. they’re not like maga or diehard trumpers, they’re just republicans who won’t budge even though everyone else in the entire family has, including my lifelong republican grandmother!!! it just pisses me off so much that she THE GAY ONE voted for trump. i really like her otherwise, she’s super funny and fun to be around but even when we like the same things i resent that she likes it because i feel like she doesn’t deserve it for voting for trump and not regretting it. i don’t even feel this way towards her brother or parents?? what is wrong with me??? how can i just get over it and hang out with her, i don’t have many lesbian friends here. i like her girlfriend (who did NOT vote for trump but seems to be fine with her girlfriend voting for trump) too! how can i stop making passive aggressive comments about gas prices or give her the grace i give the rest of her family? they are REALLY close, like her mom is her best friend.

Valerie: Maybe this is petty of me, but I don’t think you have to give her grace. Specifically because you said she doesn’t regret it. She made her choices, she can deal with the consequences. She voted directly against your (and her own!) civil rights. That fucking sucks! It hurts and you can still be mad about it. You also don’t have to hang out with her. I know you said you like her, so you obviously CAN hang out with her if you want, but you can make other friends. Friend-jump her and meet other people in her friend group that are more aligned with your values. This isn’t a low-stakes opinion that’s easy to get past. She participated in something that ACTIVELY made this country a worse place to live in, for everyone but especially marginalized people, which includes you. And doesn’t seem to care about the harm her actions have caused. I imagine you’re giving her less grace than the rest of her family because it always hurts more when a fellow gay lets us down. But I wouldn’t hold it against you for being mad at all of them, if all of them are still standing ten toes down on their decision. You can hold it against them or your cousin as long as you want. At least until she realizes what a huge mistake she made. I have some room for people who voted for him the first time around but quickly realized what a horrible mistake that was. I have much, much less room (but still some) for people who saw the mess he made and voted for him again, but are now finally seeing how bad things are. I have NO room for people who still stand by him. But that’s just me. You have to figure out where you stand, and know that it’s okay to feel however you feel. If you can still stand to hang out with her but keep making comments about it, that’s on her to decide if she’s okay with that. If you can’t move past this and only spend time with her at family events, that’s also totally fine.

Summer: I’m writing this after the US midterm election results so it’s hitting real different.

Even so, what a shitshow. A gay (woman) who voted for Trump? Like there are gay men for Trump but this? Prior to the midterms, I would have said it’s not your obligation to socialize with that clown-shoes behavior, but I think current affairs have softened my view a bit. Does this cousin seem like the kind of person who can… recover from the mania of the MAGA years ? I’m not holding out hope for her family, but is there hope for her? I don’t put much stake in the cognitive capabilities of Republicans, but there’s a chance that seeing her party get absolutely dogwalked might knock some sense back into her?

What I’m saying is… you don’t have to ‘fix’ her. But there might be hope for change. If this is all too optimistic, then I’ll revert to my default: gay women who vote Trump are batshit. Gay women who abide by and date the aforementioned type are… really something. If this cousin can stand in the ashes of these two disastrous years and still say ‘I am a steadfast Republican’, then they’re not worth it.

P.S. I’m pretty sure your snide comments about ‘gas prices’ and such are more like a defence mechanism in the face of abject stupidity than a sign of some kind of inherent cruelty.

Nico: Similarly to Summer, I’m wondering how this feels different for you after the midterm results. How is your cousin taking the news? You mentioned that she’s not a die-hard Trumper, so has anything changed?

However, if she has not taken this moment as a sign to reevaluate her politics and who she supports and why (and at whose detriment that is), then it actually feels worse, and maybe you can’t call her a “not” die-hard Trumper anymore. If you are someone who considers others who you don’t even know when making choices, if you think about consequences beyond your little bubble, and your cousin is not someone who does that, if she is not someone who has empathy and compassion for others, then her being fun and funny is not going to sustain a relationship with you long-term by itself. I know that you grew up together and so this is painful, and also I think part of you really wishes that you had a better ally in the gay cousin in your family, where you are also presumably a gay cousin because you are reading this, so I imagine that hurts. Still, I wouldn’t beat yourself up over wanting to distance yourself. If you find yourself feeling upset and if you feel like you don’t like your behavior when you’re around your cousin because her politics are disappointing and frustrating, then this just doesn’t feel worth your time. If she wants to look inside of herself and consider why you have pulled back or have a conversation with you about that, then there’s nothing wrong with being there for that, but you are not obligated to be the one doing all of the empathetic work here if she just wants to keep on keeping on the same way as always.

I have been with my partner for nearly 10 years and overall we are very happy together. We are both bi/pan women; I am cis and my partner is trans. I grew up in an evangelical church where it wasn’t okay to be LGBT+, but by the time I realised I wasn’t straight and started dating people who weren’t men, I had stopped going to church and my family were supportive. They have always got on well with my partner, we see them regularly and my mum told me once how pleased she was to have gained another daughter.

The problem is that she is still not out properly to her parents. She tried to come out to them before we met and they didn’t take it well. They were verbally abusive and threatened her with physical violence (they said they would send her far-right older brother round to beat her up) if she didn’t take it back. At the time she was financially dependent on them, so she agreed she would live as a man and promised them she wouldn’t go on hormones, etc. They now act like it never even happened. She has since said she wishes she had waited until she wasn’t dependent on them so she didn’t have to take it back, but it is now extra difficult to come out to them again having tried it once already. No one else in her life thinks she is a man, it’s just her parents.

When we met, they were pleased she was dating a woman because they are homophobic as well as transphobic. Now whenever they see her, they expect me to go along too. They don’t really talk to me about my life or interests, I just have to sort of sit there while they catch up. My partner had to tell me her dead name and I have to pretend that she is a man, and I really hate it. Once, I accidentally called her by her real name possibly in their hearing and didn’t even notice until she pointed it out to me afterwards. Since then I’ve been terrified of doing it again and outing her. She wears androgynous clothes when she sees her parents, but she doesn’t look like a man, so I also worry about getting called “ladies” in a restaurant if her dad is in the toilet or something.

I find it really difficult to see her parents and have to pretend we are people we are not. I know I could be dating a straight cis man, but I’m not, and I hate having to pretend. I also find it incredibly difficult to play nice with people who have said such awful things and done her so much psychological harm. They have always been nice in front of me, but I know that is because we are lying about who she is. I have even been prescribed anti anxiety medication to take when we see them, but it often gets too much and I get so stressed and ill, I don’t go with her. I really want to be supportive, but I am reaching the point where I just don’t want to see them. They already have a big impact on our life together. Neither of us wants children anyway, but the situation with her parents has meant that we can’t get married. I don’t know if we would have done, but we can’t even consider it.

We haven’t seen them now in over a year and they want to arrange to see us again. My partner says that if she says I am busy or ill, they will just keep rearranging until I’m free and they will be too suspicious if I back out last minute. I have forced myself to go before, but I really feel like I’ve reached a point where I can’t keep doing it and don’t want to either. She is now saying maybe she will try coming out to them again and risk them being abusive or never speaking to her again.

That might be the best option for me personally, especially if they do end up accepting her and apologising, but I don’t want to push her in that direction because it could go badly wrong. She has chosen to have this very conditional relationship with them and if that’s what she wants, I want to support her in that. I just don’t feel like I can support her by going with her when she sees them. However, she is now saying that we can’t keep going on like that. I suggested she could lie to her parents and say we’ve broken up but she doesn’t like that idea.

I don’t know what to do because I really have tried to make myself spend time with them and I don’t feel like I can keep making myself do it. I have ongoing problems with depression and feel it has too much of a negative impact on my mental health. Is it unsupportive of me not to go? It’s not just this once, it’s for as long as her parents live, which could be decades. Sometimes I think surely they must know and are pretending not to notice that she is their daughter, but even if that’s true, they are presumably happy continuing to pretend.

Valerie: I feel for both you and your partner in this situation. It sounds impossibly hard and incredibly frustrating. I also think you don’t have to keep going to spend time with them if you don’t want to. This isn’t just not wanting to hang out with her family because you think her brother is annoying. This isn’t a regular controlling “monster-in-law” situation. This is much deeper. It sounds like spending time with them is draining to you, and you can support your partner without actually going with her. In a perfect world, your partner would explain to her parents that since you’re bi/pan and they’re obviously conservative, you don’t feel comfortable spending time around them. It sounds like your partner puts a lot of stock in her family’s opinions, so I have a feeling she might not want to be that candid with them, but that’s her choice. If she wants to lie about where you are, she can, but you don’t have to endure that. Just because she is willing to lie and put up with their bigotry and be someone she’s not around them doesn’t mean you have to. Everyone has their line in the sand, and it’s okay if yours are in different places. Just like you don’t want to force her to come out before she’s ready or cut her family off if she doesn’t want to, she can’t force you to spend time with people who don’t treat you respectfully and are damaging to your mental health. My recommendation is just tell your partner that you do not want to spend time with her family, and let her decide how to communicate that to them. And understand that it’s possible this is a dealbreaker for her; her family is obviously very important to her, if she’s willing to go through this much trouble to spend time with them even after all they put her through, so be prepared to have that conversation as well. Make it clear that you’re not making her choose between you and her family, but that she has to be okay with loving you all separately. If she does decide to come out to them again, for her own sake and not yours, you can offer to go with her to support her in that if you want to. Until then, you can be there for her before she leaves to see her family and when she comes back from visits. There are plenty of ways to support her in this without causing yourself more harm.

Summer: Shiiiiit this is a rough one. In previous cases of trans people asking their partners to ‘live the lie’ with transphobes, I erred on the side of ‘respect the trans person’s agency’. I don’t think I roll with that line this time because this is so much worse than usual.

I was still planning a ‘you gotta respect the trans person’s right to live in a way that aids their mental health and personal safety’ but your mental health is being wrecked by this. Being prescribed meds for family get-togethers is way out there. Moreover, I think your partner’s relationship with her parents limits her growth. I’m sure she gets something out of that relationship, but it’s clearly at the cost of her transition — which is core to her personhood.

You’ve got many routes to cope, but I think it’s unsustainable. Your two lives are being consumed in the name of appeasing people who are categorically wrong about their treatment of trans people. I’ve got a personal interest in this because I’m trans, but I’m gonna take a firm stance: locate that seed in your girlfriend’s mind that wants to come out despite the risks and nurture it. If the risks are not immediately bodily and severe (it sounds like her… brother is quite removed now), I think it’s worth pursuing. Threads that are not worthy of being unspooled for eternity must be cut before they tangle too much.

Nico: The unfortunate thing is that your partner’s parents are abusive currently, regardless of whether she ‘comes out’ to them again. You said that she tried to come out before and that they essentially bullied her back into the closet around them. They know what the deal is. They aren’t fooled. They just think that they can control her, and control is at the heart of an abusive relationship. I also ordinarily would want to be supportive of the ways in which a trans person wants to navigate her family dynamics, but her parents sound especially unhealthy — and her brother as well. If she wants to try coming out again, then I encourage you to be prepared to be as supportive as possible. And I also hope that she has individual therapy, and maybe even group therapy support specifically for trans people. These might be good things to set up before the next time she sees her parents. If she is going to come out to them then I would encourage you to try to find a way to endure one last visit, but if she does not want to, as is her right, and you are taking medication just to manage being around them, then I agree that it’s not healthy or sustainable. If you feel like you can’t get out of going at all, another option is that you could fake being sick or make yourself sick in some way once you all meet up. Maybe you’re able to pull off throwing up on one of their favorite pieces of furniture or something. How is your fake fainting? My sister, at one point, did a beautiful sick act at a restaurant that fooled even me to get us out of a family gathering. And considering how ill they make you, I feel like it would barely be an act. It would be honest.

That aside, I think that you and your partner need to have a serious discussion about this and about the sustainability of this relationship with her parents. They are not going to get better, or at least I don’t think so, considering how you describe the ways in which they affect you when you’re around them. I’m curious about what ways you and your partner can come up with together where you can be supportive of her without having to engage in her family’s dynamic, or in the event that she does want to test things again. I would also recommend having a safety plan, in case her brother really does try something. It really sucks to have to think about what you would do in that situation, but I would advise you all to think about it ahead of time, before you’re in a moment of crisis and heightened emotion. I’m really sorry that you’re both dealing with this but it seems like you really care about your partner, and I believe that you two can get through this.