This is a follow up letter that I sent to my mother. I know that many people have read my "A Letter to my Mother" and expressed happiness about her reaction, and how I said what I said to her.

This is me cutting her off.

I was assaulted by a transphobe while living with someone as a roommate. My mother thought it was more important to attend a dinner with her sister instead of coming to the hospital to see me after this incident. Then it came out that my mother and her new husband had been running down me to my daughter the entire time she was living with them, which was a period of six months (and pure torture for her).

Dear Jeanine,

The situation has somewhat stabilized. We are doing okay, we are safe a not hungry. Not stellar, but okay.

You may choose to stop at this point. What follows is full of pain, my years of pain for the first and last time. It’s all the pain you refused to believe, that you denied was true and things you never knew.

Read it or not, you have been warned. It hurt to write, it will hurt to read, it was devastating to live.

This hurts for me to have to say this, but you have given up your right to know the details of my life. Strangers and those who are transphobes call me "he" and "him" and by my dead-name of Eric (if they know it). They don't get to know the details of my life. They are the ones who refuse to see me as a woman and say things like "a piece of paper doesn't change anything".

Since you have classed yourself as a stranger and someone who doesn't know me at all, that means you don't get family privilege of intimate details either.

You have put yourself in the same category as Jim and as the girls.

But, hey, the good news is that I won't ever be bothering you with asking for family support again. No money requests, no favor requests, no request that you come and help me when I'm injured and things like that. Yes, I'm really REALLY hurt that a dinner at Jill's was more important than my being in the hospital after a transphobe decided to lay me out, but that's neither here nor there. You don't have to worry about it anymore.

Jeanine, you have had four years to come to terms with this life event of mine. My transition is not a fad, it's not a temporary thing, and it’s not a phase, no matter what anyone else says or thinks. It is me. This is my 15 year-old-self who desperately needed his mother to help with these feelings, and got sent to the psychologist to get cured of this aberration. (Ironically enough, he could have helped me and I never talked to him about it because I was a freak and I didn't want him to hate me.) It's the me that I tried to talk to you about at 23 in Smyrna, and got rejected by you. So now you have your wish, you no longer have another daughter.

Right now I want to say a lot of hurtful things to you, to try to illustrate how much your rejection hurt me. I hope you are crying at the end of this and that this letter hurts only as a truth that should never be said or acknowledged can hurt.

This past year and a half has been torturous for the three of us. Given the choice, we would not have asked you for anything and that's why we reiterated over and over that we did not want anything from you, other than to let you know what was happening. But you insisted and ignored our statements, so I guess that's normal, ignoring what I say to do whatever the hell you want to do, and then hold it over my head. It's what you have been doing all my life.

I took you at your word when you told me that it didn’t matter to you about my transition. I assumed that you were telling the truth, that male or female, my gender identity didn’t matter and that I was your child. I was so happy when you said that, for far too many people get rejected outright by their parents when they come out as transgender. Apparently you meant as long as I was being male instead of unconditionally.

See, Jeanine, you are being just as much as a transphobe as that asshole who hit me. By insisting that you know better than I what is correct and necessary in my life, you are erasing my existence as a person and saying that what YOU want is more important than my mental sanity. That the past me is more important to you, more real to you, than the person I am now. That I'm not allowed to grow and change or to mature or try to save my sanity. You want me stuck in a time that was, honestly, a living nightmare for me, and you don't care that I want to move on past that.

Did you know that I sat with Jim's pistol in my hand, ready to put a bullet through my head to stop the pain I was going through during that time in Conyers? That part of what happened to me in Middle and High school was because I'm really a girl and couldn't deal with it? How hard it was to be a "man" at church and lead my family and so on, when all I wanted was to have a pretty dress and feel like myself? That expressing that was something I had to do, even though you found me over and over in your clothes? Did you ever once try to understand or did you just freak out? Did you honestly think that if you stuck your head in the sand that it would all just go away?

Did you know that the Army was just a cover to help me manifest being "a man"? Or did you even know that they nearly threw me out of the Army for being "gay"?

I'm trying to be the bigger woman here, but honestly it's hard given that your rejections and my attempt to secure your approval caused so much trauma in my life that I can't begin to explain to you. The reason I did much of what I did was because you couldn't handle another daughter. Didn't you ever wonder about my choice of activities? I told you that the pictures in my darkroom was because I liked looking at them but it was actually because I wanted to be them.

Do you know how much pain you caused my daughter by constantly running me down in front of her? Essentially telling her over and over by your actions and by your words that you felt that I, who had raised her and been her emotional shelter for years, was not worth calling the correct, legal and desired name? That you so disrespected me that you couldn't say ONE word, despite having met me, talked to me, gotten legal documentation of my status from? (By the way, I want all that documentation back. Our copies have been stolen and we don't have the money to get any more, and we will be needing them. You can leave it all with Tom and I'll get it from him.)

How would you have felt if you had to stay with Grandma Alice and had no choice in the matter since it was the only place you could be, and had to listen to her DAILY say how horrible and how bad and how evil and vain and self-serving Marge was? How you couldn't do anything about it because you were dependent on her for transportation, food, lodging and so on? Would you feel compelled to stand up for Marge? To defend her? Now you may understand what the last three months were like for her.

Do you know what it felt like to know that I wasn't important enough to skip a dinner for?

(By the way, Rhiannon didn’t leave because of Holly coming over. She left because she wanted to go. She felt as if you didn’t respect her, as if you didn’t care about her opinions even when she wanted you to respect her opinions. She was tired of you forcing your agenda and hovering over her whenever she was trying to do something nice for you. She was tired of trying to force yourself into her life when she just wanted peace. But that’s how you always operate, isn’t it?)

Yes, things are confusing for me. It's interesting when I hear Rhiannon say to Mary "Tell Dad that I love her." But that is the thing, she calls me Joy, she says "her" and "she" about me. So apparently she loves me enough to realize that this is not about her, it's about me.

And given that it IS about me, well, there you go.

You think that it's about "what will the neighbors think" and honestly I couldn't care less what they think at this point. But they tell me, "You are so brave", "This is fantastic", and that they look up to me and admire my courage. When I tell them of your reaction, their response (nearly to a person) is "oh, that's horrible that she has rejected you like that, you are such a wonderful person! I'm so sorry that she can't love you like you are!" So the neighbors you are worried about are actually thinking that I'm fine and you are in the wrong.

And isn't it interesting that the Church has changed its tune on the LGBT people in the world? You would think that as a dutiful Molly Mormon you would follow the Brethren on this topic, but apparently that change in attitude doesn't matter when it's your own flesh and blood. But hey, that's why 'Families are Forever', isn't it?

So, you have had four years to come to terms about this. Just like you have had 20 to come to terms with me being Wiccan and Pagan. Despite you seeing over and over that I and Mary and Rhiannon are all good people, that we love and take care of each other, that we do all the things you would have me be as a person, and which you taught me to be, I'm still a bad person for not conforming to what you feel is what my life should be. So I'm now taking steps to correct that.

This will be the last email from me. You don't get to know the details of what is happening, just like Jim. Just like the girls. You have given up that right. All you will get from now on is the "Oh, hey, everything's fine" like you do to someone in the store who asks how your day is. You got what you want. You can have Eric and everything he was forever. Tell the people in your life that Eric died a tragic death and that Joy killed him.

It's only the truth after all.

Take me out of whatever bequest you have in your last will. I know there isn't any money, it was never about that anyhow. I know you don't have any money and I don't want it. Can't give anything to a dead person after all. And Eric is dead. I killed him. I'm never going back.

Goodbye.

Joy Phillip