I went extremely low contact with my lib parents who paid for my transition because their gender essentialism and my mother's narcissism were so toxic that I was taking heavy damage.

they are well meaning and act out of love but the way they are wired and the pair of them together, their toxic dynamic, produces abuse.

I had to fall back on them for support and they stepped up, caught me again when I fell. I cannot harbor serious resentment against them for being who they are, but I have to work very hard to maintain this relationship in a positive light, I realised not too long ago that despite all their best efforts the harms they had caused me meant that I would have nothing nice to say at my mother's funeral and I decided I didn't like that, and have been trying to consciously rebuild our relationship and enforce boundaries etc. It is so fucking tiring.

If I were able to survive without them I probably would not put in the work. I think we've all sacrificed for each other so it's sort of "even" now even if I'm cPTSD and even more dysphoric and dysmorphic and over-modified from their bullshit help.

It is totally fucking valid to just not do this work. I am operating out of survival mode and bitter acceptance that I have to be with these people.

It's so complicated and fucked up I doubt this post will even make any sense at all.

If you can go it alone do not feel guilt or any other kind of whackness about being your own person and setting the boundaries you need to be mentally healthy and to survive and thrive.

Politics was part of it but not all of it — honestly not most of it — for me. Granted, I've been no-contact with my parents since Trump's first term so politics definitely would've heated up since then if we were still talking. But it was a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing. The liberalism contributed to some of the other issues (like them pretending to be less homophobic than they actually were, or hating my partner for being a retail worker instead of being PMC or whatever) and they were starting to get weirdly prepper and conspiracy-brained around when I realized our relationship was unsalvageable and called it quits.

Long post but hey, you asked.

I haven't spoken with my lib parents, except for practical matters a handful of times (via texting), in a little over two years. I mentioned a few days ago on hexbear that they pay for the NYT. That was actually one of the many arguments we had. I begged them (particularly my dad) to stop paying for it. I think he actually did, eventually, after months of pleading, but then his subscription mysteriously restored itself. Their media intake consists of CNN, the NYT, old movies, nature documentaries, and whatever is on Facebook. I think they're not on twitter anymore.

They live right next to us. My family and I would have dinner with them once every few weeks. Once the pandemic began, we ate outside. Even as the pandemic started, I had to beg them (screaming) to let me get their groceries for them. They didn't think it was a big deal. We were all almost on the same page politically up until that point. I had volunteered hard for Bernie (sorry) as a communist, but we had also attended our local caucus and watched the local Democrats literally steal Bernie's delegates right in front of us. (Bernie got the most votes, but Biden got the most delegates. I argued with the chair of the Democrats about this, and he told me that it was because of "math." Interestingly, I ran into his wife just a few weeks ago and screamed at her about voting for Harris and the genocide in Palestine. She said that she was voting to save democracy. I said: "What democracy? Your husband stole Bernie's delegates right in front of me!" And everyone clapped (not really of course but she was shocked). She also told me that I should leave the USA. I told her to go back to Europe. She was shocked again! Sometimes being terminally online pays dividends in real life.)

Anyway, Bernie getting cheated right before my parents' eyes didn't shake my parents' faith in the Democrats. Once Biden was the nominee, my parents supported him, always arguing that Trump was worse. We would have explosive arguments. I would have explosive anger. At calmer times I would go for a walk with my dad, and we would talk about politics (it was something my family was always really into), and I would get him to agree with communist ideas, and then the next time I talked with him it was like the conversation had never taken place. He had just re-brainwashed himself with CNN and Lakota Man.

The last straw was a fucking comic book version of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny they had lying on their coffee table. My parents have not finished reading any book in years, but after dinner with them one evening I glanced through this book (as a lib I had actually read the text version years earlier) and it was just page after page of equating communists with Nazis. I asked my mom if she had to choose between Nazis and communists, which one would she pick? (My dad is also Jewish.) She said "neither." And I just lost it so bad that I never went back. I ended up doing therapy for a year and basically figuring out that my parents were driving me insane and that I was happier not interacting with them. And it's honestly true, my mental health is just a lot more stable without having to deal with my parents discussing the weather while their beloved Democrats are executing children in Palestine.

My parents are capable of growth. My mom had supported Warren in 2020 until she abandoned any pretense of supporting universal health care. Then she switched to Bernie. But as far as I know, that's the last time they've changed their mind about anything political. They both retired when the pandemic started and also inherited a fat chunk of change. They've taken a few vacations and purchased a small lake house about an hour away. Growing up, we were more lower-middle class. I always had what I needed but little more than that. I was raised by the TV, novels, and video games. My performance in school was mediocre. We took our first real vacation when I was in college, after my mom won a sex discrimination lawsuit against her nonprofit employer. My sister, my only sibling, committed suicide a few years later, and my parents have never come to terms with this. They blame genetics and chemicals (even though I have the same genetics and chemicals and I appear to still be among the living). Society was no factor in her self-destruction because Obama was president at the time. When Trump is president, he is responsible for the heat-death of the universe and the extinction of the dinosaurs; when any Democrat is president, they are literally more powerless than a single subatomic particle.

On one of our walks, my dad mentioned that China is also committing genocide. I asked him what he was talking about. I'm not even sure he was able to enunciate the word "Uyghur." We went back home and looked up "Uyghur genocide" on google images. Of course, nothing was there, so he relented. A little later in the evening I think we started talking about Epstein. My dad said that I sounded like a Republican. I was like, no, Republicans and Democrats are all pedophiles, just look at Biden. And my dad got so angry, he knocked a chair onto the floor. He was screaming like crazy. My mom told me to stop talking with him because he was going to have a heart attack. And so I did.

At dinner once my dad said the n-word to illustrate something to my spouse (she wasn't born in the USA). It was something about how people used to say this word a lot, I can't remember. I told him that as a white person, he can't say the n-word in any context, for any reason. This led to quite an argument. Later in the evening after we had separated, I googled the issue, and white liberals actually agree on this matter (for now), so my dad relented.

When you see images of elderly Democrats plugging their ears as people scream and cry about genocide, that's my parents, except they aren't quite that old. They're slightly better than MSNBC libs, but not by much. If I ever manage to get out of the country, I won't be coming back, and I'm not sure we'll ever speak again.

My entire life has been a long struggle to understand that although I’m not perfect, I don’t deserve to suffer. I don’t deserve to be neglected or ignored. As a child, my parents were barely present. They were too busy making money for their lying, cheating, scumbag bosses. And even now, although every boss they ever had cheated them, they will still maintain that not all bosses are bad.

My parents were actually more supportive once I went to college, once there was some physical distance between us. We had a good conversation for an hour on the phone every week. Purely by coincidence, I really blossomed at that point. Suddenly I was surrounded by good friends, even though I had spent elementary school almost completely alone (and only had a handful of friends in high school). Suddenly I was a perfect student who loved school, when I had always been a C-student beforehand. My parents were not the only factor in this success, of course, but they were certainly a significant one. Our relationship continued to be positive more or less until Biden won the primary and the pandemic began. Since then, the contradictions in our society have grown so intense, that they have actually split up our family. My spouse and kids still have dinner with my parents once every few months. I have issues with this, but I don’t get in the way. I prefer to let my parents’ behavior speak for itself.