yeah well it finally happened, i got lazy. if my nails are painted, the first thing i do when getting home is clean em off… but last night i was tired and figured i could just do it in the morning. well, of course that backfired immediately - first thing that happens when i leave my room this morning is my dad seeing me heading into the bathroom with bright blue sparkly nails and a bag of cosmetics. he didn’t say anything immediately, but has been weirdly sigh-y all day, and just now stuck his head in my room saying he “wants to chat” later today (extremely out-of-character) while being extremely cryptic and evasive about what exactly he wants to talk about.
(for context, although i live in switzerland, my parents are hardcore USA-an tradcaths (the kind who hate the “woke” pope). my dad has voted for trump the last 3 consecutive US elections and will do so again, has trump merch proudly on display in his room, immediately started voting for the far-right immigrant party as soon as he got his swiss citizenship, regularly goes on unprovoked angry diatribes about how much gay people disgust him, etc. you get the picture; he’s pretty much the stereotype of the “far right religious nutjob”. my mom is almost aggressively unopinionated about most things, and certainly doesn’t make any effort to rein my dad ever)
anyway, i’m looking forward to talking with him this evening, i’m sure it’ll be great fun! ಠ_ಠ
update: have managed to defer talk until “later”; we’ll see where this goes (but i am prepping for a quick exit if necessary). will update again if anything interesting happens
“My coworker brought in their kid and she was practicing” I’m sure there is an age appropriate thing you could also wiggle in.
After that I only did pedi cause my parent ain’t got xray vision. As long as I’m not wearing flip-flops.
Oof
My first time getting my nails done I figured “oh yeah my family isn’t that observant and I won’t be interacting with them much for awhile”
Very next day, my mother asks me to help clean out a bit of my grandparents house, and hands me something, which I grab without thinking.
I could tell from the look she made she saw the polish (it was a trans flag theme with a full rainbow in the center instead of white) but she never said anything.
I plan on just responding to my family with “yeah, and? What’s your point?” When they find out. They can be cool with it, or not. I’m not too attached to my family.
The only real issue is if they decide to be not cool enough to decide to kick my spouse and I out, since they own the property I live on currently.
I figure it’s only a matter of time before the rest of my family finds out, I’m out at work and have actually bumped into my current brother in law at work (he was distracted and I had sunglasses on that hid most of my face since I was just walking in), and work with my sister’s ex husband when there’s a shift overlap.
Good luck with things, I second the “I’ve made friends and while out with some female friends they wanted to polish my nails and I figure why not” route
Nail polish does feel pretty easily explainable for the most part. “I was out with some female friends, and they thought it would be fun to paint my nails”. Its not a wildly unusual thing even for hetero boys, if anything, it means you have female friends.
Good luck.
not a bad idea tbh. unfortunately, young teenage dysphoric+depressed me built up this stupid persona of not having/wanting any friends because “i don’t care about anything except programming”, and i haven’t really been able to rid myself of it in the years since - any mention of me interacting with another person just gets met with sarcastic amusement. will do some brainstorming though and see if i can build that into something plausible…
thanks
“The girl next to me in class was bored so she painted my nails, I was bored as well so I let her. No big deal” - Downplays the significance to “bored and fidgeting”, which might work?
watch out for details, you also have to explain the bag of cosmetics. If they are not convinced (and they won’t be, because they already made up their minds) a full room shakedown is on the table.
the problem is, her dad already made up a story and opinion in his mind. You could say that you painted one nail for every woman you banged last night just to keep count, and he’ll still be unmovable in what he KNOWS be the ABSOLUTE TRUTH. I’m sorry op, best of luck, I’m hope you can find someone in EU you can couch surf in this community
Yeah, for any normal person its an easy sell, for a MAGA type, probably not. You’d have to go pretty aggressive on the “Lol, you think nail polish makes me gay? If I was gay I’d far more flamboyant” or something.
Oh shit. Wishing you good luck ❤️
Oh hell no, I wish you all the best with that. Sounds like you have a really uncomfortable situation at home. There might not be anything you can or want to do about that but I would still recommend calling 147 or 143 at some point, you might get help there.
are you my actual sister because it sounds like we have the same parents! i have visited/ gone to family gatherings with nails painted and while i’m sure things were said out of earshot, it hasn’t been world-ending. i’ve also never directly come out to my parents. not when i identified as enby and not now. there are parts of me i feel they aren’t deserving to share in. i hope the talk goes well. fingers crossed for a positive outcome
Do you need me to adopt you?
I’m sorry, that sounds like it’s gonna suck :(
Unfortunately I’m a terrible liar so I can’t really offer any advice, but I hope everything turns out alright.
