Did HRT make you more like your other parent?

Le question on Reddit

Pretty sure hearing loss would be about noise exposure and maybe magnesium deficiency.

I know this is a thing people wrestle with, trans or not: Am I doomed to be an awful person exactly like the parent I hate?

1. Some things are genetic.

2. Some are environmental or situational.

3. And there are lots of human quirks for how we mentally pattern match that can get odd results.

In my youth, I was the same height as my mother but didn't have her olive skin or hawk nose and generally didn't look that much like her. I also didn't seem to favor my father.

In my late forties, I shaved my head for medical reasons and me and my kids had a good belly laugh about how I am the spitting image of my father, only slightly smaller scaled features. Until then, no one ever thought I looked like my dad.

Dad was bald in his twenties from malaria and kept the rest of his hair super short, typically getting it cut once a week, because of the many years he spent in the army. Once, post surgery and doped up on morphine in the ICU, he heard some news piece about terrorists and decided that the jeans wearing, "long haired" doctors whose hair -- le GASP! -- brushed their collar were terrorists who had seized the hospital.

Charmingly, his highest priority was making sure my mother was safely evacuated and didn't get trapped there due to being a visitor at the wrong time.

I also have Dad's Irish complexion but 26.5 years in the army had his face and arms permanently tanned an unnaturally dark shade. I used to joke that I had three shades: pale white, off white and lobster red.

With pale skin and actual hair, no one ever felt I looked like my father. But I actually do look a great deal like my father, you just have to shave my head to see it and women don't typically do that.

When I was getting divorced and me and my sons lived for a time with my parents, my mother found my kids crazy making and excessively difficult to deal with. One day, in exasperation, she said "They are just like their father."

I enthusiastically agreed to try to get her off my back.

Shortly thereafter, she told one of my kids "You're just like your father." thinking that she had finally found the sick burn that would actually work as emotional manipulation. He replied casually "Well, yeah. I have half his genes."

Fortunately for us she had already walked off, likely in a huff, before he came up with his brilliant and witty punchline "And a quarter of your genes, Grandma!" or we might have been homeless a lot sooner. He turned around and she was gone, so she never heard that punchline.

You're likely to have some traits in common with people genetically related to you, especially closely related. It doesn't mean those traits require you to be a jerk in exactly the same way as that person and it doesn't mean you have to have heavy emotional baggage about being related to someone you want nothing more to do with.

If you see yourself behaving like them in ways you don't like, work at finding other answers. We all have some degree of choice in how we handle aspects of ourselves we are less than thrilled with.