Quote from: agfrommd on January 10, 2013, 09:46:58 AM
Yes, he's been very specific. He talked about how HRT is not likely to improve my face or my body hair growth. I probed him to make sure I understood what he was saying. He insisted these are simply not things HRT will help with. This led me to post a poll on Susan's where around 80% of women who started HRT in middle age DID see some improvement in these areas.
His sounds like the pro forma response. The gist I've gotten from just about everything I've ever heard from credible individuals going through transition at later ages (along with images shared by friends who've transitioned, who I've known face-to-face) is that the results are limited, which is something I suppose he needs to confirm that you've heard and understood. I probably wouldn't make more of it than that, and it sounds like, from your later comments in this post, that you were already aware of that, or at the very least confirmed it with your poll. His idea of "improvement" just might be more narrow than yours?
We do get changes, just not miracles. Though for some of us, any change that is consonant with our own sense of self may count as miraculous to us, subjectively?
QuoteAs for my daughter, he's worried it will be hard for her. I'm worried too. The chief difference is that I see my roll as a parent as providing love and support and to teach my kids how to deal with problems rather than twisting my life around to make it as easy as possible on them.
This generic bit of advice seems to me one of the bigger lies that's common from therapists, reflecting more of the problems in therapy circles than anything useful.
My ex has spent a great deal of money sending both my kids to various therapists to deal with some of what I tend to see as inevitable results of who their parents are... and not all of the atypical traits were mine. Both of us spent childhoods being the outliers... I'm not sure focusing on teaching social skills or the other efforts have done anything of positive significance for them, and may have sent subtle messages that their mother found them "defective" in some way. Granted, my apparently cisgendered daughter is the one who has had the worst time of it on this score. My trans son has rarely shown distress that he was a bit of a "weirdo" -- he comes by it honestly, and for most of childhood relished the ways he was different. He did eventually need to change schools, in part because his first relationship turned into a bit of a circus, I think (his girlfriend was not the most stable of girls, and my sense is that when they broke up she did some things to make his social status awkward and untenable in a school that was very fixated on appearing to be "normal."
I'll never be sure, but a part of me thinks that it would have been much more beneficial if my children had known openly that I was trans from a very early age. They might not have felt so isolated, and certainly would have been clear that at least one of their parents was unusual. I don't think it was much of a secret in any case that I was strange... it wasn't like I was going to be elected president of the local country club or any of the other hetero-normative institutions in our area, of which there were many. This traces back to a promise my ex made and was unable to fulfill, that when she completed residency, I was to get the pick about where we would live and raise children. There are a lot of places more cosmopolitan and open to differences that I wish we had lived, but that wasn't something either of us were able to control much. I do think a more urban and varied community would have been a better fit. My kids do have friends now, but most of them are children of artists and film/TV professionals living in the areas around Woodstock and SUNY/New Paltz, a decidedly more bohemian area where I know I would have probably found many more friends than I did here, even though we live within spitting distance of some well-known artist areas as well... somehow, though, they are very different. We're also not very far from where the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped.
QuoteWell, for me it's more about wanting to have as much of the female experience as I can. I'll never have a body that's perfectly female, but I wont to try to get as close as I can. After I explained it better he did get it, but with a little more listening on his part, I think the misunderstanding needn't have happened.
This, at least, sounds positive. It took me far longer than it should have to realize just how small a fraction of what I said in sessions was something my therapist actually understood the first time around. I think he had some strange desire to project a lot of his own issues onto me, and for some reason I allowed that. I may even have encouraged it, perhaps because of my general fear and hypervigilance when dealing with men?
