Fatherly or Motherly influences on GD

[Metanoia]

I had therapy yesterday, and for the last few months, we've focused on my GD and my anxiety with sex overall... Most every session before had ended with the realization that whatever was bothering me started with my father. Every image TV puts out on Shrinks/Therapists is a big long couch and the Therapist says, "tell me about your parents..." and this image (minus the couch) gets played out most of my previous sessions.

Well, yesterday the root came back. My therapist made the connection that my GD may have been compounded by the image of my father, and my thoughts of his manliness. If my image of my father was a poor image of a man, and if boys are supposed to learn how to be men from their fathers, then of course I don't want to be a man if the image of what a man is supposed to be is so poor. I'm thinking the GD was already present, but my father's poor representation of being a father added to the pot...

So, my question to all of you is... What impact did your parents have on your GD/needing to transition? Did any of you experience similar thoughts?

[Lady Smith]

My Dad was very much a man of his generation and certainly not inadequate as a man in any way by the standards of the time.  If anything my Dad's example only served to confirm for me that I wasn't anything like him.

[Joi]

No influence at all.  I experienced a trigger at about 8 yrs. old that set things in motion.  It had no connection at all to family.  Did I know it was GD.  Not hardly, I don't think the term had even been coined back then.

[Emileeeee]

I'd questioned this relationship in the past, but I now realize it's not so much a cause of the dysphoria as it is a cause to fear it. My father's a laborer and has very strong opinions on gender norms. I went through a lot of therapy to get my upbringing to not conflict with who I was. I was struggling between what I knew was real and what I was brought up to know was real, which unfortunately were two totally different things. That's what caused most of my flip-flopping, which I attributed to confusion.

[Valwen]

I feel that my parents had little effect if any on my GD though they did heavily effect my coming out.

I very briefly saw a therapist years ago who tried to pin everything on my parents or abuse or something like that and it was a horribly uncomfortable situation that never made that much sense to me. More recently I started seeing a therapist with transgender experience and the only time my parents came up was talking about when to come out to them again. over all I feel that a therapist who tries to direct your problem rather than let you explore it is just trying to feed you some text book garbage and is not going to do much good over time, except to find you a imaginary target to blame for your troubles.

[Felix]

Sorry I'm not mtf, but this is a neat question. I've read a lot of Freud and taken a lot of psych and pharmacology classes and I've had various kinds of talk therapy.

I feel like I would never have gotten treatment for gender stuff or almost anything else I struggle with if we had gotten distracted by how my parents were.

My mom was abused when she got caught looking at her genitals in the mirror, and her mom was the 8th girl to be born and so was given a boy's name and a boy's upbringing. I was raised kind of as an honorary boy because my dad needed a strong kid who could play baseball and be a protector, and he didn't have any male children. I got beat up many times in childhood because other kids couldn't tell if I was a boy or a girl. I was brought up to be tough and aggressive and to know how to balance a checkbook and change tires and oil.

If I were to examine and talk about all my gendered influences my trans identity could be easily explained as the result of dysfunctional upbringing or trauma, but I think that would be a really inappropriate approach to treatment for me. I don't know what the "correct" understanding might be, but it's better for a lot of us to just omit these details and go with solving whatever problems are most painful in the moment.

[ToniB]

I believe that being brought up in a house with 4 females and a arrogant male chauvinist pig of a father did rather affect my mind set I decided at a very early age that I would never be like my Father as I disagreed with all of his arrogant machismo .plus with him trying to enforce his sporting interests on Me when I hated anything like that did not help LOL.so I always tried t6o do whatever my sisters where doing much to his disgust .I grew up learning to Knit and Sew cook play 2 balls skipping and hopscotch .I had no Boys living in our area so He could not send me out to play with them .If I am honest with Myself I probably would have transitioned many Years ago but for him .Him passing away freed Me from the fear of his reaction and has let the real Me come out

[iKate]

My mom and dad split around 11 but I had been dressing since I was 4. I can't say they had any influence.

My mom was mostly absent as she and my dad split early on like when I was 10. My dad would teach me some manly stuff like auto repairs, not just simple stuff like tires and oil but transmission and suspension repairs too including a full rebuild of an auto transmission. We also lived in a rural area so we were out in the woods often.

So no, my parents had zero influence. If anything they held me back but that was normal for the very prejudiced society I grew up in.

[Ms Grace]

My father is quite the patriarch - even so his gender was quite vague, he certainly wasn't effeminate but neither was he macho. But he is a stern, distant male figure - and I often feared ending up like him when I got older. One of my earliest recollections of gender segregation dysphoria includes him (family day at the beach when I was about six, and having to go to the men's change rooms with him instead of with my mother and sister... and being totally freaked out by the many, many nude dudes showering in there!!!)... so... maybe?? I dunno, it goes a lot deeper than that for me. There are plenty of people who have had aggressive, macho fathers and they aren't trans. If I had been cis male I probably wouldn't have minded half the stuff that bugs me about me dad!

[Jane's Sweet Refrain]

I hope I am putting this delicately enough, but I wonder whether the line of questioning itself isn't irresponsible--part of a subtle kind of discouragement that I encountered from therapists in the 90s who wanted to talk me out of gender dysphoria. Even if terms like "compounded" rather than "caused" are being used. No valid study has produced a link between dysfunction fatherhood and GD. And if bad fathering caused GD, both political parties would be falling all over themselves to secure the transgender vote; there would just be that many of us.

Sorry about the mini-rant, but it was this line of therapeutic questioning that allowed me to doubt myself when I actually had no doubts. It might have cost me fifteen years of living as my real self.

[Paige]

I must admit my relationship with my father has not been good.  I would suspect much of this has to do with the fact that I have/had gender dysphoria and he had no tolerance whatsoever with me showing my femininity.  Did he cause my dysphoria, no I don't think so.   He and my mother, and society as a whole just caused the pain that came with denying who I am.

Take care,
Paige

[brenda w]

i dont feel my father head influence, as another poster said i knew i didnt want to be like him. was also more drawn to my my mother. will repeat what another has alluded to as for my father, the only affect he had was my spending my life trying to get his approval, and when he passed, it opened up the floodgates.

[amber roskamp]

I don't think my upbringing played a huge role in this. I very much had positive male role role models whether it was my dad or my three older brothers. I definitely looked up to my brothers had a somewhat complicated relationship with my father but not a bad one. My relationship with my mom was complicated. I love her, but when I was young she was in prison for I don't know 3 or 4 years. It was supposedly for abuse but I don't remember my mom ever being the one to discipline me or of being even remotely abusive. The only abusive thing theydid to me as a child was insist that I was a boy when I told them I wasn't. Despite this I have always admired my mom. 

I don't think how we are raised plays a huge role in whether or not we are trans. I think it is more biological or neurological.

[katiej]

In this way I definitely don't fit the typical trans narrative.  My parents weren't good at being married to each other, but they were fantastic parents.  I had a stable and fairly uneventful childhood.

My dad was the emotional and affectionate one, and my mom fixed things and was the calming influence in our house.

So I agree with Sweet Jane that it's counterproductive to look at the parents (or other environmental factors) as the root cause of GD. It's biology.  We may have other emotional baggage from our upbringing that clouds or complicates the gender issue. But examining them too deeply as a possible cause of being transgender can only further enforce the idea that this can, and should, be prevented.

[enigmaticrorschach]

my mother barred my father from seeing me and she ended up going to jail because of bad choices and neglecting Mr and my younger siblings. it only made it worse. if I had a normal life I could of transitioned a lot earlier. but no, influence wise, my mother or father did not have influence over me being rtrans because eventually, this monster would of raised its head one way or another. I'm adopted so I meant my birth mother

[silentone]

I do believe my image of my father contributed to my GD or at least awakened it. My father was never there for any of my siblings and me simply because he didn't want kids and the few times he was he would just abuse us. He was a weak image of a man having to threaten my mother to not leave him. He mother ended up working three jobs to support the family since he never really made any money. My mother essentially took the roll of a father and mother. She somehow managed to spend time with us working three full time jobs. I never wanted to be anything like my father, but I did have one good male figure in my life growing up which was my grandfather (my father's father). He was a perfect model of what a man should be.

[Metanoia]

Thank you all for your responses.

Yeah, I'm gonna look into starting with a new Gender Therapist in the fall, so I've gotta stick with this one for now. (I'm moving, so that's why) He's doing his best, and it's all I have so far.

My parents divorced when I was in high school, and I sometimes wonder if I would have discovered my GD before if I wasn't worried about surviving on my own... It goes back to the old 'people in worse places in the world don't worry about their identity because they're too busy worrying about their next meal' idea... I get it.

I can't play the 'if I didn't do this... then this might have happened' game too much, because I have a beautiful kid and another on the way, and a great marriage so far (besides the multiple times I've 'come out' to her). Once I made it to a place of stability in my life, stopped worrying about survival and gave my head and heart a good deep conversation about the status of 'me'... 'me' started to look a lot different... 'me' started to look like 'she' rather than 'he'...

So, my therapist pointed to my father as a possible connection to my GD... who knows. Thanks for the responses and the mini-spiels. Good stuff.

[Emily E]

I liked and loved my mother and father very much and never had any problems with or thought they were bad or over bearing parents in any way my mother died when I was 11 and my dad understandably had a hard time with it and tried to cope by drinking the pain away several years later he remarried and worked his way through his drinking problem but even at his worst he was the nicest kindest person you would ever meet.  Sadly he died about 10 years ago and it still makes me sad to think I will never see or talk to him again because he really was my best friend.  I don't understand why your therapist is trying to get to the "root" cause of your GD or that your father has a possible connection to your GD (everyone in your life has some kind of connection to it in some way or the other) unless you have real issues dealing with your childhood and parents it seems like its a waist of time.

[cassieohpia]

I completely agree that trying to find the cause of dysphoria in your parents is unhelpful. 
I think this same idea used to be mentioned around gay men as well. Like gay men having distant and uncomfortable relationships with their fathers and therefore 'turning gay'.
Being gay or being trans is how you are born.

Imagine how many cis kids have had similar upbringings and relationships to you without being trans.

From my own perspective and therapy I've realised not how my parents might have created my trans ness but, really importantly, how they've affected the ways I've experienced it and avoided it for so long. It's been like the slow unravelling of a tightly screwed up piece of paper.

I was raised and nurtured in a very masculine environment with a very masculine father, who was also full of love, and an overly mothering mother. My gender lines were massive! Through therapy I can see how the dysphoria I was experiencing at early ages was suppressed, and the reasons why. I can also see how my own 'trigger', at around 12-13, was actually inevitable. That led to the shame and denial years common to so many, but also to where I am now.

I would be worse off without understanding how my parents relationships shaped my and my life choices (they did!) but they didn't make me trans. I would be wary of a therapist who is trying to suggest this (based on my own understanding but also from reading so many others' stories).

Good luck with your own journey!
X

Ps: if you feel your therapist is trying to help it might be worth explaining or showing some of these responses. My first therapist was a gender specialist but my second, and to me the most helpful, is not. The second has learned about trans* by working with me but the frameworks used have been what has been most helpful. Not saying a gender specialist is not the best kind of therapist btw! With the specialist experience and knowledge they bring, how could they not be. Just suggesting that, if you do want to keeping working with your current one until you move, it could still be helpful.

[HughE]

My therapist made the connection that my GD may have been compounded by the image of my father, and my thoughts of his manliness. If my image of my father was a poor image of a man, and if boys are supposed to learn how to be men from their fathers, then of course I don't want to be a man if the image of what a man is supposed to be is so poor. I'm thinking the GD was already present, but my father's poor representation of being a father added to the pot...

The prevailing belief used to be that people's gender identity was the product of life experiences during infancy and early childhood. However, that theory has since been comprehensively disproved. If you want to read some of the science that's led to that conclusion, this page is quite a good starting point:

https://lizdaybyday.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/one-stop-trans-brain-research-list/

There's also posts on Susan's and most of the other main transgender message boards, about an artificial estrogen called DES that was given to large numbers of pregnant women in an attempt to prevent miscarriages, and appears to be a major cause of MTF gender dysphoria among people born during the time it was in use (between the early 1940s and about 1980). The link between DES and trans shows that events in the womb are important in determining the gender you identify as later in life.