Quote from: Moonflower on November 17, 2018, 08:56:47 PM
Hi Lisa! I'm glad to meet you here. Thanks for sharing the parallels between the story in the movie and your own. I wish I could meet you parents and thank them for giving you such support. They seem to have shared my appreciation for genuine self expression. I've always said that helping my kids discover who they are is the greatest gift of being a parent. I'm honored to be doing so for my SO as well.
Nice to meet you too and thanks for your comments. My mother was an artist among many things and a genuinely creative, open-minded and intuitive spirit interested in living life to the fullest. She married her second husband, my first step-dad knowing at the time he was bisexual but they were only together a couple of years. Of course, I knew nothing about this then, it was something I asked about before she died, but I'm sure the experience expanded her attitudes about LGB folks? My second step-dad, the one that actually had some impact came into my life between the 4th and 5th grade when I was 10 years old. He had been a Lutheran pastor for 20 years but had left the church and was working in occupational rehabilitation as a practicing psychologist. I'd spent a few unpleasant months of summer vacation with my biological father during which time my mom and her new beau were already living together back in a state I had only lived in two weeks before getting shipped off. I'm sure he had been filled in with all the problems I was having with school and with the 4th grade incident that made us move to Nevada in the first place but it was like he spent two minutes with me before convincing my mom I needed to see a child psychiatrist and lickety split, I was in counseling seeing a therapist before starting the 5th grade.
It wasn't bad or what you would think I'd be subject to in 1965 or maybe I was so obviously not a boy they knew nothing was going to change that or something but the whole matter of my gender was something they delicately stepped around or maybe they were just afraid of opening a can of worms they didn't understand and I was smart enough to not cop to anything because I knew they would think I was crazy and I knew the barbaric things they did mentally ill people. I'm sure my folks, or my mom at least had a hand in their approach as well so the focus was mainly on how I dealt with the way other people treated me rather than why I was treated that way. I went to four different schools in the 5th and 6th grade. By the time I started 7th grade (1967), I'd never started and finished an entire grade at the same school. I had been in 14 different schools by then in three different states. Either the bullying and getting beat up became too intense or I was forced to leave because my appearance was unacceptable and my presence was too disruptive. Imagine me, a smaller than average gentle, shy, quiet, introverted, withdrawn and sensitive kid that just wanted to be left alone as the disruptive one? That still irks me. (Sorry, not sorry for existing, a$$holes)
My folks put up with a lot and I can't even imagine all the moving we did because I couldn't get along with the world as a boy or the world couldn't get along me as a girl or something like that? They recognized my struggles and tried to lessen them. They just went with the flow, catered to my nature, respected my individuality and encouraged me to be my highest self even if that was not someone of the gender dictated by my anatomy. It didn't really matter other than of course the external problems this caused me socially. How they were given this insight and understanding or even the courage to do something so completely progressive, unprecedented and way beyond the rules of convention to not make an already screwed up kid more screwed up is something I really can't even fathom.
Even today, some try to label supportive parents of trans kids as child abusers so I can only imagine what kind of things they dealt with behind my back that I was protected from? How much money they spent on therapists or how many battles they had with schools trying to keep me in the education system. Who supported them? I was so focused on and involved with my own issues to even think about things from their point of view until I was much, much older.
QuoteJust as you feel guilty for never letting your parents know how great they were, they must have carried a lead weight when they weren't able to protect you from being assaulted. Of course, you understand that now.
Getting teased, bullied, mocked, roughed up, clothes torn or nose bloodied on the regular was more or less routine but I thought every kid's life was like that and it more or less became my normal but when I was attacked by a group of homophobic boys while I walked home from school one day in the 10th grade that put me in the hospital with broken bones, a bruised lung, major contusions and abrasions and stitches in my face and legs that had the cops involved and me out of school a month recovering, it
was a lot more traumatic for my folks than it was for me. They were mortified. I got to meet more new "therapists". Everybody at school got to hear what happened and two of the kids that attacked me ended up in juvenile detention for a year so for the most part, people gave me a wide berth and kept their distance except for the usual name calling, shoving and I swear, the knocking my books to the ground that had became a school sport probably with trophies awarded for those with the most points?
This was just more of what it had always been like for me except just to a more extreme degree and I really thought they
were going to kill me but this whole thing and the time I spent getting better was also the time I made a clear understanding with my folks that I simply could not continue to live my life a boy and that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that I was ever going to grow up to be a man but by then, they had reached the same conclusion but became even more convinced I was only putting myself in more danger but knew there was nothing going to stop me and it actually made sense to them so they were mostly concerned how to accommodate my needs while somehow keeping me in school? Little things helped. I got my ears pierced, got razors to shave my legs. My mom took me to her salon to have my eyebrows shaped or I should say my one and a half eyebrows as I'd lost most of the one that had stitches in it (still missing). My clothes all came from the girl's department with some that could pass for boy's clothes okay for school and others I couldn't wear to school. I already had long, pretty blonde hair halfway down my back and by the time I was 16, strangers everywhere were no longer confused if I was a boy or a girl which made going to school everyday and being known as a he/him with a boy's name the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
I barely made it through my junior year and the struggle found me depressed, suicidal and barely functional and I saw no way that I could put up with another year of this mind warping life I was living and on top of that, at 17 my very delayed puberty had begun to show its ugly signs and I was even more horrified and a complete disaster. That's when my folks somehow found me yet another doctor that supposedly could help but I'd been seeing clueless doctors since I was ten and was so over the whole thing but they insisted and they were right. I got put on HRT at the beginning of summer vacation and did a lot of talking over the next few months to get my head in the right place to make it through my senior year and graduate which I did and never looked back. The week after, I got my new IDs and paperwork and a few weeks after that, I left home with $100 in graduation money and some sandwiches with no particular plan but to get out, live my life and make my own way.
I did okay. 45 years later I'm still here.
QuoteI hope that you enjoyed the rest of your day with a cleansed heart.
Indeed I did and thank you for your kind thoughts not only to myself but to others and for taking an interest. I hope you found a few more details less than excruciatingly boring and applaud your courage for being a supportive and positive influence for your own loved ones and family. Hopefully my story can show how much that really means?