Quote from: Mrs. Oliphant on April 03, 2025, 06:58:21 PMI just tried to talk to my daughter about being genderfluid. She brushed me off. Something like, 'you're not transgender?' As though there were degrees of who I am. This is just a moment that will pass. And I will still be who I am. I was going to ask her to help me pick out a pretty dress and maybe a little makeup for a photo to use as my avatar. I'll probably hold off on doing that.
My experience has been you have to allow people to go at their own pace and if it takes us years to come with being trans, and that with us experiencing the dysphoria on an hourly basis, imagine how long it takes for someone on the outside looking in to adjust?
One thing that doesn't help here is dismissing people who are dismissing us. I should know, I've tried it. Many, perhaps most of us reach a point where we accept we are trans, at which point, we're a caterpillar yet to metamorphose into whatever butterfly we will become. Accepting being trans allows us to see the possibility of metamorphosis, but people who know us well, only see the caterpillar.
I did psychotherapy with trans people from the late 1980s after a UK organisation asked for professionals willing to do it. I never told anyone I was trans because that isn't how it works, it's about the client not the therapist, but everyone I saw always told a variation of your or my story. It was when I realised it was the same story regardless of which way they were travelling, whether they were assigned female at birth or assigned male, that the penny dropped.
A significant burden trans people face is in order to retain friends and family, we end up doing their psychotherapy. Contacts of trans people don't often think, 'I should seek help with adjusting to my partner/relative/friend's' revelation, they think instead of the impact on themselves. Sure, you get exceptions like Ginny, but they are ultra rare.
I was getting people making eight hour journeys to see me for a one hour session and felt guilty about that, so I started asking my clients to bring any significant others along, the bait being a free session. I openly admit this was mostly out of my own curiosity, but I thought it was marginally ethical because of that, so I ran it past my psychotherapy mentor... and found myself having to explain the entire trans scenario to them. I was like, 'What?' but you're old enough to remember what it was like back then, Oli.
It was long ago now and
we were still in the era of transsexualism, where being trans was seen as being trapped in the wrong body and the solution as an (almost) purely hormonal and surgical one of 'change the body to match the desired sex'.
It was as binary as you could get and even for those who felt trapped in the wrong body, as many do, having what was called sexual reassignment surgery (SRS as was) fell far short of what needed to done for someone who had gone through it to be accepted by society.
That era completely left out non-binary and gender-fluid people. When that realisation dawned splitting out gender and sex became a hot topic, driven by issues such intersex people, many of whom are genetically male, but phenotypically female and also the then emerging issue of AFAB trans folk, many of whom are non-binary. Without gender in the ring, you can't begin to address those groups, let alone bring anything useful to them. Gender as an issue extends far beyond trans anyway.
It was my sessions with significant others (SOs) which made me realise why post SRS people were struggling. There were two types of SO, those who'd known my clients 'before' and those who only met them 'after'. Neither group had a good understanding of how much distress their attitudes to trans were causing.
The 'before' group had a mountain to climb because they were having to adjust and cope with memories of how my clients were before transition and do what they saw as rewiring their entire relationship with them, even if it was non-sexual. They also had to complete the task the 'after' group was faced with, which was that everyone who presented to me was having issues aligning their gender to their post GAC appearance.
By gender, I mean gender as many
healthcare organisations from the WHO downward increasingly define it, which is the norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman (or a man, as many of my post surgery patients now were), Gender in this sense takes at least a decade of constant drip feeding and practice to learn and also, to unlearn. This was cutting both ways.
Some of my clients had had very successful surgery and hormone treatment, but were only part way through reprogramming their gendered behaviours. A few were able to switch gender at will, but even those who had completed the reprogramming (and a lot hadn't even realised what deep behavioural changes are involved) were still having to cope with SOs who were having frequent WTF experiences because they were expecting different gendered behaviour.
WTFs were more frequent in SOs of clients who had previously overcompensated on gender (either masculinity or femininity depending on which they were going) of clients who had themselves accepted they were trans. It gradually dawned on me that gender affirming care (GAC) involves not only us completing tasks in a series of stages, but our SOs and contacts doing an abbreviated version of what we do.
Those stages might be laid out as acceptance, sex transition, and retuning of gender (as in the WHO defined sense) to match our post treatment sex. The three don't have to be completed in that order, but all they have to be completed. What no-one tells us is there will be a long hang-over after we complete those tasks before everyone who knows us
before we started them adjusts, nor anyone we've come into contact with before we've completed stage three will also have to adjust.
People who aren't vested in us through friendship or love may crap out early on because it's too much effort. But people who are vested in us won't find it easy and may well resort to denial of what's happening to us instead of pitching in and helping. When I read people's stories here of how adjusting to being trans is tearing them apart, I think of how SOs cope and I'm more understanding.
Sometimes we need to help our SOs as much as we need them to help us and perhaps that's a message worth sending, that this is vitally important to you, but you also know it is vitally important to her. You're right, the dress is off with your daughter for now. But since she's sticking around, the omens for future trips are good. Patience is all.
