I'm in a very delicate situation. I am T all the way, I want to be a woman. Unfortunately my very conservative family got very angry about that a year ago when I told them that and I've been forced to stay in the closet due to a bunch of circumstances I won't elaborate on, my immediate family knows, nobody else does, and I work a job I CAN'T transition on. But not all of my family condemned me. My brother was accepting of it when he heard it, but when I heard that from him, I thought it was just him being the usual laid back person he is. He's also got learning disabilities and lives with my parents for support, although he does manage to work full time at a menial job, and he's not super disabled, he's kind of a like a mild Rain Man, he's not totally out to lunch on social issues, he's not super intelligent, but he's got areas where he exceeds me, but other areas where he's fairly crippled. I think that explains him good enough.
So anyway, I've been super depressed for a while and this week my grandmother died and that on top of everything else pushed me into a suicidal crisis and I announced that I was going to kill myself within the next few months to my family and I was serious and they knew I was. I actually set a date I was going to do myself in and started keeping a journal what was going to be a super long suicide note. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that I didn't want to die, I was just supremely frustrated about being stuck in a male body and not able to escape. My whole family went through a very difficult time. I finally called up Mom and said that I'm not going to kill myself, but I'm very frustrated. She seems to have softened up a little bit. But then I get the bombshell.
My parents left the house and I was talking on the phone to my brother and he drops the bomb, he says that he's been questioning his own gender for a long time. He said that when he was in the 6th grade he let his fingernails grow out long and he said he liked having long fingernails and felt a desire to be a woman, a desire that has kind of been in the background for a while. Wow, just WOW! So now I'm stuck in a dilemma. I know that my brother is in the "Q" arena of becoming my sister. But if I actively push him towards that, I know there are a lot of self serving interests that would pull off, after all, if the two out of two children that my mother gave birth to BOTH announced they want to be women, well, I don't think she will have much ground to object. But my brother really looks up to me for advice. I know I must NOT manipulate him. And it's a tough balance, he seems to legitimately have an interest in becoming a woman, and I want to be a helper, I want to help him guide him to be what he wants to be, but there's a MEGA conflict of interest in him going through with this. What in the heck do I do? He's got what appears to be a very legitimate desire to declare himself transgendered, but I've got a huge incentive to push him in that direction. How do I facilitate the help he wants and not become manipulative? I suppose the fact that I'm posting this very message means that I'm not an evil manipulator, but I know there is a VERY fine line here. And identifying this line is very difficult. I want to find the line between helping and manipulating. Where is the line?
