I recently told my parents that I don't want to be a girl anymore and yesterday my mom said, "I can see you not wanting to be a girl, but I can't see you wanting to be a boy."
Can someone please give me some tips or something similar to telling her that I want/'m supposed to be a boy? I wanted to tell her but I was too nervous.
Welcome to Susan's Place. That's difficult to do in a simple post but lets see what we can do. Our Wiki has coming out letters (https://www.susans.org/wiki/Main_Page) which you may be able to use or reword. I also made an attempt at a coming out letter (https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,190312.0.html). Then there is our WIKI (https://www.susans.org/wiki/Transgender) which explains what transgender is and last "the transition channel" (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfO3B57E6NpIn-KsVjvmLLw) will provide a gender therapist that might be able to help you understand yourself. Feel free to ask any questions you might have and we will do our best to answer them.
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Hi rhyfedd. One suggestion I have is a metaphor for dysphoria that I may or may not have come up with on my own (I honestly can't remember if I had seen it somewhere before using it): being uncomfortable with your gender is like the feeling you get when wearing a shoe on the wrong foot. That "shoe" (gender role, expression, etc.) is not designed for that "foot" (person). And of course, you want to remove that shoe and put on the correct one. It's not a perfect comparison, but it may help your mom understand a little in language of something that she can experience firsthand.
You could tell your mother to imagine being a man, to really look at their bodies and imagine touching that all the time, not able to feel her own. Ask her if she would mind people calling her sir everyday and being told that she doesn't understand women. Then reiterate that your dysphoria feels as odd as all of that and is very real.
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Quote from: Amanda_Combs on April 23, 2017, 09:34:09 PM
You could tell your mother to imagine being a man, to really look at their bodies and imagine touching that all the time, not able to feel her own. Ask her if she would mind people calling her sir everyday and being told that she doesn't understand women. Then reiterate that your dysphoria feels as odd as all of that and is very real.
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I like this approach.
It could also be used internally for those questioning their "trans-ness"
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One thing that I use when people ask is this: imagine you woke up tomorrow in the body of the opposite sex, but nothing else about you had changed. Wouldn't you desperately want to get back into the body of the correct sex?