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Quote from: girl you look fierce on January 17, 2013, 01:59:49 PM
How do people handle this???

I'm don't feel bad/guilty for being trans anymore than I am of my ethnic race etc. If someone hate me because of what I am (which I find to be VERY few) then it's their problem. I'm not going to stress about maintaining stealth to avoid detection. Then again I -am- a woman. I'm not going to pretend to be anything other than who I am and I'm not ashamed of embarrassed about this. I don't go out of my way to reveal I am trans. I don't wear a sign or tell people, but if they find out, I'm not crushed either. When this has happened, the people treat me the same before and after. Maybe I have very open minded friends? I seem to believe being trans is becoming much less of an issue than it was even a few years ago.

As far as being "a freak, like everybody who knows hates you", that's in -your- head. It's a common thing for many transpeople, the best phrase I've hear to describe it is -internalized transphobia-.

Quote from: girl you look fierce on January 17, 2013, 01:59:49 PM
Do any of you guys struggle with trans guilt?  Like feeling like a freak, like everybody who knows hates you, etc.



I live totally stealth in my current state but nothing I can ever do can make me stealth to my family.  But I can't really cope with being out to people.  Ughhh.


I guess I don't know what the point of this thread is, I just wanna vent.  Sorry.  Is it just me?  How do people handle this???

Well as an observation I have is that we all carry a certain amount of an inferiority complex feeling regardless of passing skills and I believe it sort of goes with the territory. I've been transitioned for a long time and have to deal with some awkward moments like listening to a woman talking about her child birth experience. Yes I've had a bunch of surgery and can blend in well, but standing next to even a mediocre woman there is always the feeling of being less than perfect. But you know, that's society talking not me. How about a woman who cannot have babies at all? How would she react in that situation? A pleasant smile like I would or does she go and cry in the bathroom?

From an early age females are told, grow up, find a man, have a family, raise children, do your maternal duties. But there is so much more to life than just that. That's why families are disappearing. Who wants to get chained to the kitchen changing diapers and be limited to dreaming of a better life while hubby goes off and makes the bacon having fun? Let's face it, these are not caveman days and we are not clubbing animals over the head for food, so either gender if well educated can equally out perform the other.

Rather than get caught up in the what if scenarios, which won't lead anywhere anyways, I live a life that is different and that's okay too. Seek out others who live the same kind of life, and they don't have to be trans. There are a lot of women these days giving up marriage and all that commitment and baggage for a career, exciting life, what have you. Granted it does take money to have a nice roof over your head, and being able to go out and do fun things Try it for a year or two and trust me you will feel a whole lot better.

Don't worry about coming out either. I didn't feel it was necessary to come out and tell everyone up and down the family tree. The were people that mattered and the rest can go pound sand. I mean what value add is there for me to tell some third cousin that I've never even met? Keep the circle small and don't worry about the rest, UNLESS you really feel that by telling them it's going to be a positive experience,

Quote from: girl you look fierce on January 17, 2013, 03:22:10 PM
@zumbagirl

I don't know about getting a job and stuff... I never got one presenting male cause I had severe anxiety problems.  They're getting a little better since transitioning but I'm still not sure about getting a job when my legal transition is way behind my social one (outing myself is never an option to me).

Someday I want to but yeah. I am kinda in the classic housewife role you talked about except a mama to 2 kitties and not kids.  I don't think it's why I feel inferior to other people... well maybe a little bit, I get jealous of people who are my age and can afford school and have future prospects etc.

I guess, yep, I feel inferior to people because in general my life seems so screwed up and behind everyone else, being trans just ruined everything in so many ways, most of it before I had even come out and it just caused all these emotional issues.

I'm a mama to 4 bouncing Siberian huskies. So much fur, so little time to brush them all

Quote from: girl you look fierce on January 17, 2013, 01:59:49 PM
Do any of you guys struggle with trans guilt?  Like feeling like a freak, like everybody who knows hates you, etc.

Yes, I have a fair share of trans guilt. I think some of it I've placed on myself but some was also caused by people in my family. My dad died in 2004 and he never accepted me. Told me I was insane and I would never be a man or be respected as a man. The last thing I told him in Hospice was that I loved him. He laughed in my face. I wonder if he were still alive if he would have came around especially now seeing everything I have been through with not only transitioning but with my cancer. I have fought hard to be who I am.

My mother's side of the family is horrible. Every year my mom begs me to come to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at her house. I tried for years. Just the last two years I've stopped going. I don't see the point if the only two people who will talk to me is my mom and grandpa. Other people will say hi in passing as a courtesy to my mom but they don't have conversations with me or sit beside me. Makes me feel like being trans is contagious, lol.

I think that is where trans guilt comes from. It's just internalizing what other people think about us. The public is one thing. I think most trans people have gotten crap from society. I know I have but that just stings for a little while. It's the people who really know us and knew us before that make it the hardest when they refuse to see us as who we are and not what we are.

Quote from: Simon on January 17, 2013, 05:13:35 PM
Yes, I have a fair share of trans guilt. I think some of it I've placed on myself but some was also caused by people in my family. My dad died in 2004 and he never accepted me. Told me I was insane and I would never be a man or be respected as a man. The last thing I told him in Hospice was that I loved him. He laughed in my face. I wonder if he were still alive if he would have came around especially now seeing everything I have been through with not only transitioning but with my cancer. I have fought hard to be who I am.

My mother's side of the family is horrible. Every year my mom begs me to come to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at her house. I tried for years. Just the last two years I've stopped going. I don't see the point if the only two people who will talk to me is my mom and grandpa. Other people will say hi in passing as a courtesy to my mom but they don't have conversations with me or sit beside me. Makes me feel like being trans is contagious, lol.

I think that is where trans guilt comes from. It's just internalizing what other people think about us. The public is one thing. I think most trans people have gotten crap from society. I know I have but that just stings for a little while. It's the people who really know us and knew us before that make it the hardest when they refuse to see us as who we are and not what we are.

I'm really sorry to hear that about your dad. It's definitely hard to feel good about yourself when your own family won't listen. I'm in kind of a strange place with my mother -- she's trans herself, but is happy living as her birth sex, and whenever I try to bring up the topic of gender, she just gets angry and refuses to listen to me. I feel like she's saying "I'm more trans than you and even *I* don't mind living as a woman, so you have nothing to complain about". And of course, if I press the issue I get the standard "you'll never be a real man", "this will upset your grandparents", "there's no such thing as brain sex", "your life will suck as a ->-bleeped-<-" spiels.

I'm sure I'll get her to come around eventually, once I've finally seen a therapist, but she's the only person in my life I feel I can talk to about anything personal, so it's frustrating that she won't take me seriously. It definitely makes me doubt my own feelings on the matter.

Quote from: Simon on January 17, 2013, 05:13:35 PM
I think that is where trans guilt comes from. It's just internalizing what other people think about us. The public is one thing. I think most trans people have gotten crap from society. I know I have but that just stings for a little while. It's the people who really know us and knew us before that make it the hardest when they refuse to see us as who we are and not what we are.

I completely agree on this one. I recently had to deal with some internalized guilt I had, and I realized a lot of it came from people in my family. For example, my grandpa died 6 years ago, and when I told my grandma I was trans, she said "I haven't felt this awful since grandpa died." And she took his death really, really hard, as they'd been married for almost 50 years...

And it's taken me a while to be OK with correcting my family for that reason. At some point, they managed to convince me that there was something wrong with being trans just because they don't like it. That I was doing something horrible. So I got to thinking to myself "this is a bad and selfish decision I had to make because I had no other option." I don't believe I could live as a woman, but that doesn't make me a bad person, or someone who did something evil in order to survive.

I very much feel this way. I even find it almost impossible to tell anyone I am a woman, so I just let them think what they will and luckily, it mostly seems to be favorable. I am pretty darned out though since I still live in the same tiny town of a little over 400 people as I did for years before I transitioned. It got very, very difficult for me to even leave the house due to anxiety, fear, self hatred, low self esteem, etc. But I got to where I needed to do something as I was about broke by then, so I took a chance and applied for a job when I found out they were firing the girl that worked there. My dad having dated the manager there for years didn't hurt either, but it was her bosses that did the hiring. So I've been working a very public job for two years now and it was very scary at first, but most people just didn't give a damn about me being trans so long as I didn't frighten their kids and they got courteous service. The few that did have issues mostly got over them enough not to be ->-bleeped-<-s to me, especially when they realized just how darned nice I am. I still feel like a freak though, not sure if that will ever go away and it does affect my ability to make friends and I definitely don't date because of the way I feel, even if they know.  I was lucky about family though, at least my dad and siblings, they have accepted it fairly well, even my brothers who initially had a hard time with it.

Quote from: girl you look fierce on January 17, 2013, 01:59:49 PM
Do any of you guys struggle with trans guilt?  Like feeling like a freak, like everybody who knows hates you, etc.

I struggle w/ this problem and I'm doing everything I can to not let it be inflamed by coming out to out of state family, but it's really hard.  I wish so much that I could just not be trans and never have had this stupid body.  I am a woman and I can't live any other way, but the fact that people exist who don't understand that makes me completely neurotic.   I feel almost like I owe them something, like I have to do something or give something to them to make them not hate me for being a crazy person and an embarrassment.  What I feel like I owe them most of all is to pretend I'm ok and not transition... but I can't do that, I just can't, I can't live as a boy, I wasn't even able to, and I don't want to at all.  And I know I don't deserve that, but I still feel so guilty.  I have an inferiority complex too and am a people pleaser and it's so hard to go against that grain.

I had similar feelings a long time ago, before I transitioned.  I worried about upsetting family, worried about upsetting friends.  Maybe that's part of the reason that I delayed doing anything for so long and joined the navy.  Hard to say now, so long after the dust has settled.  It all worked out well, but you can't help feeling in the back of your mind maybe I let them down.  If I did they never showed it.  They haven't mentioned my past for a long time.

Having transitioned so long ago, and having lived stealth where I am now for so long without any contact with other TS people and out of the TS scene, I'm judged for who I am, on my personality, by my actions, free from being seen or known as a transwomen.  I'm just me.  It's taken a long time to get to this point.  If there was any guilt, it's long gone.

When I first came out to my parents I was about 13. Didn't know what was happening to me. The internet wasn't even a dream. So the amount of info was negligible. All I knew was that I was a girl and the body was totally wrong. My folks, bless them, had not a clue what it meant. Except that I was their only son in a Liverpool Irish Roman Catholic family, and I wasn't right to think that way and I must be ill or worse. My Mum only knew one type of pervert and that was paedophiles, so I was one of them. I'm pretty sure she didn't know what a paedophile was, but it was a perversion that she had heard of.

I did give up on them. I did leave home and I did go to the other side of the world; looking back I think it was to hide.

They died before I transitioned. They never met me and I do regret that. I'm such a different person than I was even 6 months ago, I would have been proud to tell them that I was their daughter and that I loved them. I do as well, but it has taken me a very long time to say that.

Yes I felt guilty for not being their son and the 'man' to carry on the family name. I can see what pain that must have caused them, I can see it now but I could never see it in the past.

Accept me! Accept me! But we do? You are our son, and we love you dearly.

I think if I had been Gay they would have coped. Of course homosexuality in that era, was still a criminal offence in the UK. But they could have coped with that, and protected and cherished me.

But that I was a girl was a bridge way too far.

I think I did carry my guilt like the proverbial mill-stone holding me from being me and keeping reminding myself that I was ill.

I regret not going to their respective funerals. At the time it was an easy decision. The wrong one; based on my inability to love and forgive. How can I expect anyone to love and forgive me, if I could not  give my unconditional love to them? The guilt stays and if you let it the feelings of failure and inadequacy will rule you.

Acceptance of our mistakes and acceptance of how people treat us tend to go hand in hand.

I totally love being me and I am utterly delighted to be me.  I just wish I had the courage to say sorry to them before they died. Sorry for what?  Sorry for hurting them. That they hurt me is immaterial. I should have been bigger than that. They thought they had a much loved and wanted son. I can understand their pain.

Quote from: Cindy James on January 18, 2013, 02:40:05 AM
They died before I transitioned. They never met me and I do regret that.

I didn't find acceptance with my father and he also died without accepting or ever meeting the true me.

That is a distinct kind of pain. The "what might have beens" and always wondering if there would have been acceptance and love at some point if they had lived to see their child actually be happy.

I've thought of this and I think would have. They didn't understand me but they loved me.

I think if they met me in my happiness that would understand. And they would accept me.

Damn 'mones crying again

What you both described with loved ones passing away is something I am really worried about. Actually, near terrified. Not so much with my parents, as they're fairly young and unless something tragic happened, they won't pass away any time soon. They will almost certainly accept me first; they're getting close enough now.

But I'm worried about my grandmother passing away without being at peace with my transition. She's known for two years now, so it's nothing new at all, but it doesn't seem she has adjusted in the slightest. I guess I worry she will die feeling like I didn't love her or something. So I'm torn between that and politely correcting her when she calls me "miss", my birth name, and so on and so forth. She is in very good health but you never know, you know?

Quote from: girl you look fierce on January 18, 2013, 11:35:11 AM

I feel a little sick but whatever, at least I am finally letting the house of cards fall, cuz it had to sometime and I already wasted too many years w/ life on standby avoiding it.

Ugh, I just went through this...I'm all too familiar with that sick feeling. I came out to my sister first. I'm total rubbish on the phone but I couldn't stand it anymore...it was time, so I forced myself to call. I told my husband in person.  And even though I'm still not 100% certain how they feel about it (initial reactions were surprised but more or less supportive), I feel so much better about having been honest with them.

I too was worried that no one would take me seriously. I also felt guilt for the upset I figure this will cause in my family. To them it probably looks like I'm taking a pretty decent life and just tossing it away.

Sending happy thoughts your way. I hope your father can accept you for who you really are!

I feel much the same way. I feel compelled to remain as I am and just hope I can find ways to deal with how I feel even though everyone who matters around me must already know or guess I have some issues to deal with.

I can see why people just run away and start again somewhere new. The temptation to do that is really strong.

Quote from: Anna on January 19, 2013, 05:18:16 AM
I feel much the same way. I feel compelled to remain as I am and just hope I can find ways to deal with how I feel even though everyone who matters around me must already know or guess I have some issues to deal with.

I can see why people just run away and start again somewhere new. The temptation to do that is really strong.

I can understand. but it doesn't work. We have to accept ourselves., Otherwise we will always be shells.

JMO
CJ

Quote from: Cindy James on January 19, 2013, 06:08:18 AM
I can understand. but it doesn't work. We have to accept ourselves., Otherwise we will always be shells.

JMO
CJ

I agree. Self acceptance is the key to happiness

i have those feelings too like why couldn't i just be normal like everyone else. but in the end you are who you are so....yeah. i just be myself and hope that people can care about me and that guys wont freak out. although it does happen.

All of my trans guilt is actually in my childhood. From an early age I told myself the way I was feeling and the way I thought was wrong through social cues from friends, classmates, and strangers. I felt shameful and guilty of the way I felt, and for years suppressed those feelings because I wanted to be the boy and man I thought society wanted me to be. I put everything on myself. No one explicitly told me that the way I was feeling was wrong, and I'm quickly and easily letting go of these emotions in therapy. I don't have to be anything else than what I feel to be. Society does not need to be the controlling factor of my life. Sure, it's going to be hard, but it's the right thing to do because I'm being right to myself.

It also helps, though, that my parents and the friends I've come out to are nothing less than supportive.

All my trans-specific guilt is built around my current partner, because it's highly unlikely that we'll stay together if I transition. So, when I most want to be a man, I start to feel guilty for essentially wanting us to split up.