Hi Everyone,
I'm on day 4 of HRT and it feels like a chronic debilitating injury has disappeared. As a result, I've been much more productive and optimistic, and my desire to live has greatly increased.
However, there are moments when I feel nervous, because my doctor told me that physical changes should become noticeable in 6 months, and I don't think I'll be ready for that at the pace I'm on now. Maybe if I'm still not ready in 6 months, I'll be able to conceal the changes until I am, but I know I can't rely on that possibility, so I've compiled a list of things I need to accomplish soon. Among this list are; "train voice," "train walk," "buy basic women's clothing," "meet more transgender people who have successfully transitioned," and "learn basic makeup," but the one I want to ask you for your advice now is "come out to Tom."
Tom is my uncle, but when I was teenager I would have considered him my father. He took me to baseball games, paid me to do work around his house, taught me how to fix things, and gave me my first job at one of his businesses. However, when I started college I couldn't defer confronting the inner vacancy I was feeling any longer, and since Tom and I couldn't reach a compromise between our individuality and interrelation, we stopped speaking to each until 3 years ago.
When we started speaking to each other again, I confronted the guilt I was harboring for leaving him alone without anyone that really cared about him, so for the first year I listened to what he had to say without offering my thoughts, even when he was expressing many of the uglier aspects of human nature. My ultimate goal was to teach him how to be a kinder person and one that I could love again, but when I gradually started expressing my thoughts such as; Obama isn't trying to subvert America, Caitlyn Jenner isn't a pervert, and "Never talk about my mom like that again!" he would just respond with anger. I tried backing off and then trying again, but in the last 3 years I've made minimal progress, and in the last 6 months I've made peace with the fact that I may never like him.
When I came out to those closest to me, it took them some effort to understand what I'd been going through, and they are some of the most open minded people I know. My mom asked me, "Why do you want to mutilate your genitals?" and I responded, "Imagine you woke up tomorrow with male genitals. Wouldn't you view having them as the disfigurement, rather than the alteration of them? Now imagine if you were then taught that your desire to remove them was disgusting, so you try your best to want something that you innately hate. As a result, you create a self hatred which you're constantly averting your attention from and allowing to fester."
My mom was mostly able to understand this, but I doubt Tom will. I've already tried to explain the concept of how we don't choose who we are to Tom in various contexts, but he's from the school of thought that asserts that poor people are poor because they aren't trying hard enough and the solution to poverty is to make life harder for the impoverished, and anyone who thinks that both the carrot and the stick should be used for solving poverty is spouting liberal nonsense! He sees humans as independently inventing themselves in the moment, and leaves little room for the influence of nature and nurture, except for a part of him that feels white male Germans are intrinsically superior to any other group.
Of course, Tom isn't alone in this type of thinking that releases him from feeling responsible for others, and I'm still able to develop rapport with people who think this way, but I've never heard someone scream so loudly to block out their cognitive dissonance as from him. Therefore, my prognosis for coming out to him is not very bright.
My best friend doesn't think Tom has the innate empathy to understand my perspective on this issue, while my mom thinks that even though Tom acts selfishly and unkindly, he loves me as much as he can love someone, which gives me some hope that he may at least get a glimpse of what I'm going to try to explain to him. Maybe he will be able to simultaneously view "those people" as perverts, but not me, and maybe he will eventually be forced to reconcile those contradictory views.
Regardless of how he will react, though, I know I need to tell him, because the cost of living in fear is greater than the cost of going down the path I'm on now. So my plan so far is to appeal to authority and talk about what my therapist told me and how a lesser compromise still leaves me in depression, but I think he'll probably still laugh, shout and try to convince to stop HRT. However, as the conversation continues and I understand the position he's taking and my confidence grows and he eventually exhausts every avenue and settles on some emotion - most likely anger - my guess is that we'll be able to move on, but with some added distance.
This is what I expect to happen, but this is a difficult conversation to predict, so thank you for allowing to write out my thoughts and have them read, and for any advice that you can offer me.
