Hey y'all. This is a question I have been wondering for a while. Is my Aunt a transphobe?

The story begins in 2011. Tho i was starting to questions my gender more and more these days, I was having a mental break down over issues that happened in the past (not trans-related). She was driving to Toronto or Barrie I think in Ontario from New Brunswick. At first, we hit it off well and I thought she was going to help me with my issues. And on very few issue i did get some good stuff to work with. She popped back into our house every 2 weeks or so from sept-dec 2011 during her travels from ON to NB. However, things started to sour after a few months. In December I visited her in Toronto for a week and began to see much of her true colours. She had always been talking to me about how to love the spirit, be loving and peaceful and blah blah blah (she claims to be highly spiritual). But what I saw down there was a lot of anger, and she was prown to blowing up at random even at random people. I would then talk about my issues and she would then talk about how hard her and her boys (my cousins) really had it.

However, I can forgive all that expcept that she was trying to get me to reject my woman inside me. I told her before my Toronto visit that I was thinking i would like to transition and been feeling not so comfortable with being male for a while. She instantly shot that down with ''you're afraid to be a man because you never had any good male role models'' and stuff like that. I recall I wanted to phsically fight someone for offending me back then and she said ''you dont think like a woman, only a man thinks of physically fights''.... after she told me a story about her breaking this other girls ribs in a fight back in the early 1980s. I was kinda upset. But I also found she was trying to push the ''man'' card on me very much at times. This one time at a Wal-Mart in Trenton Ontarip she was looking for new panties and i was with her, i was kinda spaced out as I had other things on my mind and then she said ''Ooo Aunty (name) is sorry for making you stand here looking and girly panties, you dont want that'' With a stupid smirks and that joking but condescsing voice. That actually offended me because that was right around the time I told her I would rather be female. I was 17,and yes i did look like a very masculine teenage boy but I was in turmoil with my gender to a degree. Even if I wasnt, i was still 17 and most 17 year olds males are mature enough to not be embarrsesed about being in the ladies section at a wal mart with their anut. I was 17, not 10. Still, Ifound it was certian things like that she would do. That family is really big on masculinity, evem the females. A masculine female? no problems! a feminine male or a transwoman (or even a transman) big problems. While the males would try to ''beat it out of ya'' i found some of the female, and my aunt in particular would just try to push the ''man'' stuff on you using ht epower of the mind and mouth.

Anyways, I stopped chatting to her purposly in Feb 2012 after i was feeling suicidal and she basically blew up and said '' everybody is woes me, and doesnt want to do anything to improve'' or something around those lines. Since then in those 5 years I talked to her once and only once and even then that was by acident. We had moved to Petawawa in the meantime and she moved form Toronto to a small town and I didnt know her number so I picked up the phone on day in Feb 2015 and dreadfully had to talk to her and be ''nice''. She did say my voice sounded softer but didnt say anything else good or bad. That was the last time. My mom has her on FB and through the years they talked a lot calling eachoter ''sista'' and showing a good mutural like. However, this past May on mothers day a photo was uploaded of my mother and I and I was obviosuly visiably a female now. Many of my moms friends hadnet seen me sicne prior to HRT and were soemwhat suprised but super supportive. With many saying I look more happy and natural in this photo and one said ''I had a twinkle in my her eye that I never saw when she was living as <birth name>''.... I dont think my aunt has seen any pictures of me living as my real self and any photos she saw of me were pre-2014 when i was still trying to be a ''man'' ....Shortly after that, my mom lost my aunt as a friend on fb


You think she may have disowned my mom due to me??

Hi Ashley,

I don't know if your aunt is trans-phobic or not but it does appear that she is anything but supportive. As for your mom being unfriended, unless something was said about it you have no reason to believe you are the cause of it. At any rate I wouldn't worry one second about it either way.
  Just continue to be happy in who you believe yourself to be as your own view of yourself is the only one that really counts.

  Hugs,
   Laurie

I guess you're right. Still bugs me that many in my life where not only trying to get me to be ''one of the guys'' but also tried hard to push some hard-core manly-man masculinity into me too.. barf

I am sorry you have to go through that. It makes me absolutely ill when people try to push masculinity on a trans girl. It can actually be traumatic. One of the most horrible experiences of my childhood was from my grandfather trying to make a "man" out of me. Thankfully my parents and the rest of my family was supportive and did not try to force masculine behavior on me. Except for my grandparents on my father's side. When I was growing up my parents would send me to Kiruna for two weeks in summer to visit them. Kiruna is a very small town and the people there were more of the oldschool type mindset. I was an extremely feminine boy and that set of grandparents did not approve. When I was 10 my grandfather decided it would help make a man out of me to take me hunting. So he made me go on a hunting trip with he and 3 of his friends. I absolutely refused to harm any animal and I refused to even touch the gun my grandfather kept trying to push on me. My grandfather shot a deer. Watching that was absolutely traumatic. I cried so much my grandfather got embarrassed with his friends and we ended up going home early. He was so mad at me he called my father and told him I wouldn't stop crying over a killed deer. My father got so mad he came immediately and got me. I remember him yelling at his father and telling him I would never be allowed to visit them again. And I never did visit them again. My dad was really mad at his father over doing that to me and he didn't speak to him for a while after. I didn't see those grandparents again until they came to Jönköping to visit us when I was 15. By then I was fully transitioned and had been on hrt for 3 years. My grandfather actually got tear eyed when he saw me. He shook his head and he said " poor (insert old name), your parents have destroyed you."

There are some relatives who just will not ever accept you. Though it can be difficult it is better to cut them out from your life rather than allow them to continually try to ruin your happiness and try to invalidate your true self.

Wow i am really sorry you had to endure that. Your grandfather sounds like an arse. I will never understand how or why shoving masculinity down a person who was AMAB is  a priority. Like really all thats going to do is make me even more upset that i was born male, not make me somehow magically love it. It isnt about finding yourself with them it is all about conditioning the brain to put up with something that you other wise would never choose.  Dont these bone heads understand that?