I can't find much about it online, but it seem obvious to me.
Growing up LGBT should be an ACE on the ACES score.
Growing up in the wrong gender is abuse that can cause C-PTSD.

How many stories of "depressed withdrawn child blooms after gender is affirmed" do you have to read to realize that?

Yes, I agree. Add on all of life's other problems and sadly you get the highest suicde rates..

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Thank you Allison.

I know for my own self that i became that depressed withdrawn child when I was 5, and didn't come out of my derealization fog until i was 28.  And no matter how long i work on it (I'm 51) I'm still angry at a world that doesn't seem to be aware that this is abuse... in fact half of them think it's the other way around: that affirming gender is abuse.

I'm legally blind, having been born 3 1/2 months premature. As far as I'm concerned, being born with incorrect genitalia is no less a "handicap" or physical challenge than my other physical challenge. Both have impacted my life equally, but in some ways, being gender-challenged has been the greater burden to bear than being visually challenged. Thoughts, anyone?


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Hi Sarah,
I'm not blind, so i can't compare the two.  But I'm sure you get tons of abuse from people who disrespect the blind. 

I know that as a 5 year old who didn't get their gender affirmed by their parents, I learned that I couldn't trust my parents, and since parents are our world at that point, I learned not to trust anyone.  I grew up to have an attachment disorder which is part of C-PTSD. 

Your openess is so refreshing to hear. Sarah too. It's such a real burden to carry alone as a child and for so long even as an adult... to be honest I don't think I can manage sometimes. It's debilitating.

I'm not trying to play the victim card but I'm so early in my transition still and it does sometimes feel like the world is against me..

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[HUG]  (wish they had a hug emoticon)

I don't think we're victims as adults, but as children we are victims: we don't get any say and we are unaware that we could have any say.  The thing that most people don't get is that abuse to a child will change their neurology and have lasting effects when they are an adult.  You just don't "snap out of it."   

Quote from: LohmanTelshor on February 23, 2018, 05:20:50 PM
[HUG]  (wish they had a hug emoticon)

There is one in the standard set. Click the more under the row of emoticons that you see when you are posting. It's about half way down.

Considering the way I was raised during the 60s and 70s, it is understandable that I was too terrified to even mention to my adoptive parents that I felt like I should be female. They locked me in my room at night, and beat me virtually every day. That treatment only got worse as the years went on, and I certainly got PTSD from it. It was also illegal at the time for a minor to transition., so saying anything would cause more harm than good. The fact that I was forced to live as a male certainly made everything worse, as I was already terrified.

That's awful Lady Sarah.  At least my parents tried to be good parents.  Any abuse makes me angry.  I hope your life is a lot better now.

I don't know if I ever said I was a boy.   I was raised during the 70's too, so I just knew it was too taboo to mention by the age of 5.

It was different then, for all of us. Including the people who were raising us. I have done all of the programs, all of the steps even forgiveness, but more than anything I wish that I could forget.

What is abuse? After my older brother and I had grown we talked about it, in a way you just never do when you are living it. He said that it was a good thing that we were raised by our grandparents, in a way that is undeniably true, but in a way it was sooooo much more true for him. Life before was ah... not great. Neither parent wanted us and was not quiet about it, physical abuse, well there was more but what's the point. What he never understood was that maybe half of the abuse that I suffered then was him, he was lashing out and I got as bad from him as he had from anyone else. Much worse than I had gotten from anyone else in that time. Probably worse than he had gotten too, I don't think anyone ever broke any of his bones. I don't blame him, I was there and saw what they did to him. For him though the abuse ended that day my parents walked away forever in 1974. Mine didn't. He wasn't sent to live in the middle of nowhere with our aunt and her husband and all of the lovely abuse that year brought. He wasn't put into a mental institution because he said that he was a girl. It doesn't matter. He was there until my grandparents died though and they didn't treat him like he was twisted. Not when he stole a car when he was 13, not when he threatened to hit my grandpa. I am glad that they treated him that way, he needed that unconditional love. I guess the point is, we lived 2 completely different lives and I don't think he sees it that way. So we are back to what is abuse.

I could go into the physical, mental or sexual abuses. I don't know, it's bad right? I was always able to block most of it though. Want to know the times I remember the most, the worst pain?

The day my mother drove away and this time I knew she was never coming back. My father had already left the month before to live 3,000 miles away and now she was leaving for good. It didn't matter that we had lived with aunts and uncles almost as much as our parents until that time, our parents were close always now they were gone. That was painful.

The day less than 3 years later, when my grandparents pulled me out of summer camp because I wore a dress and stayed with the girls for a while. My grandfather pulled the Volare station wagon over on the way home next to the orphan home that they had threatened my brother with in the beginning and my grandfather said the only thing that he ever said directly to me, "No more! No more girl friends, no more dolls and no more goddamn dresses! You are never bad like your brother, but this is wrong. I don't think we can fix you like we did him and this is where you will have to go." That was terrifying beyond anything I had know until then. I had always been with family but more importantly, I had always been with my brother.

My first day in my new school in my year of hell. Physical, sexual, verbal, all that I had endured that summer could not have prepared me for that day. It wasn't that I was younger than everyone else in my grade, I always had been. Not that it was a new school or that it was the first time I had ever gone to school without my older brother. My father had died earlier that year and whoever was my guardian got a good size social security check so money should not have been a problem but... I was only allowed to own two pair of pants and two shirts and one pair of work boots. The one shirt and pants were only for church so I lived in one set of clothes on a farm that I had to start working in at 4:30 AM school or no school, I literally stank all of the time. It was in the middle of nowhere and everyone was poor but none of those kids looked or smelled like me. It was not cold enough so I didn't have a long sleeve shirt yet, so the bruises on my arms were showing, I tried to scrape and spray all of the crap off my boots but they still smelled and were wet all day every day at school my clothes were stained and smelly. They were poor, I wasn't even human to them. In the worst year of my life by far, that day stood out. I hurt then more than I thought that was possible.

Two years later I tell my grandma about me being a girl and I didn't think that I could be a boy anymore, I wasn't really expecting joy but not what happened. The next day I was strapped to a bed in the hospital, none of the nurses would talk to me, they acted like I had the plague. Only the shrinks and one of the orderlies who like to play with me under the covers would get near me. No one in my family ever visited, no one called. I won't go into all that happened there, it wasn't fun for me. That wasn't the worst part. Not even the pure hatred for myself I had then could compair to what was to come. When they did come for me and took me home it wasn't surprising that no one but my brother even knew that I was in the hospital, but they were able to surprise me. Less than a week after getting home they put me in the back of the now Escort station wagon and drove through several states to a revival. Kind of an ultimate church get together. I thought they wanted to pray for help or to ask their advise what to do with me, I was wrong. They drug me up in front of maybe two thousand strangers and asked the preacher to exercise my demons or to kill this evil child. I don't have words for how I felt.

So what is abuse? I have heard every definition, but I still don't know. Why do I find those moments the worst in my life? My brother doesn't consider them abuse, for him it was what he experienced when we were very young.

What we have had to go through as trans children is brutal, but was there intent. Like okay, my mom. My mom had some mental issues, not crazy but there were a lot of things she could not handle. Ask any of my siblings, or even her when she was alive, I was her favorite, the only of her 4 children conceived and born in wedlock. So why would she leave me and not one of the others? She had no idea how to deal with me, didn't know what to do with her little boy who thought he was a girl. I have seen abuse, I am not sure that was. Was it wrong, painful, yes it was but was it abuse?

I don't know. I have worked on this my whole life and I still don't know. More than anything I want it to go away forever but it doesn't. The only thing that I am sure of is that holding onto it, or worse holding it in, only hurts us.

Are the people today abusing children by doing what they think is right? Maybe.
I don't think I have an answer and I don't think that we can change it anyway.
I hope tomorrow is better for us all.

Sorry for making this so long.

What you probably mean is it's a "traumatic experience" to grow up in the wrong gender, yes?

For something to be "abuse" or for someone to be "abused" there has to be deliberate action upon them from someone, themselves or others. They won't be using the terminology of "abuse" to describe something everyone but you is likely unaware of.

For me, it was not abuse. Nobody forced me into doing or wearing anything (except dresses, but that was just because I couldn't play in them), and I didn't have the faintest clue that I was trans even while I was exhibiting classic behaviors. Growing up, I "knew" I was a girl.

I was abused for completely different reasons, as a kid and teenager, though. Emotional abuse from a parent that went through two divorces before I was 11 and expected me to act like an adult and caretaker for her; another parent that was/is chronically and deeply insecure, projecting his own fears and self-loathings onto everyone else, including his preteen daughter and her friends. And when he remarried, the wife made things worse.

So yeah, lots of that going on. Fortunately, none of it had to do with gender (aside from the casual misogyny from my father) so at least I don't associate my being trans with traumatic experiences.

Quote from: Kylo on February 24, 2018, 09:32:58 AM
What you probably mean is it's a "traumatic experience" to grow up in the wrong gender, yes?

For something to be "abuse" or for someone to be "abused" there has to be deliberate action upon them from someone, themselves or others. They won't be using the terminology of "abuse" to describe something everyone but you is likely unaware of.

Yes, perhaps I should have said "traumatic experience".

But I proffer that there is such a thing as societal abuse.  Society has repressed the fact for so long that we exist.   

But what's in a name?  Whether we call it abuse or traumatic experience, the effects are the same. 
Imagine a parent dressing an apparently-cis male-bodied kid in girls clothes, convincing him he has to be a girl, and enrolling him in an all-girls kindergarten class.  Would that not be considered abuse? 
Now consider the same thing being done to a trans-boy, unaware to his parents.   Then you would call it a traumatic experience. 
But the emotional scarring is the same.

Quote from: LohmanTelshor on February 24, 2018, 03:02:24 PM
Yes, perhaps I should have said "traumatic experience".

But I proffer that there is such a thing as societal abuse.  Society has repressed the fact for so long that we exist.   

But what's in a name?  Whether we call it abuse or traumatic experience, the effects are the same. 
Imagine a parent dressing an apparently-cis male-bodied kid in girls clothes, convincing him he has to be a girl, and enrolling him in an all-girls kindergarten class.  Would that not be considered abuse? 
Now consider the same thing being done to a trans-boy, unaware to his parents.   Then you would call it a traumatic experience. 
But the emotional scarring is the same.

Exactly societal oppression...

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Quote from: FinallyMichelle on February 24, 2018, 02:08:15 AM

The day less than 3 years later, when my grandparents pulled me out of summer camp because I wore a dress and stayed with the girls for a while. My grandfather pulled the Volare station wagon over on the way home next to the orphan home that they had threatened my brother with in the beginning and my grandfather said the only thing that he ever said directly to me, "No more! No more girl friends, no more dolls and no more goddamn dresses! You are never bad like your brother, but this is wrong. I don't think we can fix you like we did him and this is where you will have to go." That was terrifying beyond anything I had know until then. I had always been with family but more importantly, I had always been with my brother.

Two years later I tell my grandma about me being a girl and I didn't think that I could be a boy anymore, I wasn't really expecting joy but not what happened. The next day I was strapped to a bed in the hospital, none of the nurses would talk to me, they acted like I had the plague. Only the shrinks and one of the orderlies who like to play with me under the covers would get near me. No one in my family ever visited, no one called. I won't go into all that happened there, it wasn't fun for me. That wasn't the worst part. Not even the pure hatred for myself I had then could compair to what was to come. When they did come for me and took me home it wasn't surprising that no one but my brother even knew that I was in the hospital, but they were able to surprise me. Less than a week after getting home they put me in the back of the now Escort station wagon and drove through several states to a revival. Kind of an ultimate church get together. I thought they wanted to pray for help or to ask their advise what to do with me, I was wrong. They drug me up in front of maybe two thousand strangers and asked the preacher to exercise my demons or to kill this evil child. I don't have words for how I felt.

Michelle,
I have no words for the kind of abuse/trauma you have been thru.   All the other types of abuse, plus the above noted trans trauma.
I just hope you have a really good therapist, and hope your life is going much better.

Quote from: LohmanTelshor on February 24, 2018, 03:02:24 PM
Imagine a parent dressing an apparently-cis male-bodied kid in girls clothes, convincing him he has to be a girl, and enrolling him in an all-girls kindergarten class.  Would that not be considered abuse? 
Now consider the same thing being done to a trans-boy, unaware to his parents.   Then you would call it a traumatic experience. 
But the emotional scarring is the same.

If they do know and force the kid into it, then yeah, that's abuse. But a lot of the time people DON'T know we're not cis and a lot of the time we don't tell them.

If you're getting at that they should wipe gender expression off the board altogether for all children just to accommodate us, or avoid any potential "societal oppression", that's also abuse. Not allowing "boys to be boys" and "girls to be girls" would be abusive too. You've no more right to dictate what they should be doing any more than they should have to dictate to you.

There's no solution here except that trans people should be able recognize their condition asap and decide what steps to take, and cis people should be more open to letting them do what they have to do to resolve problems. I don't see abuse coming into it unless a given society bans trans people from seeking help or having operations, or literally forces them to hide or suppress (or kills trans people). Society is what it is and the sexes are what they are, they shouldn't be expected to alter themselves just because we don't fit into it, but they could be more aware of our existence and the facts about our condition.

But at the end of the day we are a minority and the idea the rest of the world should have our issues on their mind often enough not to ever assume what looks like a girl isn't a girl or a boy isn't a boy is wishful thinking. That we are allowed to pursue our transition as adults at the very least is what's important, since there's no easy fix here.

There isn't going to be a society anytime soon where ingrained biological instincts and gender expressions aren't dictating people's behavior and expectation in a general way. It's not there because society just wants to take a crap on us. It's there because that's what most people are like and they never think about gender the way we do. That's also not really their fault. Do healthy people think about cancer and what it's like to have it? Neither have I because I don't have it. If someone said I was abusive toward cancer victims because of that, I would find that wrong. To accuse or demonize the ignorant is pointless.

I'm not going to consider myself abused as a child by society or anyone else when none of them were a party to my internal struggles. How does it help empower me to consider myself a victim?

It doesn't.

The people I encounter who insist upon victimhood (from society) are often using it as ammo to try tear down gendered expression in the first place. That's not why many of us are transitioning.

Kylo,

I'm sorry we can't seem to connect on this.   I certainty wasn't say anything like "they should wipe gender expression off the board altogether".   I'm just saying that in a world where trans people were allowed and accepted, that little 5 year old boy would be able to say he was a boy because he would know about being trans.  We're not there yet. 

Both kids in my example would be suffering.   Of course if a kid isn't suffering it's not abuse.

Quote from: Kylo on February 24, 2018, 04:14:21 PM
How does it help empower me to consider myself a victim?

Like I've said, i don't think adults are victims, but children are.  Young children don't have a say in what's done to them; and don't know that they could.  When you are abused you have to heal that young inner child. 

And you are empowered to try to make it stop for future generations.

Quote from: LohmanTelshor on February 24, 2018, 04:00:31 PM
Michelle,
I have no words for the kind of abuse/trauma you have been thru.   All the other types of abuse, plus the above noted trans trauma.
I just hope you have a really good therapist, and hope your life is going much better.

You are very kind, thank you. Honestly I never talked about any of that besides a few groups, therapists and my brother until a year ago, probably less. Sometimes it seems like I never shut up about it now. It is hard for me to trust therapists but I do have one now that I like, she is just very busy. My talking about transition ended and this is what she wanted to work on, so it is on my mind more now than in a long time. I hate that I talk about it so much but I don't know how to stop. It does help though. It was just part of me I didn't know a different life, now... Well, now that I have transitioned, I don't know. I guess that it is like I can have happiness now, I don't want to endure, I kind of want a little exceptional before I die. That means I have to deal with all of that.

I really felt sorry for writing that much and thought about deleting it but in the end I couldn't.

Sorry. 😊
Thank you.
Hugs