So... one of the problems I'm facing is that our parents don't know that we're bisexual or a transgender... and they hate "those people".  I shouldn't care because they've given me more reasons in my life to hate them than I need in order to justify it.  But I still care for some reason.  Though I've never told them I wonder if they sometimes suspect because every time I'm around they preach to me about the evils of transgenders and bisexuals and that if I don't stay away from those kinds of people I'll turn into one.  =_=

The other day I was visiting (very briefly cause dad started almost right away) and a commercial came on that was talking about gay, les, bi, and trans are 4x more likely to commit suicide.  He actually said "Good.  Do you know why they do that?" and... I'm a confrontational person due to his constant abuse growing up so instead of having anything grand and revolutionary to say I shot back "because straight people are stupid fools".  To which he told me "no, its because they know they're going to burn in hell and they deserve to die".

For once I didn't want to fight about it.  I was sick of the fact that we have this argument every time I show up.  He does not have this argument with any of my brothers.  Just me and Danni (my host personality - I explain in my introduction sorry).  So... I don't know what to say anymore.  I got up, said "hatred is wrong no matter how you justify it and I'm sick and tired of being the only one that gets it" and I walked out.  But what am I supposed to say to his obvious hatred?  Is there no way to explain it in some enlightening way?  Have you ever come up against an outright hater and found a solution?  If I told him he'd hate me more than he already does.  How do you deal with family that hates you?  What do you say to that?

There may not be much that you can say to change his mind, some people are too set in their ways to see the hurt that they impose upon others. It's a true shame, especially when it is your family. Would family counseling be an option? I don't think that everyone has to necessarily share the same beliefs, just that they ought to respect others rights to live how they choose.

Just know that you are a good person in your heart, and continue to spread that love to others. He's the one missing out by putting his energy into hatred. It's much easier to love and accept then it is to actively hate.

Good luck.

*hugs*

In all honesty, his claims have no foundation at all. Even the most devout Christian, assuming he identifies with Christianity, will acknowledge that any references of that kind need to be read in context.

Think about it. There was a time when the laws of your society said that women couldn't vote. Those laws are irrelevant now but their existance is a matter of fact. So, someone comes along and points out those laws, refusing to acknowledge the later injunctions which overturned them.

But sadly, there are politically ambitious people who seek to manipulate others.

I suggest, with respect, you try to avoid these confrontations. You and I both know that there is absolutely nothing to be gained. Your father will never listen to you.

As a sort of comparisom, when I use to work in elderly care homes, many years ago, there would be occasional residents who would rant on about Germans, Communists, blacks, Scots, you name it. I was once chased by a man who was convinced I was Irish!. We weren't permitted to humour people. That has been unacceptable in care of the elderly for many years. So we just had to stand there and accpt that that is how they are.

I really hope you don't mind me saying this. I know how frustrating it is. My own family got so bad I cut off all contact with them, one by one, the last being about 15 years ago. But if you need to continue contact with your father, I suggest you just rise above it.

He's wrong. But you are never going to convince him of that.

I'm really sorry that you have to put up with such hateful and close minded parents.   That is such a horrible environment to grow up in.  Sadly I can completely relate as my parents are the same way.  The majority of my family does hate me or at the very least they want nothing to do with me since I came out to them. 

The only way to reasonably deal with it and keep your sanity in tact is to realize that a lot of hate comes out of ignorance.  Not everyone, in fact most people, are not at the same point in their journey through life as you are.  You have the unique position of being more enlightened and aware of yourself then the majority of people walking around.   

As for explaining it in a rational way they will understand it's not an easy thing to do.  These people are normally not rational and they do not want their views threatened.  However if you do somehow find a way to get them to a point where they will listen you can start by explaining about how the verses in the Bible used to condemn homosexuals are taking hopelessly out of context.

Start out with announcing that homosexuality is not a sin.

The Bible is constantly being taken out of context to support anti-gay views. Scholars who have studied the Bible in context of the times and in relation to other passages have shown those passages (Leviticus, Corinthians, Romans, etc) have nothing to do with homosexuality. These passages often cherry-picked while ignoring the rest of the Bible. The sins theses passages are referring to are idolatry, Greek temple sex worship, prostitution, pederasty with teen boys, and rape, not homosexuality or two loving consenting adults.

Here are some links you can show them if they are ready to read them with any measure of objectivity. 

http://www.stjohnsmcc.org/new/BibleAbuse/BiblicalReferences.php
http://www.gaychristian101.com/
http://www.wouldjesusdiscriminate.org/biblical_evidence.html
http://www.soulforce.org/article/homosexuality-bible-gay-christian
http://www.goodhopemcc.org/spirituality/sexuality-and-bible/homosexuality-not-a-sin-not-a-sickness.html

Best of luck.  I don't know how old you are but I encourage you to hang tight until such a time as you can be independent of your parent's toxic influence.  Just know who you are inside and find friends outside your family who are willing to see you for who you are.   

Thank you for your replies and for the links.  I appreciate it.  Right now I'm feeling a little defeated.  I just had this conversation with my brother and... it didn't work out.  I had told him before that we were bisexual and transgendered, that we're a man.  And he had told me "you're a woman and you won't ever be anything but a woman".  Which had upset me at the time.  I couldn't understand how he could say something like that.  We weren't allowed to have friends outside of school grounds growing up.  We weren't even allowed outside of the house.  And no one was allowed inside it.  Just one time my father caught me standing in the yard with another guy and he dragged me into the house and beat me black and blue for it.  So... we were generally very sequestered.  I was my brother's best friend growing up.  I thought that he would be supportive of me.  But he isn't.

So I just got done talking to him again about it.  Some of his comments today really hurt.

Me:
We were best friends growing up right?

Him:
Yeah

Me:
You called me dude even though mom told you not to right?

Him:
Yeah, I still do

Me:
Right and you and I hung out with a group of guys in high school and you treated me like one of the guys right?

Him:
Yeah... so?

Me:
So... what changed?  Why can't you see me as a guy now?  Why can't I be a man when I have always been one?

Him:
Its just different

Me:
Why?  Why is it different?

Him:
Because you're a woman.  You may be mentally masculine but physically you're a woman and physical is what defines gender.  Take away all the mental stuff.  You are physically a woman, attracted to men.  Just like any straight normal woman should be.  The mind can get messed up.  And considering the situation we grew up in its no surprise that yours is.  You just want to be a man because right now you're fat.  And its easier to be a fat man than a fat woman.  Once you lose weight though and slim down again you'll feel more like a woman and you'll be happier as a woman.

((he's referring to the fact that I was in an accident 6 years ago.  I gained about 80 lbs because my right side was paralyzed.  It took 6+ months of physical therapy to walk again... and my leg always feels like its asleep and I just moved it... I haven't managed to take the weight off.))

Me:
Nothing is going to change it the way I feel.

Him:
No matter what you do, you can cut your hair, you can cut off your breasts, you can dress like a guy... but nothing will give you a working cock.  And that is what makes you a man or a woman.  You can never be a man.  And to pretend to be one is fraud to everyone around you.  Any job you go to, any person you see... everyone.  And what's more if you do any of that, you're going to make everyone around you uncomfortable.

I didn't have anything to say after that.  Pretty much ends the conversation.  I feel incredibly defeated and part of me wonders if I'm doing the right thing or if I'm making a huge mistake because ... part of me feels like he's right.  No amount of change is going to make me a physically functioning male.  Right now I feel like quitting.  Giving up before I even get started.

This illustrates what I believe.  This is an untested theory but it makes sense to me if people can see it all laid out in easy to understand black and white perhaps they will consider it more seriously.  So you could try showing this to your brother and try to make him see.

Now don't give up.  I know a lot of bio men would like to think so but a man is not his cock. lol  Really that should just sound like common sense as it is just a body part.  Without the mind it's just going to hang there and do nothing useful.  Sexuality and sexual function and pleasure starts in the mind and that is also where gender is located.  What about when men become impotent or loss their penis for various reasons or in various ways.  Are they suddenly not men?  Of course not.     

Tell your brother to keep his mind off of what is in your pants and focus on what he has always known about your mind.     
     

The way he dismisses your mind is quite insulting really.

But there seems little point in trying to convince him.

Suggest you make yourself a plan of action. Looking at what you can reasonably expect from your near future, try to figure out how you can fit each stage of what you want to do, into it.

You post as if you're DID...in which case what they did to you must have been rather spectacular.

Question: why do you still talk to these people?
My father was severely abusive to me..in ways that are not fit to talk about in a G-rated forum. (Also my uncle... and an upstairs neighbor in the projects...the same year that another creepy guy tried to force me into his apartment at gunpoint...I was four.  Gotta love the projects.)

In order for me to ever speak to my dad again, he'd have to earn my forgiveness as painstakingly as I've earned my sanity back-part of the process being for him to become a better person than he is now.

Does your family deserve you? start asking yourself that.

Edited to add: looked up your profile: yep, DID...My PTSD was more bargain-basement dissociative; there were some very blurry years...now still blurry, but I know why...

My PTSD symptoms now, well...I don't like to call it hypervigilance...but I am just SO aware of my environment these days...

Feel free to PM me if y'all feel a need to vent

Yeah, I'm a DID.  I dunno about spectacular, certainly sucked.  I've heard of people that split for very little abuse.  And ones that were brutally tortured first.  I've also heard it said that to split you have to have suffered some kind of abuse in multiple categories, particularly sexual.

To gloss.... yes, my father was physically abusive, so was my mother, about on a daily basis for any reason at all that he could make up.  Beatings with objects, choking, etc.  And while he was doing it he would go on and on and on about how much he enjoyed what he was doing.  There was public humiliation, name calling, seclusion, life threatening, descriptions of the ways he would torture and kill us if he had the opportunity to... etc etc etc, the list goes on, including what I call the merry go round.  Which was not nearly as fun as it sounds.

But that was Danni's normal life.  I was born from sexual abuse.  A family "friend".  Nearly every day for months or so.  Danni was 7.  There just came a point where the look in his eyes said whatever it was that he was about to do was going to be so very much worse than anything he'd done before.  Danni had a moment of "I can't".  I can't handle this.  And I would swear that I heard it.  The audible snap the exact moment I was born and I exploded through Danni.  I was already in my 20s at that time and I wasn't afraid of him like Danni was.  I cursed, I fought back as hard as I could, I threatened what I'd do to him, how I'd expose him if he didn't release us.  Got us out of a locked room.  Maybe because he was so shocked that the meak child he knew was gone replaced with this little monster.

Who knows.  But yeah... there's more than one of us.  I know of another... I wouldn't call her a personality just because she... is stupid.  And its a she.  She's also dormant.  I've only ever seen her twice in oh... 15 almost 16 years of being aware of Danni.  And she never talks to us.  So... /shrugs/  I don't include her into the count.  IF there are any others... I don't know.  Never seen them.  I do know that we do not have majority of our memories intact.  I don't know why.  We just don't.  I have no desire to have those memories back.

I don't know how to answer the question of why I still talk to them.  I don't know.  Its very love and hate.  I can only imagine the black mail and the brain washer has in some was institutionalized me to them.  Maybe its just as simple as I'm waiting for them to grow up and for us to be a better family.  Do they deserve me?  No.  And yet for some reason I desperately want my father's approval.  For just one moment for him to like me.  But he made it very verbally clear what he thinks about me.  And its not flattering.

Thank you all for replying to me.  I'm gonna have to finish reading over this and contemplating tomorrow because I need to sleep asap if I'm going to make it on time to my therapist appointment tomorrow.  And I NEED it so badly, I'm so very tired and stressed out right now over all this stuff.

Keep going...things will be getting better.

mymaleshadow

Thank you for sharing that. I know that we can all feel your pain. When you feel ready, you can share more.