Told Best Friends

[Guest Fletcher]

So last night I was hanging out with my best friends at a sleep over and the topic of our sexualities came up. First it was just jokey stuff, but then it turned kind of serious. So I thought, what the heck, I'll come out to them.

At first I thought it'd be fine - "Oh, I don't care whether you're transgender or not, you're the same person to us" (I was using simple terms - I didn't touch on androgyny) and so on. But then I was asked what exactly made me want to be a guy. And I said "I just do, it's hard to explain." So to make it clearer to them I told them about how I'd felt during my childhood and so on. And that's when it started to go downhill.

No matter how many times I said "It's not that I don't want to be girly, it's that I don't want to be a girl" they still kept on saying "oh, you're a tomboy, it's okay, some girls are like that". I tried to make them think differently by saying "If I had been born a guy and had just told you I wanted to be a woman, would you treat me more seriously?" They didn't seem to get it. One of my friends said that it's just because of the way I was raised and the others didn't really say anything. They made a lot of comparisons between their older sisters (some had been total tomboys until they turned a cerain age and so on) and basically seemed to be telling me that I was just going through a phase.

Then I mentioned this place - I said "I joined a forum for people like me". After I'd explained what a forum was, they started getting kind of nasty. One girl - the one I'd consider myself closest to - turned the whole conversation into a "damnit Maeve you're influenced too much by the internet and I bet you couldn't spend a month without the internet and you rely too much on facts and statistics". They way they suddenly seemed to turn on me was very hurtful and I started crying, which was horrible. They kept on spouting cliche lines like "you're a person not a statistic" but it didn't help at all. It felt like I was being told off by my parents - "are we making any impression on you at all, Maeve? Of course not." I was asked whether I'd told my parents and I said I was scared of telling my parents. That was the last straw as far as they were concerned - "Well if you don't want to tell your parents it means you don't actually feel this. If you don't want to make the (three hour) trip to Dublin to go to this therapist then you're not really transgender."

They ended up having to hug me for about five minutes because I was crying so much.

All in all, it wasn't a good experience. I don't want to bring it up with them again but I can't make them forget it (they asked this morning what kind of male name I'd like, whether I'd wear a dress or not to an upcoming party and so on). Even though they seem all right with it, I feel like I lost all my credibility the moment I mentioned that I'd spoken with other people online. I'm still a little confused about what actually happened last night, especially how I should feel about it.

[Guest JaniceW]

Fletcher,

Imagine trying to describe an elephant to a blind person. Actually do that for a few minutes. See how absolutely impossible it is to describe something to someone who has absolutely no frame of reference to put it into. You can't say that the elephant's trunk is like a snake because the blind person has never seen a snake and cannot relate to that.

You have tried to explain something to your friends that they have no frame of reference to understand, the frame of reference that they have tells them something that is totally wrong from the truth for you. Why did they keep talking to you about how wrong you are? Because they care about you and from their perspective they think you are thinking something that is harming you and they want to help. They are trying in their own way to be there for you but their frame of reference leaves them no context into which to place what you have told them.

They want to give you good advice but the advice they are giving is what would be good for them not you because they are not trans.

The real message for you is that they did not walk away from you, yes they do not understand what you are going through and they may never understand it but they accept you and they care about you. Now they also know what you have told them. So move off of this subject with them for a while. Accept that they do not understand but they also did not reject you. Get on with being friends.

[Guest Avery F]

Well, your friends didn't outright reject you, which is obviously a good thing. Perhaps you could help them to understand you by telling them where to find out more about transgender topics; while they may be doubtful if you just tell them the information, reading it for themselves may give them a better chance of understanding. I know what you mean about the 'tomboy vs. transman' thing, I get it frequently from my parents - but despite what people may say, there clearly IS a difference; it's just a matter of being willing to understand that fact.