Coming Out: "We still love you and will pretend you didn't say anything."

[Lenneth]

Honestly, I never truly put much thought into any scenario in which I would be coming out to anyone about anything.  I equated "coming out" to people and a community I supported but wasn't actually a part of.  I wholeheartedly supported the people who braved the tempest of social, political, personal, and religious values and ideologies surrounding the, arguably, most fundamentally important question people grapple with.  Who am I?  Until you know that, you can't really answer any other questions about what you want, believe, support, defend, advocate, or any of the millions of words I could use in this list.  If you can't really answer that one question to yourself, you'll wander around perpetually unfulfilled and probably completely lost.  I'd never really thought I was trying to answer that question.  I thought I was just cruising along.  Had I made stupid decisions and found myself in places or situations I could have avoided?  I'll have to get a truck to drag out the list.  Ending up where I am in this very moment, typing these words, was not somewhere I thought I'd ever be as I grew up and went through my days.

 

I knew early on in my life I was unhappy with genetic hand biology had dealt me.  Biology put the amab tag on me and I was raised under the assumption "that was that."  It's what I was and I was signed up for the crash course in being a boy on his way to manhood.  I was exposed to all the social cues, fashion choices, proferred toys, activities, and expectations placed on what everyone in my life kept insisting was a "normal" boy.  From where I'm standing at the moment, I understand that everything being thrown at me in the interests of raising a normal boy was code for straight, cis male.  I had been born to parents following a religion they believed and supported, holding views about the nature of life and our place in it, and how people should relate to each other.  They believed things generally labeled conservative, sometimes called traditional at certain family gatherings.  So were there more open enviornments for a developing child?  Absolutely.  The one I had been born into, however, simply had the mix of beliefs and opinions leading to me growing up with what was presented to me as the way I was "supposed" to be.  Everything I was exposed to and taught in my formative years was being funneled through those lenses.  Eventually, as I grew old enough to start contemplating the idea of the "future" as something I would inevitably be a part of, I started thinking of my own future in particular.  The idea of what I was "supposed" to be was still there, being pushed by everyone around me.  When I thought about my future, I wasn't really considering how I would personally think, feel, or believe.  I was thinking about it, visualizing it, within the predetermined concept of what I was "supposed" to be.  When you start thinking about playing house as kids and none of the boys will pretend to be the mother or none of the girls will be the ones pretending to fix the car.  I didn't know it, but everything was being spelled out for me.  

 

It was that idea of "supposed to be" I ended up having problems with.  When I was 11 I realized something.  If it had occurred to me before that, I can't really say with any certainty.  I had started keeping my first journal.  I had been rather proud of myself.  At the time I thought that was where I was supposed to dump all those thoughts rattling around in my head.  I never thought about the ideas and thoughts as being intrinsicly "wrong" or "right."  I was 11.  It was just things that were inside my head or how I felt about the world around me and my interactions with it.  That was where the first physical evidence of the feelings ultimately leading me to where I am now were expressed.  And again, I was 11.  It wasn't epic prose or anything like that.  It was a simple statement about how I wished I was a girl.

 

I'm not trying to leave out all the juicy parts of any grand story by skipping around here.  It's just not essential to the point I'm working towards.  That thought was there.  That desire.  It never went away.  The problem was the environment I was being brought up in and the people I was always around.  That notion of "supposed to be" was always there and it almost suffocated those thoughts or feelings daring to move past those predetermined boundries.  That singular thought I had expressed in my journal never went away, no, but I found myself crushed under the belief such a thought was wrong to have and the body I was standing in was the physical reality of my existence and what God meant me to be.  I was constantly fed ideologies and rationales telling me what I wanted to be or felt like was irrelevant.  The body I was standing it at the moment was the one I was supposed to have and with that body came the things I was supposed to do and think with it.  It was set in stone.  And that thought honestly stuck with me for the longest time.  At the time I didn't understand the relevance of my feelings as they pertained to my budding sense of self.  Whenever I was confronted by a thought or feeling contradicting the blind adherence to the male script I was supposedly holding by virtue of physical biology, I was "supposed" to ignore it.  Maybe that was the first thing you could argue I did to start moving towards where I am now.  I couldn't ignore it.  I could never, in all the years I fought with it, ignore it.  Instead, I lamented it.  I felt disappointment.  I felt trapped.  I felt I was not blessed, fortunate, or any other uplifting, inspirational term you can think of by existing as I did.  I felt I was condemned to be male.

 

I didn't have anyone I could have spoken to about any of the things I felt because everyone I was around in social situations I had met through the church I was taken to by my parents regardless of my desire to be there or not.  There was no support structure available to me that would have helped me understand what I was feeling or that it wasn't a horrible sin dragging me to hell.  I just came to the conclusion that feeling regret and frustration about who and what I was apparently was the way things were supposed to be.  And I rolled with it.  I threw myself into the whole "male" role.  It helped that as I got older, among other issues, I was not being dragged to church or having the narrow minded social and political ideas of my parents and elders constantly shoved down my throat.  I still thought I was supposed to fufill  some predetermined role as a man though.  I had a number of girlfriends.  Eventually I became sexually active, though here too I was engaging in those activities from a one-sided idea of both what sex actually was and what role I was supposed to be playing in it as a man.  Eventually I got married.  That marriage ended poorly, but I did get two wonderful sons out of it.  And in all that time I never stopped wishing I was female.  I still struggled with how I felt about my body.  There were even points during my life where I engaged in self-harm.  I was fighting depression and a perpetual frustration over being who and what I was because I couldn't stand either answer.  When I said I had never considered coming out would be something I ever thought I would be dealing with, all of those feelings were why.  At the base of everything was the belief that I was born one way and that meant I had to act in one way.  I thought how I felt about my body was irrelevant because nothing would change and I had to just accept it.

 

I'll skip a head a bit here because the journey from that to actually realizing, and ultimately taking the steps toward, where I am now is it's own story.  I had found people with their own views and understanding of themselves.  They allowed and supported me to actually accept what I felt as part of that burning question of who I was.  They helped me find resources, people facing similar issues, communities where nobody would try telling anyone who, or what, they should be or how they should feel.  It was still a process.  I had to get from repressed fear of even contemplating my feelings weren't satan laced hell traps to understanding that I've been fighting against who I was and there's nothing wrong with who that is.  Which brings me to why any of this is even in this thread.  I would have much preferred easing my family into everything after I had come to terms with myself.  I knew there would be blowback from some members of my family.  I was even trying to prepare myself for being cast out or informally excluded from certain people's lives because of their views on this issue.  The reality of being transgender was going to be rough on it's own.  If I got into my relationship I was convinced I could cause a heart attack in at least one of them.  I am happily involved with two wonderful partners, each with their own identities and personalities.  We're coming up  on 2 years being together and it's been wonderful being with people supporting me and helping me find the answer to who I am.

 

I had not intended to really come out in some grand fashion or dump the reality on anyone all at once.  I had gradually been buying little things here and there or looking at clothes I liked within the context of who I was finally able to accept being.  The details are involved and I prefer not to dwell on them right now, but my plan to try and ease people into this did not go according to plan.  I found myself in a situation with my mother that was going to end with admitting some, if not all, of the realities about me, my life, and where I was going from here.  So I wound up talking with my mother.  For everything I'd gone through in my life bringing me to that moment, I thought I'd have been a bit more prepared for it.  I was not.  What I was able to get out in that conversation, one sided as it was, amounted to telling her I was trans and the relationship I was in was with two partners.  Given how she feels about these things, I knew it probably didn't matter what I said or how I explained any of it.  She was going to see me as amab trying to dress and act like a woman while in a relationship with an amab partner and an afab partner with no concept of what non binary and gender nonconforming meant.  I could have handled it if she had blown up in my face about it all.  That was an outcome that I thought fell withing the realm of possibility for her.  I was also prepared for her to be against basically all of it and potentially telling me I was going to hell.  Also within reactions I could see from her.  What wound up happening was several moments of silence before she told me that it didn't matter what I did, looked like, or believed, I would always be her son.  I didn't pursue her at that point because I could tell she was overwhelmed.  In the 3 months, give or take, since that several things have happened.  I stopped going out of my way to conceal my identity because of someone else being uncomfortable about it.  I don't shove it in anyone's face either.  I just wear what I want to wear.  There's no statement being made by my fashion choices.  And my mother has essentially taken the position of acting like nothing has happened or changed.  She talks to me like she did before I got into all of this with her.  She's commented about how she loves me.  But she has an almost plastic expression sometimes and blatently ignores anything about me that lends itself to identifying me in the way I want to be.  For example, she won't acknowledge I have a purse.  She calls it a bag.  Men don't have purses.  When my oldest son makes comments about my wearing things girls wear she doesn't really engage and the last time I saw that exchange she made some comment about how that's just what daddy wanted to wear.  So she's not jumping all over me or attacking me about anything.  She's just doing everything humanly possible to ignore anything drawing attention to something she's clearly not ok with.

 

And that leads me to what I did before writing this novel.  I can't make her believe, support, or accept anything she doesn't want to.  I don't plan on trying.  I never thought I would ever be in a position from which I needed to come out about something.  But the reality is, here we are.    The conversation we had initially was forced by circumstances and I didn't feel comfortable with it.  I felt like I was backed into a wall and just threw out the basics without actually addressing what it meant for me and how she could be a part of it if she chose.  So I spent a while trying to decide what to say or do about it all.  And what I came up with was my attempt at being straight forward and simple.  Because she's taking this position of just pretending I haven't said things she isn't comfortable with after her efforts at undermining my identity in social situations has failed to discourage me from continuing to be who I am, I just told her what I wanted.  I didn't feel the first conversation was successful because I thought "coming out" was supposed to be more than just saying "this is how I live now."  I wanted to be more specific about what it means to me and what I am looking for from people.  Her especially as my mother.  So tried to keep it short and simple.  I told her how much better I feel emotionally because I don't spend the time and energy fighting my feelings about who I am with who I thought I was supposed to be.  I told her if she was going to reference me when talking to other people, I would like her to use "she" and "her."  I said I did not identify with "he" and "him" anymore.  I told her I will still answer to it if necessary, but if she wants to support me or try to understand me, that's not who I am.  I also told her that I understood the name she has associated with me is not something easy to just drop.  She picked it out and she's been using it to identify and define me in her mind for over 30 years.  But like the pronouns, I said very plainly that I no longer was the person that name belonged to and it's not my name.  I told her what my name was and that I would appreciate it if she could start using it.  She can't see me for who I am if she won't try.  I told her I'll still answer to terms I didn't not believe applied to me anymore because it may be necessary for me to do so.  And if she was going to flatly refuse to speak to me using the things properly identifying me, I wasn't going to just ignore that she's talking to me.  But I'm kind of in limbo now waiting to see if she'll even acknowledge I sent anything to her or if she's just gonna keep going with the "ignoring things I don't like" approach.  Thanks for sticking through all of that.  Sorry it was so long.

[Jackie C.]

So speaking as someone who lived through a very similar scenario, I know that there are really no words. I wish that I'd realized that I could actually address the problem and seek treatment earlier than I did but otherwise, well, we could be sisters.

 

My genetic donor disowned me though. Much like Darth Vader she, "Finds my appearance disturbing." She's a serial abuser though so it might just be that she can't stand to see me happy.

 

Sweetie, I wish you all the luck in the world but the one thing you absolutely cannot change is how other people choose to react to you. Live your life for you. Be the best version of yourself that you can. Invite the people that you care about to come along on your journey. The ones that love you will be at your side every step of the way.

 

Hugs!

[Kelly2509]

I get you.  My parents go to great lengths to tell me they love me but deadname me and misgender me almost constantly.  I'm not going to say this is a great solution, but the way I have handled it is reminding myself I can't control what they do but I can control of what I do, which means that any time I mention my name (signing a birthday card for example) I use My Name and not theirs.  On all the Christmas gifts this year in the from area I listed all of us by name instead of just putting down "Us" like I used to.  Death by a thousand cuts.

[Lenneth]

Update:

 

I have still recieved nothing from my mother regarding anything I said in the message I sent.  The nature of the text message does not allow me the option of seeing if the message has been read, only that it's been delivered.  So I could quite legitimately accept the possibility she hadn't seen it.  Her not seeing to reading messages I send to her is by no means uncommon for her and it's led to several ugly fights over the years.  However, I sent her something about half an hour ago, completely unrelated to the message from last night, and got an instant response telling me she'd gotten it and would take care of what I had asked her to do in it.  So I know the other message has been read.  So now I'm personally seeing two possible outcomes.  She read it and is taking time to process it while considering a response, or we're right back to operating with the "ignore what I don't want to acknowledge" logic.  I suppose there is technically a third option in simply not responding at all, but I'm not inclided to believe that is the case because this woman has made it quite clear over the years that when she has a thought about something, somebody is going to hear it.  Back to hunkering down and waiting for further developments I guess.