Former Trans Child of Gender Critical Parents (very long). *Trigger warning - descriptions of self harm and suicide* - Title edited by MNHQ

[pop91]

Hi,

To start I wanna say I'm writing this post in good faith to provide the viewpoint of a Trans person with Gender Critical parents but I know this is the internet and this will probably just be trolled to death but here goes.

I had a pretty regular 'happy' family setup, and apparently first told my parents of my identity at just 5yrs old but the first I remember is at 8yrs old when I refused to go by my 'very gendered' birth name but my parents insisted on using it especially publicly.

My parents were never particularly strict on gender roles in the home - my sister would wear my dad's glasses and jacket and stomp around with his briefcase in hand and my brother had an emo phase with heels and mascara to match and apart from some grumbling from my father it was never the biggest issue in our house.

Sexuality was different though even though my father would class himself as a pragmatic centrist, barring a socialist university phase, and my mother a card-carrying progressive New Labour type whose Best Friend was the most flamboyant gay man and an Aunt who lived with her 'friend' until she passed. There was an uncomfortableness with sexuality where both my parents would call it a lifestyle choice and opposed gay marriage - cut to three years ago when my older brother came out as bisexual and last month the youngest sister as a lesbian but rest assured the other 3 siblings remain firmly 'normal.'

Back to me and by 12 I had started puberty and was experiencing debilitating gender dysphoria - I would look into the mirror and see nothing that matched my brain. I would continue to feel this way until the bullying and dysphoria got so bad that one night I climbed into my bathtub with a kitchen knife hoping I could change my body to fit my brain somehow I managed not to perform self-surgery in my bathtub.

A couple of months later I came clean to my parents, I wasn't expecting a big hug but I wasn't expecting what came next. They ignored it as if I had told them what I wanted for dinner, they decided they didn't hear what I had said at all.

Over the next year, the internet became my friend as I found ways to affirm my gender by doing hidden things at first and then slowly more outward things. I came out to my siblings and although they found it confusing my oldest brother and sister were a godsend who I wouldn't have survived without, They helped me pick out a new haircut and new clothes and we came up with a new name.

I came out in school and sure there was bullying but I was feeling so Euphoric that it almost didn't matter. When the teachers found out they informed my parents and that's when everything changed! My parents sat me down and said I was just confused. They threw out my new clothes, anything that I used to affirm my gender, even my shoes and magazines then they took my bedroom door off and took away my laptop and phone and forced my older siblings to refer to me by my birth name, my older brother and sister stopped supporting me and I lost my only family support and anything that was helping me.

Eventually, when they realised everything they had done hadn't worked and I still felt the same way, they decided to try both religious and non-religious conversion therapy which left permanent scarring to my mental health and I frequently have nightmares about it.

At 15 I had my first suicide attempt and my parents forced me to lie and say it was due just to bullying at school but that wasn't true it was the dysphoria and conversion therapy that was killing me.

From 15 to 17 I had multiple suicide attempts and after the third one, my parents finally allowed me to stop the conversion therapy but still forcibly live as my 'biological' sex.

Eventually, I managed to get to a great University and at 18 I socially transitioned and by 20 I had started hormones. I now have a job that provides me financial stability and have an amazing partner, with 2 children from a prior relationship that I now consider like my own. We are also now having a baby very soon.

My mother now describes herself as Gender Critical and frequently posts online about how she will be unable to see her grandchildren because of her views, which is true as I will not allow my parents to see either my child or stepchildren.

My parents continue to refuse to acknowledge my identity and pronouns. The last time we talked, she said she believes I am just gay, which neither makes sense considering my partner's gender nor the fact she also has a terrible relationship with my lesbian sister and bisexual brother who also rarely allows his child to visit my mum, due to her comments about their sexualities.

I finally have the support back of all my siblings and we do frequently gather without my parents. I hope one day my parents change their minds but honestly I don't hold much hope and I don't know if I could forgive what they did to me.

A lot of online trans activists wish trans children for Gender Criticals but I don't, it wasn't very nice at all. If you're going to ask if I think kids should transition, the answer is I don't know as I didn't transition as a child and a social transition helped plenty for me.

Well that's it I think, just the perspective and experience of a trans person with Gender Critical parents, feel free to ask any reasonable questions or respectful questions.

@WarriorN

*I LIKE having a dick and a beard and a flat male chest. I DISLIKE having a vagina and a smooth face and tits. I LIKE being called my name and He/Him. I DISLIKE being called my birthname and She/Her.*

It's all just costume in a world where cosmetic surgery can be done in a lunch break.

As a previous poster said, men and women can have any type of personality, any likes or dislikes, it doesn't change their sex.

Well no one I am friends with is ‘cis’. It shines a fucking huge light on the ridiculousness of that definition. It requires everyone else to conform in any way.

That is what I find most people who call us cis hate to hear. But it has probably been true for many of us for decades. Yet, here we are being told we conform to an either or description.

To make someone else feel better about themselves.

Ffs I am so glad my own teen understands that the only thing we required of them was to do a wide range of subjects at school so as not to limit their future decisions.

That and doing two specific weekly chores that are not rooted in sex stereotypes but earned them pocket money.

I would be horrified if my teen fitted the ‘cis’ box too.

I mean, who really does?

That is why it is so offensive. It seems to be premised in one group being special and non-conforming and the other not.

What I can say, is that this and the other thread is bringing many new usernames to post. Maybe some are namechangers. But I think most are new posters. And it is wonderful to see !!!

OP, please look carefully into all possible outcomes if you're considering phalloplasty. I've seen people having very difficult healing, nasty scarring, having to have revision surgeries, being left incontinent, not being very happy with the result. Maybe even consider putting it off for a while until surgical techniques have improved?

One thing that confuses me, and means I am not entirely gender critical probably, is that I think it might be part of a person’s male or female sex to want to signal that sex, or sometimes, on the contrary, want to muffle that signal. In other words I don’t think it is just social stereotyping if it is driven by biology.

Not that I know how this fits with wanting to change your apparent sex within society.

@BinBandit 19:44

Excellent post.

How about people have the body they have, find who they like attractive and pursue whatever interests they like instead of chopping of bits of themselves, taking hormones and talking absolute pish? Maybe some mental health treatment is more appropriate? You cannot be born "in the wrong body" and you cannot change sex.

If people spent more time worrying about, oh. I don't know, maybe Ukraine, or global warming or their elderly neighbour who struggles to get to the shops and hasn't any family, and less time obsessing about their bodies and gender presentation, they'd all be a lot happier and healthier too.

@pop91

Okay people if not Cis then we can we say you're 'not trans' or is that offensive too?

We don’t refer to short women as non tall women, black women as non white women, young women as non young women, French women as non English women. In all of these cases, the noun is woman - adult human female. That’s all that’s needed unless we’re designing clothes for women under 5’, or the title of a support group for women who are Black, or a book club for women who speak French as a first language… I could go on.

@runningfromreality

Ha. Yes... show me a teenage girl happy with her puberty and I show you the exception!

I don't recall going through any of the angst which seems to be considered normal on here, wasn't aware of any of my friends doing so either.

Hitler's party was called National Socialists. It was not a socialist party (www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists).

In exactly the same manner, the OP's parents calling themselves gender critical did not make them so. Gender critical feminists, sadly, are not yet a unified big power group with headquarters in New York City, Geneva, London, and Paris, so we cannot send out guidance on how to exclude the OPs mother and father from the group. As they never belonged, I think, though I am sorry for the parenting the OP describes in this thread.

I am fascinated by the idea of matching heels to mascara and with red mascara! I had never head of either before today!

Snoring . Boring. Find another thing to whine about. Try to make it something not about yourself. Waiting. waiting. Fallen asleep.

I hated puberty @KimikosNightmare. I got very large breasts seemingly overnight and got teased mercilessly about them. I was sexually assaulted, and flashed at. I didn't feel ready for sex but pressured into doing it.

My sister hated it so much she became anorexic.

I'd suggest your experience is more unusual than mine.

Isn't it fascinating that there seems to be so little research we can fall back on as to the effects of puberty on girls
Physical effects known but the mental impact , whilst known to be greater for girls
, is much less wel understood

So we can't say what proportion of girls feel none mild, moderate or severe distress

@Clymene

I hated puberty *@KimikosNightmare*. I got very large breasts seemingly overnight and got teased mercilessly about them. I was sexually assaulted, and flashed at. I didn't feel ready for sex but pressured into doing it.

My sister hated it so much she became anorexic.

I'd suggest your experience is more unusual than mine.

No your experience is your experience- mine is mine.

Hated my body as a teenager. Hated the unwanted attention. Wanted to remove breasts. Nothing to do with wanting to be a man - all about fucking patriarchy as per, but I can see why it’s so confusing being a teenage girl today.

The male gaze is such a warped view of womanhood. All transwomen can aspire to is that over sexualised, commodified, hollow version of being a woman and my god does it show.

No your experience is your experience- mine is mine.

That doesn't mean one type of experience isn't more common than another. I'd be very very surprised if the majority of girls did not experience at least some level of distress about dealing with periods, the physical changes which go with puberty, and the often unwanted attention and comments from men and boys which follow. I have no statistics, but I think it's pretty obvious that girls may not readily admit these feelings, even to their friends, probably because they wrongly feel that everyone else is handling it fine apart from them.

I hated being a girl. I had male cousins and I was an engineer. I knew I was an engineer before I knew the word. I mended things, I took them apart and put them back together. I used to go out to a place between our village and the next town and dig up clay, and bring it back and make things in the garden.

I had to fight in the first week of a new school to be able to do woodwork, metalwork and engineering drawing. I went into construction and was once told, when I'd been doing the manager's job that women couldn't handle clients the way men handled clients. I worked on construction sites and had to stand in front of 30 men first thing every morning, testing concrete to see if it met the slump test, and had to turn some away to screaming jeers of not being able to do my job properly. Every day in construction was a day I thought 'I'm doing this for the next generation as maybe one day, they won't get jeered at every fucking day'.

Nah. They just get their breasts removed and go on drugs to become sterilised.

Doesn't anyone from this toxic ideology see that encouraging non-gender conforming kids to remove their own rights to procreate and thus taking non-gender conformists out of the gene pool is eugenics?

I'll get a delete for that as I had one the other day for saying the same thing. I find it astonishing that people can't see this. They are taking themselves out of the next generation. Baffling, utterly baffling.

I did not say your experience was not real @KimikosNightmare. I said I thought it was unusual.

I have some sympathy for those suffering gender dysphoria- in my brain I'm able bodied, sadly reality does not agree. And so my body often feels like a cage I occupy. It's a heartbreaking feeling, and some days the distress is so strong that I feel I could peel my skin off in an attempt to escape. So I understand why you'd do what you could to escape that feeling, even as far as surgery knowing that it would never fully fix the mismatch. I do get it.

OP you do come across as someone who struggles with the physical side of things, and most of the GC feminists I know have a lot of sympathy for you. You aren't however representative of all trans people nowadays. We're seeing more people who are content with their sexed body, including some who are even proud of their genitals (and let's be honest, these are largely penises they are proud of). So they come across very much like they see being a woman as nothing more than what we wear.

I'm all for people dressing in a gender* non-conforming way, I did myself as a child, and my son does now. I was constantly mistaken for a boy, and he gets mistaken for a girl. And I try to encourage gender non-conforming behaviour in both my kids. Though that is a much harder thing to do. They are so surrounded by messages about how they should act, both conscious and unconscious. Our immediate family won't enforce gendered behaviour (and I'm in fact known for getting very irritated by it) but school, media and society as a whole are very insistent. I know that I behave in a way that is consistent with the expectations for women, though I try not, it's been ingrained in me since birth. And I suspect you exhibit behaviour more like those you share a sex with.

That's one of the reasons I'd be concerned if either of my children announced they wanted to transition. I would always do what was best for them, but I would spend some time trying to understand why they felt the way they did. I think if it was due to horror at their own bodies I'd want them to consider therapy before hormones and surgery, as I'd be concerned at the health implications (especially as I know I have a horrible cocktail of hereditary conditions that may be in their futures too). If it was that they thought they felt like a distant gender identity then I'd want to know what they thought that meant, as they can't possibly know what it feels like to be socialised so differently. I would try to discourage them from transitioning honestly, or at least to delay it until adulthood, because I'm not convinced you ever know what you truly want from life that early. (I made a lot of decisions up to the age of about 30 which were very very wrong, but seemed very right at the time).

I hope your life is a happy one, and that your decisions all work out for you. But please remember your parents do not represent all GC people, and your experiences and motivations are not the same as all trans people. Like your parents appear to have embraced the GC label in bad faith, there are plenty of people (often men) who have embraced the trans label in bad faith too.

*Gender as an externally imposed set of behaviours and expectation.

pop91 I have only read your opening post bit just wanted to say I am sorry for all you have been through. I have a trans child and it (as a parent) very hard when they came out. We have accepted him as he is and I am so sorry your parents could not do that for you.

“AlisonDonut

I hated being a girl. I had male cousins and I was an engineer. I knew I was an engineer before I knew the word. I mended things, I took them apart and put them back together. I used to go out to a place between our village and the next town and dig up clay, and bring it back and make things in the garden.

I had to fight in the first week of a new school to be able to do woodwork, metalwork and engineering drawing. I went into construction and was once told, when I'd been doing the manager's job that women couldn't handle clients the way men handled clients. I worked on construction sites and had to stand in front of 30 men first thing every morning, testing concrete to see if it met the slump test, and had to turn some away to screaming jeers of not being able to do my job properly. Every day in construction was a day I thought 'I'm doing this for the next generation as maybe one day, they won't get jeered at every fucking day'.

Nah. They just get their breasts removed and go on drugs to become sterilised. “

I hope this is not deleted. I can’t tell you how much I admire you for showing what a woman can be.

I became an engineer too - I guess growing up I’d now be described as gender non confirming, but it didn’t feel like anything that needed a label in the 1980s. Lots of pop stars were GNC and it was just normal, lots of us looked pretty androgynous. I had a family that were keen for all us kids to do what we wanted (parents were war generation so had had limited opportunities). I was lucky with puberty that I kept a boyish figure (I did loads of sport and was very fit) and it never occurred to me that I was anything other than a girl / woman as I was a human female.

I too had to put up with misogyny on site, usually of the “women shouldn’t be doing this, I wouldn’t want my daughters to be doing this, I’m going to be fucking difficult” kind, so I always felt I had to prove myself more than the men. And I also felt like I was doing this to pave the way for more women to go into the industry.

IME a lot of GC feminists don't dress in a feminine manner and/or have experience of work in traditionally male or male dominated roles. Lots of experience of being told to get back in the kitchen our gender box.

What I'm taking from this thread is:

• One person's definition of transgender can be wildly at odds with another person's. You must accept the definition offered by the person in front of you, otherwise you are a hateful bigot terf etc. But also accept the definition of the other person, even if it negates the first. You must hold all the possible definitions in your head at the same time, even though they all contradict one another.

• There seems to be a huge misconception of what "gender critical" means. And to echo a PP, if this is what many TRAs think GC is, no wonder we're in this mess

• I think that sexist stereotypes are a load of balls. Why are these outdated, limiting ideas being dusted off, given a lick of pastel paint and being lauded as gender identity? As if it was somehow progressive? As if a boy who doesn't like playing with guns is "really" a girl? Fuck right off with that.

Why are these outdated, limiting ideas being dusted off, given a lick of pastel paint and being lauded as gender identity? As if it was somehow progressive?

Do you recall a few years back where if a girl like football in the UK it was taken as evidence she was a boy but the inverse for soccer/football in the US where it was interpreted as indicative of being a girl for boys?