This is really quite saddening to read, and shows a repeating pattern.
You seem to be saying:
- You don't talk to your own mother anymore because you refused to accept your sister and this drove them both away. This is heartbreaking.
- That you believe your mother isn't capable of 'really' seeing her daughter as female. This may well be true.
- That it is important for mothers to deny children when they express gender dysphoria and refuse to accept their transness if it persists. (Imagine saying the same about same-sex attraction 30 years ago under Section 28 - it's eerily familiar rhetoric).
- That there is a trans woman in your life who you haven't yet alienated enough to drive away forever, and who appears to agree with you when the two of you are together.
Ok.
My experiences of my own friends and family are very different, but everyone's family is different I suppose. Maybe your mother really can't see your sister as female - she is clearly just trying her best to accept her child anyway, though, and I can respect that.
I know that you are going to labour the point you and other posters keep trying to make that I and other trans people are only being humoured by the people in our lives (I think there are actually some good points to be made about how many people struggle with latent transphobia and are desperately trying to wokewash their own behaviour, in much the same way that homophobes had to learn to treat the LGB people in their lives like human beings a decade or two ago after it stopped being socially acceptable to voice publicly. Hell, even trans people today aren't magically immune to transphobic attitudes!)
The thing is, you seem to not be considering that this same principle also applies to you - people in your life will humour your anti-trans views in person an extent because they don't want to turn every conversation into a battleground and want to keep their family and friendship groups together if possible.
Your complete refusal to accept your sister seems to have finally broken your family apart when they couldn't humour you and the harm your ideology was causing any longer.
That's heartbreaking - and a very common dynamic amongst many families I have spoken to who have also been torn apart by gender critical ideology. There comes a point where it just can't be stepped over like a missing stair anymore - where you just can't in good conscience keep inviting dear Sister or Auntie or Granny over, due to the harm it causes to the kids. Heartbreaking, but you eventually have to make the difficult call.
It also seems like something that would be so easy to repair as well, let alone to have avoided to begin with.
I asked my own mother what it would feel like to have one child begging for acceptance and another refusing to accept her for who she is and she said it would tear her apart and destroy her utterly. She would be incandescent over feeling like she was being forced to choose, and would find herself wondering if that lack of acceptance would extend to other facets of a family member's life rather than just the parts it is currently socially permissible to hold negative philosophical views toward.
I can unfortunately imagine precisely what hearing this stuff constantly must be like for your Transfriend (friend? Maybe she's just a Transacquaintance?). Hopefully she has robust filters in place and a solid support network - I know I find it exhausting to engage in person with people who are doing the conversational equivalent of kicking me in the teeth periodically, even more so than online. That said, she might find it tolerable if she isn't particularly dysphoric or has managed to frame being misgendered during your meetings as a sort of necessary evil.
You've clearly found a community here who accepts your ideological rejection of your sister, and (before that?) you found a place in the Dr Who fandom, but you seem to have said before that there is a great deal of tension there - which makes sense!
Dr Who is one of the most relentlessly inclusive and trans-positive shows on TV and has been for years. It makes me wonder how much of an influence you have in the Who fandom - and whether it has diminished over the last decade or so due to your behaviour. I could see a situation where a prominent fandom figure liberally throwing GC talking points about in a space populated by many trans people would actually encourage the community to close ranks, and if it got especially bad and impossible to ignore, it could encourage the show writers to write more trans-accepting stories and thus make it starkly clear where they stand. It would be hard to remain prominent or relevant in that community afterward!
You don't come across as someone who actually likes the Who fandom or even the show very much to begin with, honestly. You may find it less frustrating to disengage rather than continuing to hate-watch.
That said, you seem to talk about it in the past tense quite a bit, so you may already view it as something in your past.
This is an attitude I've seen in geek circles a great deal in recent years - holdouts who come together to lament how the IP they grew up with 'went woke' when they suddenly started noticing it conflicting with their own ideological standpoints. You end up with these little island universes that refuse to accept anything beyond a particular cutoff date in canon. It's particularly odd when said IP has always, transparently, been 'woke' within the climate of the times within which it was written. Star Wars is particularly egregious for it - the amount of screaming rage that has accompanied the release of the most recent series of Andor has been a sight to behold, and similarly for The Boys once a subset of fans finally realised that Homelander isn't supposed to be viewed as heroic.
If you have disengaged from the Who fandom, Bravo on moving on! If you are looking for TV shows that display appropriately virulent anti-trans attitudes then there is no shortage of classics from before the Great Awokening.
Old Who itself, of course, has a particular low budget earnest shaky cardboard-and-tinfoil charm as well - and barely ever resorted to getting mean or punching downward. Even the shaky early attempts at depicting trans characters were pretty interesting if a little tonally odd. I can't recall a single instance of overt mean-spirited transphobia and I've watched most of it at some point. It simply has never had a single malicious bone in its body, so no wonder most of the modern fandom - bar the holdouts - have no issue with trans people.
I think that the way you launched a jeering pile-on against me yesterday is an indication that you perhaps aren't someone for whom kindness or tolerance comes easily, even if your self-image says otherwise. You've certainly done a lot of sneering at me, and it has felt like a rather desperate point-scoring exercise that went on and on for several pages. I used to get plenty of that kind of thing from girls and boys at school, as a trans kid trying to catch up on missed social cues, so it's almost nostalgic in a way.
If you behaved like that to your sister, I'm not surprised that your family no longer talks to you - and wouldn't be surprised if you have lost your voice in the Who fandom as well if you've engaged in this kind of behaviour there. Many people - especially in geek circles - don't enjoy those who engage in behaviours that look awfully like bullying, and generally only play along out of fear or a desire to engage in ingroup signalling performances. There are plenty of well known geek social fallacies where people tolerate bullies due to the residual siege mentality and wish to be inclusive - but there are times when it just becomes too much.
You'd probably have more success with both your family, and the wider Who fandom (Whodom?) if you eased off on the anti-trans stuff. That really seems to be at the core of everything you have described as a source of conflict in your life.
I suppose this board's community will never challenge you for expressing gender critical or otherwise trans-hostile views - indeed, you'd be treated like other posters who haven't toed the line if you didn't - and is more than willing to support you, so you have everything you need here!
I think there's a Reddit board that dedicates itself to a virulently 'anti-woke' trans-hostile interpretation of old-left political thought. Same kind of gig as Spiked and its hybrid 'conservative leftism' holdout ideology. Can't remember its name and don't really care to expose myself to it again unnecessarily but you might find it to your liking. There seems to be a lot of lamenting the existence of trans characters in modern media. Obviously as with anything that markets itself as 'anti-woke', buyer beware.
I'm wryly glad you found yesterday's juvenile multi-page pile-on an entertaining opportunity to hold court and grandstand. It's certainly given me a lot to think about and reminisce on. I thought it was quite illuminating - as did quite a few observers who were vainly hoping that following the SC ruling, things would ease off and the board might become a little less overtly hostile to trans people.
My general policy for social media laugh-react storms is that the harder and more sweatily a dogpile labours a point about how loudly they are guffawing and how jolly a time they are having with their collective mockery of a single person for an innocent mistake or even just a statement they dislike, the more desperate they are to find straws to clutch to undermine said person. There is a characteristic desperation that almost looks like relief. It's fascinating to observe, and almost like clockwork. It seems like a perfect fit for a strategic policy of portraying trans people as inherently laughable, ridiculous and worthy of scorn and derision, should that align with your goals.
I don't think it will win you many friends amongst people interested in treating trans people with dignity and respect, but perhaps that isn't a priority for you.
Sorry, this got pretty long. Your disclosure of your family situation really upset me and I suppose I'm just trying to understand what leads a person to that point, and how that would affect the way they engage with the world.
I really hope you find a way ahead that allows you to reconcile with your family! The world would be a better place if more people were able to find a way to reconcile with and accept their parents and siblings.
I'm rooting for you!