In theory I should’ve never had much difficulty coming out to my parents as a third thing. I mean, Mahu is “third-gendered”, right? And my parents, given that they come from the pacific islands, have that as their cultural touchstone for what a tranny is anyways, so all should be good. From the very beginning, in an ideal world, I’dve just said hey Mom and Dad, I’m Mahu, or more Rae-Rae I guess, but like not in the sex-worker Rae-Rae way, but like in the Mahu on hrt who functionally socially lives as a woman Rae-Rae way…". But I’m just so repulsed by the idea that switching out the language I use to describe myself would in reality just set back the way I’m viewed and addressed.
I think a lot of my paranoia stems from the fact that I’ve been pretty insistent on calling myself a trans woman to them for the entirety of the time I’ve been transitioning, mostly because I fear using any other framework would risk making my intended surgery pathway seem less legitimate in the eyes of family, friends, and doctors. I want to be taken seriously in the things I aim to do. And so far they’ve been reasonably supportive of the medical side of things, but my parents treat me as a gay+ they/them third-gender thing, and I had an actual theymab partner for years who they only ever he/him’d despite them being overtly quite androgynous, but in a no-hrt kinda way. Seeing that has kinda re-affirmed my initial fears that, in this household, presenting as a binary transitioner gets me the nonbinary treatment, and presenting as nonbinary would just increase the incidence of getting the natal sex treatment, so may as well just keep acting like I’m a trans woman to continue getting treated as neither man or woman.
It’s just so weird because I don’t even entirely hate the way I’m referred to by them… in a way its even the ideal, and I know I’m kind of a family luckshit for being treated with any humanity by my family as a tranny whatsoever. It’s how I got them to treat me this way that kinda disturbs me. But idk, maybe things will just remain much the same if I basically confirm to them that I’ve been womancoping all along, and I’d just end up less distressed in the end, but I also don’t want to reinforce any prejudices about trans women actually being third-things in-denial by doing that.
Sometimes I feel so retarded for having managed to create a situation where them gendering me neutrally feels bad when I’m like obviously actually nb and already think of myself in gender neutral terms. It doesn’t feel bad because I actually disagree with it internally, it feels bad largely because I’ve only ever insinuated I’m a trans woman, and I’m like… offended on trans women’s behalf I guess lmfao. Fmstl
Sympathies are appreciated nazar, it’s just so weird because it feels like the best way to get third-gendered by people who grew up with this cultural understanding is to proclaim and act-out a cross-sex binary identity. It’s what generations of people thinking “ah yes of course, we have a word for males who claim to be women, and they’re not exactly either but a third thing that’s like mostly male!” does to a people.
The most truNB thing I can seemingly do to my family is be hyper-feminine and call myself a woman, if I do that it’s they/them’s and third-gendering 100% of the time… at least my Mom does at-least actually seem to perceive me as distinctly not male or female, biologically and socially, which would be even cooler if she reached that conclusion without me insisting on being a woman all this time… the most charitable thing I can assume is that maybe she can read minds and knows I’m repping idk lmfao, it’s awkward that she seems to have exactly the right idea about me despite trying to lie to her. Everyone else just kinda shelves me as “Mahu” in their head, but it’s easy to tell that it’s in the “that’s the word for gay men you have to walk eggshells around, and they used to serve cultural and ceremonial purposes and were thought to be good with children in the days before we were Christianized, and they look so non-male that they’re not real men despite actually being men” kinda way.
One potential plan I have to get what I need AND eventually stop the lie is to tell family and doctors I’m nb only after I get ffs and rib remodeling, just in-case those things would turn out to be too hard of a sell on people who don’t believe I have 100% binary debilitating dysphoria. I’m probably done with surgeries after those two things unless major advancements are made in duosex surgeries, which I doubt, my orchie should be fine… that being said, it kinda goes without saying that coming out as nonbinary only before getting an alternative bottom surgery would make a lot of sense on it’s own lol.
But idk, it would technically be safer to transwomancope till I die… it just makes me sad to think about tho. It feels so weird to proclaim annoyance at people degendering me all the time when, like, in-theory, this treatment is actually my preference, but I just don’t want my complacency in this treatment to blow my cover, and not being taken seriously scares me, and I’ve come to see being nonbinary and being unseriously trans as synonymous, so being gendered correctly by basically anybody besides my girlfriend and 4tranners genuinely makes me anxious…
Sometimes it almost feels like a humblebrag to complain about this shit as I know it could be SO much worse, but like still tho… I just wish I felt allowed to live honestly.
if you need to get therapy letters for insurance coverage, then pretending to be WPATH’s golden girl is probably the safe play—and lying to doctors is always good and justifiable anyway.
weirdly, my mom is kind of the opposite to yours. i have a female trans friend who she genders correctly (which ig bodes well for me) but she cannot for the life of her do the same for my enby(ish) friends. at first i thought she was doing it on purpose, since she would go through the whole “she- i mean he- i mean they” charade to such a ridiculous degree, but i slowly came to realize that boomers’ brains just melt down when faced with using neutral language. no clue how she truly views anyone, since she’s gone on a couple of “i just don’t get it” rants in regards to le troon uprising.
i still have no idea how i’m going to #come out to her, since i don’t want to tell anyone how to perceive me nor do i even know how i want to be perceived. i’m probably just going to write a novel-length letter about my dysphoria on my own terms (to the extent you can tell your parents) and not #identify myself as anything, and hope for the best.
i totally get you on feeling guilty about being bummed about your family though. like, i’m eternally grateful to have a libbed-up tolerant family that i know won’t kick me onto the streets but i still wish i could be understood instead of #accepted.
It’s probably worth noting that there’s like a 99% chance my Mom is on some level a nb repper, because she’s expressed interest in getting on testosterone to counter-act menopause (despite estrogen obviously being an option), has expressed feeling prideful about how much she’s like her Dad, has expressed that pooning out socially and medically would be cool if she wasn’t “too old for it” but she can see a younger version of herself doing it “if I was raised in your time”, and has claimed that she thinks that “almost no people are 100% male or female in their brains and souls, and you seem to skew more female”, and was always a massive “tomboy”. She also thinks every single person on planet Earth is a repressing bisexual… that whether they claim to be gay or straight they’re just repressing bi’s all the same… and funnily enough I am bisexual, and so are my sisters, and if what my Mom say’s is true so is my Dad as she’s allegedly his first female partner but not his first partner, as he was allegedly living with two gay lovers before he met her… So despite being a boomer she probably see’s too much of her own experiences in me to be truly ignorant. Her imaginings of a future utopia is honestly some gender abolitionist sneed stuff too, whenever trans stuff comes up she brings up adjacent ideas that seem to come to her as shower thoughts and less-so as something that’s theoretically-informed. All very highly unusual for someone her age… and also as you can see there was genitically like a zero percent chance I wouldn’t end up some kind of LGBT being born from these parent’s lmfaooooo.
My Dad’s perfected the they/them’ing from teaching college classes and needing sensitivity training for that. He’s basically against gendering people by anything but their natal reproductive anatomy unless it’s degendering, and the school-board basically told him it’s okay to they/them trannies, so he’s ran with it. As for other family members I get the sense it’s the same conflict-avoidant logic most of the time, tho some are far more affirming. And it’s weird because my fear of not being the WPATH golden girl makes me “correct them” even tho it feels completely insincere.
It definitely has been my experience that most boomers can’t process neutral language tho. A lot of that comes from the education of their time often including the concept of the gender-neutral “he”, as using he as a universal pronoun wasn’t always seen as derogatorily male-defaultist… it’s just the logic of, y’know, everyone’s a he until you find out otherwise. Seeing the world like that is neutral to a lot of boomers. It almost makes sense as English didn’t always even have she/her. Things honestly would be better if everyone stayed a he… but I digress.
But yeah… the womancoping and caring about how others address me will last just as long as it takes to get everything I need, I think… I can see myself relaxing and not being hyper-neurotic about perceptions then, and pretty much only then…
holy trainknee gene lmao… but also your mom sounds kinda based waow. we definitely have very different mothers though, despite them being similar ages (assuming you are using boomer literally.) i think my mom operates under the normative liberal “equality of the sexes” idea and can’t really understand why anyone would troon out. i’m kind of a gender abolitionist myself at heart but i think the notion is not really conducive to transsexuals being understood by cissies. she seems to think we’re all just trenders for that reason and i guess i can’t really blame her since she hasn’t ever talked to anyone with crippling dysphoria before and is probably still working off a sex essentialist mindset.
my mom has also mentioned that apparently my grandmother used to say she wished she were born a boy, but this was always presumed to be purely in a “social opportunity” kind of way, and not the repper kind. and at least from what i knew of her in her nursing home alzheimer’s-delirium, this is the impression i got too. my mom is 100% not a repper and has pretty much said as much. my dad on the other hand… well i’d feel bad saying anything even on a pseudo anonymous internet forum… but let’s just say i have reason for my suspicions.
also
she’s literally just right, no?
I would just add, I guess, that the fact she feels similarly to me on a lot of gender things doesn’t actually inherently make me feel better. I honestly am especially scared of telling her how I feel. Because she’s clearly dysphoric and has managed to rep for all these years, so I’m worried she might learn my transition goal is more androgynous, and pull the whole “well you don’t need surgeries for that, I didn’t need surgeries for that, why am I helping you with ffs when you already look androgynous? Me and you, we’re the same. You can do like I did… I was a tomboy who passively wished she was a androgyne quasi-man thing… be a femboy who passively wishes he was a quasi-woman thing!”. I feel like she’d feel too comfortable speaking from a place of authority on what my feelings mean or how to treat them if I don’t exaggerate my physical distance from my goals, y’know?
also sorry if i gave the impression that i was saying that your situation with your mom is in any way better than mine, since maybe that’s what it sounded like. i guess i was just remarking on the stark contrast, since it’s so different to what i’m used to. but i wasn’t trying to imply that your relationship with your mom was any easier to navigate and i can sympathize with all the struggles and frustrations it would bring.
Oh it’s okay, nothing wrong was meant, I get that. It just kinda occurred to me that making my Mom sound all based can make why I’m wary of being honest to her harder to understand at first glance. In a way if she was just a cisoid with a non-dysphorically theyfabish view on gender, I’d almost feel less intimidated by explaining nb dysphoria to her. Since it’s clearly something she actually experiences too but has simply managed to rep, it’s especially complicating, because she has actual room to insinuate that she handled those feelings x way, so why can’t I do that? When I first started explaining issues I had with my body to her she kinda did exactly that. I eventually ramped the WPATH golden girl theatrics up all the way and that’s when it felt like my pleas were truly being heard y’know? Everyone still thinks I’m planning on getting full-srs, and a part of me is inclined to do exactly that because I’m in so deep, and at least that’d solidify some more distance from just being a straight-up fucking moid. It’s just sad thinking about leaving the male box and just jumping into the female one. Some voice in me is screaming at me to not let things go that far, but I can sometimes feel fate pulling on me, as there’s another voice that I often perceive to be wiser that will say that this is the only way for me to live a life that’s seen as somewhat comprehendable and somewhat dignified… for tranny standards anyways… and that idea is certainly seductive. Sounds kinda schizo maybe but yeah.
On the last point I really can’t know if heteros and homos are lying about actually being restricted to 50% of the population lol… idk, like I can understand the insinuation that bisexuality is WAY more common than we think, or that true zeros and sixes on the kinsey scale are not the majority of people who claim to be straight or gay and they’re often more like ones and fives… but saying they don’t exist just feels needlessly invalidating and gives off the impression she almost lacks a true theory of mind at times lol. Similar thing with her theories on gender. Like idk Ma, what’s more likely, everybody is repping gender dysphoria and bisexual attraction and therefore your feelings are completely normal?.. or… maybe, just maybe, a woman wanting to inject testosterone and kiss women is a somewhat remarkable thing that sets you apart from others?.. lmfao.
But to be fair the world would be a more hopeful place if she was right. A planet of nonbinoid bifags who just need to be woken up to their true nature is, indeed, the world I want to live on. But just because I share that cope with her doesn’t mean I’m so gullible as to believe in it… it’s believable to me that heterosexuality and homosexuality exists, even tho, admittedly, I frequently have to be reminded that monosexuality is a thing. Similarly, many people clearly don’t idealize standards of physical androgyny that hardly even exist like her and I do. I’m just generally wary or any position that sounds like “I’m oriented this way because I’m enlightened. You could or would feel this way too if you just deconstructed some stuff hard enough”. I said some insensitive theymab gender abolitionist stuff in my day, back when I got super into queer anarchist theory, and I feel like I learned my lesson since then y’know? I’m not like this cuz I’m enlightened. I just am. I get that same smug feeling from her and I’m just wary of it now.
And yeah I was born to actual boomers. A bit on the younger side of boomerdom, but boomers. My Mom was kinda raised by hippies tho, and like she’s read Tolstoy and stuff and believes the kingdom of God is within you and says her church is a rock under a tree and her whole politics can be summed up as praying for peace and smoking weed, so, y’know, the hippie dream never really died with her. She can be pretty radical in some respects to social issues but usually is just kind of a lib.
It is kinda understandable that an ignorant cisoid would assume trenderism like in your Mom’s case to be honest… not enough attention gets brought to dysphoria. Sorry your Dad tranny gened you lol.
also, i guess i prooobably shouldn’t be calling my dad a repper since that really is all speculation on my part. i really don’t know. i’m mostly going off general miserableness that i’m interpreting as highly-masked repression (off my own experience) plus like one piece of somewhat-damning evidence. but i don’t think i’ve heard him actually talk about gender, like ever. which, in some ways, is maybe another sign.
i was mostly joking on the last bit but there is some part of me compelled to believe it. maybe being on here too much is rotting my brain but i sometimes start thinking that all sexuality is comp-het or meta-attraction or something. i just don’t really have a good grasp on sexuality or attraction or even romance, honestly. i’m probably closest to pansexual if anything (although i rarely say it because if you mention being pan on 4t you get downcummied and called a blue-haired eff slur) so i realize that i’m probably just projecting here. but idk it’s always seemed really strange to me how people put so much weight on sexual compatibility and what not in romantic partners, when in my head that just “shouldn’t matter.” but like… you could say the same thing about gender and sex characteristics… which basically was my longest-lasting repper cope. so, yeah, i’m kinda just stupid.
so you’re wholly right about it being bad to project your own inclinations outward. i try not to be so insane, since i’ve definitely also been guilty of enlightenment syndrome before (particularly while repping.) even if i sometimes can’t help myself, i’m at least aware that such thinking does not lead to a healthy and open worldview. so it does irk me when people on 4tran4 get all holy with what sexualities / sex roles / types of dysphoria are righteous, even if it’s usually half-serious discussion. it’s funny to me that as much as we rag on tumblr vxlidity discourse, we’ve basically replicated the same debates, only for different topics and on even more dogmatic terms.
…interesting about your parents’ ages. mine also just barely make the grade for boomer status. and you’re not the first person i’ve seen on here with older parents. i’ve seen the theory floated before there could be some linkage between troonyism and having kids later in life—something like: old age -> mutated gametes -> higher risk of AuDHD comorbidity suite, possibly including transsexuality. but of course all that would also be schizo stuff that should perhaps not be entertained too seriously.
Well hey I’m technically pansexual too, and sexuality theory of mind isn’t exactly my forte either lmfao. There’s a silent part of me that judges everyone who’s not bi or asexual as superficial or overly picky, but I try to remind myself that that’s probably a super deranged thing to think and feel, and that if I too experienced monosexuality it’d be more apparent to me why that is. Still tho, when people talk about how unnatracted they are to men or women, it’s hard for me to believe the extent they take their words, a part of me interprets it as performative and an obvious lie.
Idk why it’s so hard to just believe what people say sometimes, but my instincts just reads it as performative. Like you’re telling me love wouldn’t be able to overcome your sexual preference??? Really??? And like c’mon no demographic is really all that ugly… like think about it y’all, we all got cool stuff to offer, you’d see if you only opened your eyes like me!.. lmfao. I remember an asexual nb repper friend of mine and I came up with a term for our trolly alliance when we were circlejerking about this lowk enlightenment/superiority complex we silently share due to just fundamentally struggling to understand the inner-worlds of others. BATBA. Bisexual Asexual Transgender Bigender Agender. Kinda like LGB drop the T but for excluding monosexuals and people with strict genital preferences (hence the inclusion of T). A fundamentally unserious idea meant as a self-parody, but I think about the concept and kinda laugh at myself whenever I catch myself being retardedly close-minded about orientation things.
I’d also say the pan hate just comes from the way that term is positioned against bisexual as more woke and trans-inclusive and stuff, when it really just kinda is a more narrow version of bisexual, like an elaboration of sorts, like calling oneself sapiosexual or demisexual can be. Like… human sexual distribution is no binary, I get that this fact can make people feel weird about “bi” if the assumption that it means binary-sexual… but sex is in-fact bimodal so… lmfao. “Battle-axe bisexuality” is also kinda retarded tho. Pansexual is not inherently evil and biphobic, and implying that it is is just doing the same thing that annoying pan people do lol. I think it’s okay to have a word for “I’m a dgaf bisexual” lol.
I agree that the transsexuality being included in the AuDHD comorbidity suite is somewhat likely but also not too worth entertaining. I feel like it’d be healthier to focus on the nature of the trans-autism-oldparents correlations during a time when transness and autism aren’t so incredibly politically charged with genocidal intent lol. It has been found tho that autistic brains essentially have sexual differences of their own, much in the same way that trans people have been differentiated, even in autistic adults that don’t present with dysphoria. It kinda implies that in the same way that an adult can have an autistic brain and only present with ADHD symptoms, an adult can have an autistic brain and potentially only present with dysphoria, or, on the inverse, have autism and a brain that in-theory would be ripe for developing dysphoria, despite presenting in a way that appears asymptomatic or subclinical in regards to dysphoria, which could actually explain “non-dysphoric” autistic nb’s who don’t ultimately feel moved enough to transition by their vague feelings of gender incongruence… but idk it doesn’t inherently matter. It’s all schizo to focus on even if it were fully true.
tbf the pan hate is understandable with how it gets used in the wider LGBT community. the joke about calling it chasersexual probably holds some truth. but it’s kind of a shame since i do think it’s a useful and non-trivial term. i think of it as being like negative attraction, as opposed to bi being positive attraction.
that said, i wouldn’t say it fully fits me + i hate labels + i feel weird assigning any sexuality to myself. i used to think of myself as completely aroace but now i’m feeling like maybe that was just part of my repper delusions but also i just feel fundamentally incompatible with deeper human relationships. maybe it could happen, but it would have to just ~ happen ~ —romance isn’t something i’d ever seek on it’s own. idk if i think about any of this for too long i just feel insane and very isolated. i wasn’t built for this lmao.
BATBA sounds kiiinda based tho lowkey highkey ngl
The negative vs positive distinction is a real good one tbh and does highlight pretty much why I can sometimes find the term useful, even tho it’s been kinda ruined. Sometimes when around bisexuals I’ll see people talk about how much they loooooove both men and women and everyone in between, like they’re maxxed out on androphilia and gynephilia, and that is an attraction style that is a bit alien to me, as, like, when I view others lustfully, it feels more accurate to say that I kinda look upon their body with the same kind of gaze I would apply to somebody with a completely different configuration. There’s no man ass and girl ass to me, y’know, just sometimes butts look good. People aren’t hot cuz they fit a super specific physical “type”… just sometimes what somebodies got going on just “works” for me, and a pattern is rarely obvious… it’s just a thing where there’s some people I like and others I don’t. I think I could be seen as a little bit chasery for other nb’s and androgynous people from the outside looking in just looking at my dating history, and I like to tease myself for that often, but it’s certainly more on an emotional level and about additional assurance that I’m understood, nothing actually perverted.
Not to mention preferring cuddling and outercourse over kinks and intercourse kinda putting me at odds with, like, most sexuality communities. And yeah labels are weird. It feels odd labeling something that I regard as so neutral and obvious to my life anyways.
BATBA 4eva