I'm posting this in part because there's still much ambiguity involved in the very tentative outreach of my Texas relatives to my new self. So I am in a kind of limbo with them that could go on for years with no genuine acceptance of me. Yet there would still always be the hope that someday they will get things right. Despite my sister-in-law's terse response six weeks ago that she needed more time to write a sensitive letter, I have heard nothing more. I have had no response at all from her husband, my youngest brother.
I have written a lot to them, although not since their last tepid email, giving them many details of my new life. By 'their last tepid email' I'm referring to my sister-in-law directly and inferring that my brother agrees. I have also explained to them that I know this can be hard for families and I gave them resource information to help them. Some time ago, I wrote in a blog post that 'I Want to Abandon My Family'. Now I feel more that I really don't want to abandon them but I now understand more fully how some families react to a transitioning relative. That reaction indeed may never change at all and it's no one's fault. It is simply the nature of humans beings.
The healthy thing for me to do is to start letting go of them. Some trans folks have waited and tried for years to gain acceptance that wasn't clearly there, in some form, from the beginning. In some of the stories I've read, there are ambiguous hints at acceptance, as in my case. My Texas brother, who has said several times over the years that I raised him, has not spoken to me or written me directly about my transitioning. It's been about 3 1/2 months since I first told them I am transgender. The simple fact is my life is moving on and it's moving on without them. To get on with my new life, I need to "grieve, let go and never look back" as Lynn says in the quoted text below. My Texas family needs to do the same.
In my last email to my Texas relatives about seven weeks ago, I explicitly gave them permission to let go of me. I stated that I knew one or more of them were likely having difficulties accepting what is happening in my life. The one thing I wanted them to know was that 'I am very happy' and whether they ever accept me or not I could handle it and they need not worry about me.
My visit with my West Coast brother a while back was painful because he rejected me totally. I indicated to him that if things ever changed in his thinking, I'd be open to hearing from him. The reality is, his complete repudiation of who I am ended up being very useful for me. I clearly know how he feels so it has been easy to let go of him. In his case, there was never much closeness so my grief was minimal.
My life is certainly changing, I am gaining new friends and in a very real sense a new family that loves me very much exactly for the woman I am. I am fortunate to have so many supporting people in my life, both online and off.
What I'm pasting in here is part of a long essay by Lynn Conway on her own experience with family being unable to deal with her transition. While I am technically 'pre-op', it's very clear that Lynn's comments apply to my situation as well as to her own 'post-op' status. The thing that impresses me is that she in no way blames her family for their lack of acceptance. She gets it, as I do, but it took her many years to reach the healthy point of letting go. Of course, she was much younger than me when she transitioned. I have no intention of allowing myself to be held back with false hopes of clear acceptance. The website URL is
TS/TS-IIIcde.html and the quoted text is from section IIIC. I highlighted the text in red. The blue text is a comment I added.
>>>However, TS women must remember it's not their fault that such things happen, nor is it their family members' fault. Instead, these rejections are caused by deep aspects of human nature being acted out under extremely trying circumstances. What we witness is an almost animal-level reaction to something that seems incomprehensible to close family members.
The more successful that a TS woman is in her transition, the more superstitiously emotional and profoundly shocked a reaction she may get from her family. This should not be surprising, being a natural reaction to witnessing one human being disappear forever and a completely different one replace them.
Try to put yourself in their shoes. Think how you would feel if a beloved son or brother of father transitioned. It's a terrible quandary for family members, especially if they didn't have a clue this was coming. Some family members may try hard to still "see the boy" in the transitioner and cling to the past, and thus alienate the new girl. Others will suddenly "don't know this new person who seems to have killed the boy", feel grief at the loss of their loved one, and feel great anger at the "stranger" (the transitioner) for making this all happen.
I've seen many women struggle for years in hopeless efforts to "gain acceptance" of parents and siblings who either can never regender them as women - or else can't get over the loss of the male family member. Trying to gain acceptance of such family members is like trying to make real an unrequited love. It just won't happen, and can only make the love-sick person feel even sicker inside. For some of these women, their failure to gain family acceptance causes a deep lingering sadness that hurts their chance for happiness after transition. At the same times, these families grieve for the one they lost, and this grief is resurfaced every time the see the "replacement". In such cases it would be much better to "let go", grieve, move on and never look back. Otherwise the newly transitioned woman will carry a heavy burden for years, and that burden will interfere with her efforts at building self-esteem and assimilating.
I myself fell into the trap of struggling for years to "gain acceptance" by a family member I loved. During the sometimes lonely years of my early transition, I visited my younger brother and his wife and two boys at least once a year. Sometimes it would be for Thanksgiving or Christmas, other times it would be to go on camping or canoe trips. We never talked about what had happened to me. They were very "nice" to me. I assumed they were gradually seeing me as I now was. The visits were usually fun events, even though usually a bit stiff. This went on for over thirty years, seeing them once a year or so, even though there were telltale signs that things weren't right. For example, they spent three weeks each summer at a vacation home in the Finger Lakes area of New York, along with many of my brother's wife's family members. They always raved about how cool a place it was, yet never asked me to visit there - not even once in thirty years. I already knew I was never invited to the summer place to avoid other family members "seeing me". And on and on it went, one tell after another. I just tried to push these tells out of my mind. After all, they were being nice.
Finally in 2000, just as my story was coming out, I visited my brother again. We'd planned to talk about my past, so he'd have a current perspective on the TS condition and treatments, and be better able to interact with the journalist doing the story. Upon arriving, I was shocked to learn that he hadn't read anything I'd sent him. He "didn't really want to talk about it", and instead had gone planned an "outing". All of a sudden everything became clear. I could now see all the obvious "tells" I wouldn't let myself think about before, all the tells that he still saw me as the "big brother" he'd so looked up to years ago. To him I was now his big brother who had had a sex change, whatever that was. To him I was still a guy, and when I tried to talk to him about what had happened to me, it just resurfaced grief that he'd never gotten over.
I wasted a lot of energy over years of trying to gain the "acceptance" of my brother and his wife. They were the only family I had, so it seemed important to maintain that connection. I'd felt a lot of emotion about our relationship during those years, a feeling that they were "there for me" and the I was "there for them". When I realized that they didn't even know me, all emotion evaporated. I felt no loss. I felt nothing except a feeling of stupidity for trying to "gain the acceptance" of people who out of fear, shame and ignorance wouldn't make an effort to get to know me. I let it go. They are now strangers to me, whom I won't see again.
I've heard such stories of non-acceptance repeated over, over and over again by other postop women. Stories of loved ones who can't "see us" as who we are now. Some still see and refuse to let go of the old person, hurting us to the very core of our souls. Others suddenly do see the new person, but don't have a clue how to get to know her - and resent her for killing off their loved one. Either way, the longer we try to "gain acceptance" and grasp for a loving connection with someone like that, the more we give them power to hurt us, and hurt us they will. And they too are hurt by the situation. If you're in one of these situations, it's best to just let it go.
One useful mental trick that can help us deal with the strange and quirky things that happen to us is to remember that "it's all data". One can cope with family rejection and other difficult realities of postop life by simply observing these things unemotionally, "taking notes", and realizing that you are an observer of very interesting ethnographic data [Note by Danya: This sounds decidedly anthropological to me
] about transsexualism and how people react to gender changes. The behaviors you observe are natural reactions to events that seem mystical and inexplicable to most people. Since no one "is to blame" for these reactions, this helps take some of the sting out of things. It can also help you "let go", and not try to regain the love of people who are now lost to you, and instead look forward to bringing new people into your life.
There are exceptions to this old rule of "loss of family". As people become more knowledgeable about gender transitions and less fearful of "what the neighbors might think", some families ARE now able to get to know and "regender" a family member after her transition, especially those who transition while young. It is much easier to regender a girl who transitions when she is young, because there are fewer memories of her as a post-pubertal boy, and fewer forward-projections of her future as a "man".
There is some very important lessons for families here: Families have great difficulty in regendering a close family member who transitions as an adult. It is just a fact of human nature and of the way our minds work, of how we remember someone's gendered past and project ahead their gendered future. Therefore, if at all possible families should strongly support a TS girl's early transition. This way they are much more likely to end up having a daughter, and knowing that daughter, after her transition. In cases where a close family member transitions as an adult, it's best to be very honest and forthright with them, and tell them if you are having difficulties seeing them in their new gender. That way you give them the option of moving on, and not being hurt year after year trying to hold onto a connection that is not meant to be.<<<<
Once he was shirtless I figured he'd put on another shirt. Instead, right in the middle of the parking lot, he took off his pants, too! There he stood with no shirt and in his boxer underwear. This was right outside a busy restaurant. I figured at that point it was time to leave so I turned on my headlights which shone right one him. He didn't seem to care and I drove off. He was probably changing for a date, or something. I've never seen anything like this before.
Of course, the whole purpose of the transition team and the way things were handled was to make things go exactly this smoothly.