My family tends to be sprinkled throughout the different levels. My wife, grandmother and son, easily number 1 in support of my transition and identity.
Many of my cousins I grew up with are level 2.
Father and stepmother are level 5 - possibly level 6 when I was a child - still figuring that one out as new traumas surface.
Everyone else hovers around 3 - 5.
Just remember, I’ll always be a level 1 for you ❤️
Level 1: completely supportive
Level 2: mostly supportive but lacking some knowledge, or some transmedicalist attitudes due to ignorance, not malignancy
Level 3: neutral, not supportive but not opposing either, or “supportive” transmedicalist
Level 4: leaning oppose, but no forceful interventions, or refuse to gende you correctly but used neutral pronouns
Level 5: misgendering, not accepting you as their daughter or son, but still pretend to be “loving” misgendered you
Level 6: disowning or physically beating or etc, most extreme measures
(Stolen, with love, from the user Cormier643 on Reddit. Felt like this was a great way to get discussions going again ❤️)
-Olivia ✌🏻
- :3
Despite having been on T for like 15 years now, being post top surgery, and having had a legal name change that they’ve had to put on paperwork, my sisters and I simply Do Not Speak Of It because they’re both evangelical. I’d say between level 4 and 5 for them. I don’t force the issue because I live across the country from them and only deal with it in small doses.
I have a queer cousin that is easily my number 1 supporter and stands up for me to her family (also evangelical), I love her so much 🥹 She’s easily a 1.
My parents were level 4/5 as well, but they’re dead so I don’t have to deal with that anymore. Kinda sucks they never got to really accept me before they died but they chose what they chose.
Frankly I consider myself lucky that none of my deep south super Christian family members went level 6 on me.
I don’t understand the whole trans-thing, but what i understand is life’s #1-rule:
Remove toxic people from your life. No matter who it is, period. If they dare to judge you or your decisions based on some stupid old fantasy-book and have no opinion on their own: fuck them, you don’t need such people in your world. Family is just being related by blood. That doesn’t mean anything at all really. Real family is people who are on your side, who got your back, even if they don’t understand it or like it or whatever. I don’t know why we all overvalue blood-family so much.
I just finished coming out this week to everyone who matters, personally and face to face, so I feel like I’m in a good place to go through this list
So to start I’d rate myself a 2 because of some internalized transphobia/homophobia from my conservative Christian upbringing.
My wife is a 3, she sees and loves the real me and is incredibly supportive up to a point and then not supportive at all. She’s taken me shopping and helped me pick a purse, takes time out of her busy life to help me with laser hair removal in places I can’t reach, is teaching me girl things like what to do with my long hair and painted nails… But then she won’t call me by my chosen name and pronouns. I haven’t asked her to, because she thinks she’d be lying to me. We are working on it, we’re going to make it work.
My siblings and parents (and in-laws) range from a 1 to a 5, from Bible thumping to complete affirmation.
My gay friends are all a 1, but they don’t understand that I’m still a Christian and hate that part of me.
I think “accepting as Trans/accepting as Christian” is the same scale, inverted. Those who accept my transness don’t accept my Christianity, and vice versa.
Trying to convince both sides of this culture war that reconciliation is possible and good and right, and that I, the Transbian Christian, should be allowed to exist in both camps at once… It’s exhausting. Why must existing itself be so hard.
I dream of a world in which this civil rights movement has been won, and people on both sides (and in the middle) look back at us today and say “what a bunch of bigots we all were”
Do you think your wife refuses to use your preferred pronouns, because it forces her to re-assess her own sexuality?
Even if your partner is supportive otherwise, unless they are bi or pansexual to beginn with, I can imagine, that this is a difficult part when your straight relationship suddenly changes into a queer one or vice versa over your partners transition.
So she’s bi, and probably she/they agender.
On the sexuality side, she thinks that homosexuality is immoral because certain Bible verses seem to condemn it (she would word that much more strongly), so she’d be much happier if I was content to transition to he/they feminine man. I, on the other hand, would love to jump straight from hiding behind my he/him masc to living she/her full time, the transition itself and being visibly trans scares me.
On the gender side, she feels that her soul isn’t gendered, that she’d feel equally at home in a male body, and feels that if I’m a woman because I feel like a woman, she can’t be a woman because her genderless soul happened to be poured into a woman. I told her she’s allowed to be a woman for different reasons than I’m a woman, and she didn’t like that. I told her I would happily use they/them pronouns and had no issues perceiving her as genderless, but she didn’t want that, either.
So yeah we are cracking all this open and we pick up one tiny piece of this mess and chew on it and discuss it for like a week, decide we can’t agree, put it back down and try a different piece.
We are seeing a therapist next month, but Christian therapists who specialize in gender issues are really really rare, so it’s a one time consultation instead of someone we can go back to.
I’m sorry, you are going through this. When believe systems and religion comes into it, something that can’t be reasoned with or logically worked through, it all becomes so much more complicated.
I’m happy for you, that you both seem to be committed to work through it and I hope you eventually find a place between you, that you can be both happy and fulfilled with.
You are doing great. Keep going. Don’t forget you are worthy of your happiness. Don’t let the hard parts of life dimm your shine. You are strong, you are beautiful, you are loved.
My parents have been really accepting of me being bi, and are accepting of trans people in general but on the subject my dad said something along the lines of “don’t expect me to call you they”, but honestly I think he’d be accepting if I told him. I’m very lucky to have the parents I do, I know their love for me is more important to them than anything else about me. My sister I’ve told and she’s amazingly supportive. Probably never going to tell extended family, if I see them in person they can draw their own conclusions
I apologize if this is too long. Feel free to skip to the tl;dr at the bottom if you wish.
Level 5½.
Most of my family didn’t really disown me so much as just not inviting me to anything anymore. Or talking to me. Or calling/texting me.
Of the four people who were left:
- One was flat-out Level 5 – they AFAIK haven’t changed to this day; we haven’t spoken for almost 11 years. I typically refer to her as “That Bitch”.
- One was Level 5 leaning toward Level 4 – thankfully, after a talk with them and some subsequent healthy eavesdropping on their end of a conversation with me and a friend of theirs (yes, I knew about it), they swiftly turned into a Level 1 and eventually one of my heroes in life. That was 6–7 years ago… I love my Dad. :)
- One was Level 3 – she’s still Level 3 and I have accepted that she will never change but she has at least largely also accepted the fact that so won’t I and that it’s not a phase. But at least we’re not fighting…
- And one was Level 1 with a dash of Level 2 – sadly, my paternal grandmother has been dead for a few years now. :( Rip…
tl;dr: Holy fuck, fuck, fuck then not fuck, sadface, and rip da homie…
