A plea, if you will
Nov. 24th, 2010 09:41 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
cykotyks.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
transHey all! I've got a bit of a story (that gets a little ranty) and a related request.
Backstory: my boyfriend and I are both FTM. I've known since I was 19 (I'm 22 now) that I was trans, but my boyfriend didn't quite figure it out until about a year ago, when we started living together. (Some may remember my post inquiring about gender-neutral pronouns.) However, he can look back on his life at this point and see that things make a lot more sense now that he knows he's trans, plus he fervently wished for a penis when he was three. This will become relevant.
Today we had an early Thanksgiving celebration with his mother (his parents are divorced - we're celebrating with his father on the actual Turkey Day). He also decided that he needed to come out to her for several reasons, the biggest being that he is a bit emotionally unstable during PMS, and he can't deal with the depressive effects of his hormones and the stress of college at the same time, so in order to be able to handle staying at college, he pretty much needs to be on testosterone to level out his hormones so all he has to deal with is school-related stress. But, we're kind of tight on money, so getting it started on our own is a bit of a reach, (though we will if we have to) so we were hoping that his mother would help us out with that.
Upshot is that she took his coming out very well (not that she's trying very hard to use his preferred name or pronouns, but that's something we'll work on). Downside is that even though she's accepting, she has a hard time understanding. She's known I'm trans, so this isn't a new concept to her, but she's never really respected it (as she misgenders me constantly, despite having only known me as her kid's boyfriend). But, since I'm not her kid, she doesn't feel the need to police my life, so she accepted it and moved on. But now that it's her kid... There is a lot of misunderstanding coming to light.
As for minor transgressions, she finds it odd that somehow two trans guys have managed to get together in a relationship (disregarding the fact that it's a fluke in the first place that either of us found somebody as weird as the other!), and she's skeptical of the timeline (disregarding that he told her upfront that these were feelings he's had to lock away and try to forget about since he was very little). Then she tries to convince him that not everybody feels connected to their gender...by telling him that she doesn't always feel feminine/girly. He shot that down by telling her flat out that a cis person cannot properly relate to the trans experience. It's simply not something cis people feel or agonize over. Then of course she switched over to the "I'm just concerned for your health" mode, disregarding that I have been info-gathering for years, and that information doesn't become less valid when applied to him. She's worried that we "don't know" what testosterone will do to us (oh, we do, and we're looking forward to it all), and that we're being "mislead" by word-of-mouth information, and that we should see somebody who really knows what they're doing (because apparently the doctors at Fenway, who deal with a lot of trans people aren't good enough), and so on and so forth.
My request is this: based on the things she's worried about ("knowing" and HRT, mainly), does anybody have...
A) Any bookmarks or links to reliable studies and information on these subjects?
B) Any tips for my own Googling - what I should look for and avoid?
His mother is very science-minded and I think might believe anything that a study tells her is true. Hard facts and extensive research studies are ideal, but I've no clue where to start looking for all this. We're hoping that if we can give her enough information, enough reason for her to believe that we're serious about this, that she'll stop pestering us about it and may actually help out. Anything available on the internet is also ideal, as we don't have a lot of resources for other things, but book titles may also work, since I can pass them along as recommended reading.
Any help at all is appreciated, and thanks for sitting through all this!
Backstory: my boyfriend and I are both FTM. I've known since I was 19 (I'm 22 now) that I was trans, but my boyfriend didn't quite figure it out until about a year ago, when we started living together. (Some may remember my post inquiring about gender-neutral pronouns.) However, he can look back on his life at this point and see that things make a lot more sense now that he knows he's trans, plus he fervently wished for a penis when he was three. This will become relevant.
Today we had an early Thanksgiving celebration with his mother (his parents are divorced - we're celebrating with his father on the actual Turkey Day). He also decided that he needed to come out to her for several reasons, the biggest being that he is a bit emotionally unstable during PMS, and he can't deal with the depressive effects of his hormones and the stress of college at the same time, so in order to be able to handle staying at college, he pretty much needs to be on testosterone to level out his hormones so all he has to deal with is school-related stress. But, we're kind of tight on money, so getting it started on our own is a bit of a reach, (though we will if we have to) so we were hoping that his mother would help us out with that.
Upshot is that she took his coming out very well (not that she's trying very hard to use his preferred name or pronouns, but that's something we'll work on). Downside is that even though she's accepting, she has a hard time understanding. She's known I'm trans, so this isn't a new concept to her, but she's never really respected it (as she misgenders me constantly, despite having only known me as her kid's boyfriend). But, since I'm not her kid, she doesn't feel the need to police my life, so she accepted it and moved on. But now that it's her kid... There is a lot of misunderstanding coming to light.
As for minor transgressions, she finds it odd that somehow two trans guys have managed to get together in a relationship (disregarding the fact that it's a fluke in the first place that either of us found somebody as weird as the other!), and she's skeptical of the timeline (disregarding that he told her upfront that these were feelings he's had to lock away and try to forget about since he was very little). Then she tries to convince him that not everybody feels connected to their gender...by telling him that she doesn't always feel feminine/girly. He shot that down by telling her flat out that a cis person cannot properly relate to the trans experience. It's simply not something cis people feel or agonize over. Then of course she switched over to the "I'm just concerned for your health" mode, disregarding that I have been info-gathering for years, and that information doesn't become less valid when applied to him. She's worried that we "don't know" what testosterone will do to us (oh, we do, and we're looking forward to it all), and that we're being "mislead" by word-of-mouth information, and that we should see somebody who really knows what they're doing (because apparently the doctors at Fenway, who deal with a lot of trans people aren't good enough), and so on and so forth.
My request is this: based on the things she's worried about ("knowing" and HRT, mainly), does anybody have...
A) Any bookmarks or links to reliable studies and information on these subjects?
B) Any tips for my own Googling - what I should look for and avoid?
His mother is very science-minded and I think might believe anything that a study tells her is true. Hard facts and extensive research studies are ideal, but I've no clue where to start looking for all this. We're hoping that if we can give her enough information, enough reason for her to believe that we're serious about this, that she'll stop pestering us about it and may actually help out. Anything available on the internet is also ideal, as we don't have a lot of resources for other things, but book titles may also work, since I can pass them along as recommended reading.
Any help at all is appreciated, and thanks for sitting through all this!
