♔ ♱ ♔

I was vaguely openly queer, as in, I hadn't told my parents I was trans yet but I had an online girlfriend when I was 14 that they knew about, I was publicly identifying as pan, and was involved in my high school GSA, etc. and I needed a private space outside of school and the internet where I could process my traumas while being out as trans. As such it was really important to me that I had a queer or queer friendly therapist. Now that was hard to come by in Indiana even in the 2010's (especially bc a lot of the ones advertised were covert conversion therapists) but we did finally find one that took our insurance. A middle aged, married cis lesbian, who advertised as having experience with trans clients*.

I didn't know this until my early 20's when my mom and I were reconciling her poor reaction to my eventual public coming out as trans at 18, but my therapist was very convinced that I was not trans when I came out to her. She shared the fact that I told her I was trans to my parents and explicitly told all four of them she doubted me in her sessions with them about me.

I'm thinking about this all because the anniversary of my dad's passing was recently and I've been doing a lot of reflecting on my conflicting feelings about the ways he treated me as a teen (that was part of why I was in therapy, and why my parents were having sessions with my therapist without me). Then the memory of a day where he took me to Barnes & Noble and made me pick out several fashion magazines because "he thought I needed to be more feminine" came to mind and it clicked.

My therapist probably told him to do that.

It always struck me as very odd that my dad did that because while he was always kind of a "girl dad" with me growing up, he was also the first parent to fully embrace me when I publicly came out and never had any issue with my general lack of femininity when I was younger - in fact he often encouraged it and was very progressive about my upbringing... Until I started seeing my therapist and suddenly he was very concerned about me being a young woman and not being "feminine enough".

If that isn't a perfect example of transandrophobia, anti-trans masculinity, the gendered correction young people perceived as young women experience when exploring our genders/gender expression, and the private violence cis queer adults in positions of power can inflict on trans youth - particularly that adult cis women can inflict upon trans masculine youth, I don't know what is.