Well, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, not having any personal experience with transgendered folks, but that’s certainly not the conclusion I drew from her posts.
Sounds to me like she was pretty supportive, all things considered. If you can’t get over the fact that she can’t help but think of her ex as a man, when that’s how she knew him for some seven-plus years, her husband after all, then I think maybe it’s you who has the problem.
Are you always this bitchy to your allies? :rolleyes: yourself.
Flamsterette_X, I know it’s not easy. My ex couldn’t do it either. I fault AvhHines not for being unable to make that switch, but for claiming to be understanding while at the same time continuing to call her ex a “he”, for defending doing so (making it clear that doing so is deliberate), and, even worse, saying things like “the surgery simply took the costume down to another level”. (That statement was the real killer: it proves that AvhHines believes that her ex is delusional, rather than actually transsexual. Reminds me of Shodan and his attitudes, which I also find reprehensible.)
I can live with people who just can’t understand despite their best efforts to try. What pisses me off are people who deceitfully claim to understand when they clearly do not. And, from where I sit, that describes AvhHines.
Just seems to me that Avh was doing her best to be supportive in a very difficult situation (for all concerned). Yet you hold her in contempt because she’s not absolutely perfect, by your standards.
Smacks of “cut off your nose to spite your face” to me, but hey, it’s not my fight. shrug
“Enemy?” Could we go just a LITTLE farther over the top, KellyM? You are being remarkably bitchy here. There is a vast area between “enemies” and “the oh-so-sickeningly-(shit, I have NEVER used this phrase with the vitriol I am feeling right now)-Politically Correct.” Can’t you allow AvhHines the right to have some negative feelings about what happened in her marriage just because you can’t stand to have anybody say anything the slightest bit negative (and the “deliberate failure to use appropriate pronouns” is trifling compared with what AvhHines COULD do) about her and her husband’s situation?
You are acting like a hateful and hate-filled person. Knock it off.
Ferrous, “not absolutely perfect” would be occasionally making a pronoun mistake. What AvhHines is doing is consistently and deliberately using the wrong pronouns. That’s a base insult, inexcusable for someone who ought to know better. (Nor is it “trifling”, as dropzone incorrectly claims.) Deliberately using the wrong pronoun, repeatedly, is a very common way to try to degrade a transgendered individual and is almost always taken as an attack.
And, dropzone, this has nothing to do with political correctness, it has to do with respect. Something AvhHines clearly does not have for her ex or her ex’s feelings. Which would be fine, if she wasn’t in the same breath claiming to have been supportive.
My ex was “supportive” too – until I started seeing a psychiatrist with the intention of getting my clearances for surgery. So perhaps I am seeing a bit of my ex in AvhHines – except I’ve actually seen my ex refer to me as “she”, something which I think AvhHines is incapable of doing (with respect to her ex, at least).
I’d say something like “Try to see it from AvhHine’s or your own ex’s side, how their world got turned upside down etc,” except I don’t think you are capable when you are feeling this strongly about it. I think AvhHines is being marvelously supportive, considering how “oogy” (it seems to be the word of choice this week) most people get about transgenders.
You and I have different definitions of what is not trifling. Using the wrong pronoun is trifling. Physically attacking her husband is an example of what is “not trifling.”
Oh, and before you draw the correct conclusions, I find the concept of sex change operations gross and have long suspected that the people who go through them are suffering from a mental illness surgery cannot fix. Because of my friendship with Eve I have had to try to push this onto my ever-enlarging scrapheap of outdated and unworkable beliefs but this is a tough one. I mean, I still haven’t completely gotten over non-skanky women getting tattoos. Transgenders are a whole different ball game.
I say this because I think having a worldview in transition gives me an insight into and sympathy with both sides of this issue. However, with the transgender side having a champion with as strong of beliefs as you I’m going to lean more in AvhHines’ direction, if only to add balance.
I’m going to chime in here on AvhHines side.
I don’t have any real experience with TS but I do have a fair bit of experiance in loving my husband. If he decided that he needed to become a woman, I would have a very hard time referring to him as she, for a very long time.
Part of it, I think, would relate to my own view of myself. I’d have to wonder if at some level loving a man who became a woman might not mean my own sexuality was in question. To re-assure myself of my own identity as a hetro woman, I’d probably rather think of my husband as a man, even though I knew perfectly well that his choice had no bearing on my own gender.
I’m probably way off base here, but I’m just trying to give an example of what MIGHT be going on. Keep in mind that it was a man she fell in love with and from what I sense, still loves.
Oh, and Eve? I went to your www, and damn! If I hadn’t read this thread, I’d never have guessed from your picture! Classy!
Y’know, KellyM, changing one’s gender is not JUST a form of political activism. Sometimes people are affected personally as well, strange as it might seem to you. And not only those who choose to embark upon the metamorphic journey. Sometimes their families and friends are taken along for the ride without the resources or understanding to fully appreciate what the hell is going on. AvhHines has chosen to share with us her experience. Just because it doesn’t meet with YOUR approval is no reason to deny her right to a place in the human race.
Get off your PC horse Sunshine. It’s not doing you or your ‘cause’ (if that is the way you want to see it) any good whatsoever.
I’m sorry you find it offensive, KellyM, but I was not capable of seeing my husband as anything but the man I had always known. But I will admit that I had no desire to do so, even if I could have. To do so, to me, would have denied the happy hetero relationship we had had as husband and wife.
My ex did not want to be a woman when we married. He had (unbeknownst to me) an occasional, to his mind shameful, desire to wear women’s clothes. His admission to this, four years later, was a magnificent act of courage on his part. Over the next year, while dressing up as a woman and going out to malls and such with me on weekends, he gradually decided that he wanted to make the switch permanent. He spent a year in transition (dressing in women’s clothing for everything, basically living as a woman), and had the surgery. I nursed him through his convalescence.
I did not think he was delusional. But I didn’t think I was either. In my eyes, my heart, my mind, he was a man, the man I married. I was not aware of the moral imperative that made the emotional needs of the transgendered take precedence over everything else. Thus, if refusing to lie about it makes me unworthy in your eyes of the air and space I take up on earth, so be it.
But, KellyM, I strongly suggest you try to lose that chip on your shoulder! Not for my sake (what the hell do I care?), but for your own. Bitter, angry, resentful people are rarely happy.
I’m confused. I thought that the transgendered were people who had a very fundamental dissonance between what sex they identified with and the body they were born into. And that this dissonance began at an early (prepubescent?) age. And it is also hugely different from an occasional desire to cross-dress (as well as taking the “costume down to a different level”).
The pronoun issue is a bit tough. If my hypothetical husband decided to have a sex-change operation, I might have a very hard time thinking of the man I married is female, especially if I did not have counselling to help me through the transition. I would hope that I’d have enough respect for my ex to call her her and she, but I might be too bitter or hurt or confused to do that. I don’t know. And I don’t know what AvhHines went through so I’ll not judge her on her pronoun use.
KellyM, your comment that Jodi referenced was not nice, to put it mildly.
Sorry to be back, but I realized I had forgotten a point.
I didn’t claim to “understand” my husband. I don’t think being transgendered is something that those of us who don’t share those feelings can understand at anything but an intellectual level. The idea of wanting to be a man, of believing inside that I truly am a man despite my body, is simply outside of my comprehension in any emotional sense, and I suspect this is true for most folks (well, female folks, anyway).
That being said, I think I understood as well as was possible for someone who could not share those same feelings. I did nothing to prevent or deter him from finding his happiness, and everything I could to make my husband’s situation easier, except to deny my own perception of reality, which was as valid as his.
Look, KellyM, I recognize that you and other TSs have had a rough time, and that life has given you a raw deal. But I’m not the one who did it to you, and I don’t recognize that your pain is somehow more important than other people’s, except, of course, to you. Gender is probably the single most fundamental thing we know about a person; “Is it a boy or a girl?” is the first thing we want to know about a newborn. A lot of people, maybe even most, aren’t going to be able to switch their perception of you because your inner feelings dictate to you that nature fucked up. You know this, as does Eve. This thread came out of that knowledge on her part, as she stated quite accurately that a lot of men who might otherwise be interested back away if they find out. That’s unfortunate, tragic even, but it’s the way it is. They’re not choosing their beliefs; beliefs of that sort simply are.
Here’s a news flash for you; they’re not inherently evil, and it’s probably not going to change in our lifetimes. So either learn to deal with it, or don’t. But spewing vitriol helps nothing.
brachyrhynchos, I think that’s true for many tg people, but my husband, while he had had fantasies at a young age, had not come to any realization of a desire to be female when I met him. After he told me, he honestly didn’t know whether or not he was a cross-dresser or whether he wanted to be a woman. It took him quite a while to decide what he wanted.
I was not suggesting that for him it was a costume. But for me, it was. I knew him as a man. I helped him to look like a woman. The fact that he’d had surgery to make his body look more like a woman’s - why would that change anything for me? How could that change anything for me?
Yes, I could have been courteous and used female pronouns for his sake. But that was where I drew my line. I did everything in my power to help him, but I would not deny what I knew in my heart and mind to be true (for me). Perhaps that makes me selfish and immoral; if so, well, as KellyM so kindly pointed out, no one else has to put up with me. It so happens that that’s my preference anyway.
AvhHines, you sound like you were a lot more supportive of your husband that many of us could have been. I know to lose my husband in that way–or any way, for that matter-- would break my heart, although I hope I would be as strong as you were and help him do what he needed to do.
I heard an ex-wife of a post-op transexual on an interview show say something to the effect of to her former husband (now her friend and co-parent) the change seemed real because it was an inner truth and it felt right. But she didn’t have that inner truth, and to her it felt wrong–not that she was denying that it was true and right for her co-parent, but because she wasn’t in that person’s skin, she couldn’t feel it in the same way and had to consciously (and painfully) adjust her thinking.
