r/GuyCry•
shorty6049

I'm just so tired of my life being consumed by this...

Just venting, no advice

Sorry for the vague title, I'm just not sure how to sum it all up in 300 characters or less...

I appologize for this long post... I just need a space to get this out. Any names below have been changed for privacy purposes.. My use of pronouns may get slightly confusing but I'll be changing them to fit the current point in the story.

I don't even know where to begin here but I'll try to give a really quick rundown of my situation here as its relevant to this post.

  • Our family consists of Myself (37M) , my two kids (technically step kids, but I'm only mentioning that to give context. I still consider them my kids) and my wife.
  • In the spring of 2020, both of my kids (10 and 17 at the time) transitioned to school-from-home due to the pandemic. Around this same time, my eldest was at the tail-end of a several year period of time when she identified as a boy and went by a more masculine name. It was a hard few years navigating that , vising an endocrinologist a couple hours away, dealing with a lot of mental health challenges, therapy, etc.
  • As the year went on , our 11 yr old girl (we'll call her Maggie) started experiencing mental health issues of her own. At the time we didn't really know it but she had been talking to people online that she shouldn't have been and going through some other traumatic things that didn't come out until years later in therapy.
  • Fast forward a bit, and the restrictions have lifted and school is back in-person . Our oldest decided not to go back to in-person and finished out her senior year online. Maggie -did- go back, but immediately started having problems. Complained every day that she hated school, fought us most mornings about going, etc. until one day we received a call that the crisis team had been called to the school because she had expressed suicidal ideation to the school therapist. We were basically told that if we didn't agree to send them to an inpatient facility , that we'd be reported to DCFS. This was a really difficult decision for us but we ultimately sent them (for about a week if I recall) partly because she herslelf believed she should go.
  • When Maggie returned, she told us that she had changed her name to Ali and was now identifying as a boy, and felt so validated that everyone there was calling him by his new name. We were honestly pretty surprised and confused by this because -Maggie- had never previously expressed much of a desire to be less feminine. She was a "girly" girl who played with barbies a lot, liked pinks and pastel clothing, etc. We felt that this may be a case of following her older sister in "deciding" to be trans rather than it being her -true- self. As supportive parents, we went along with this name and gender identity change because whether or not we -believed- it , we wanted him to feel supported until the time that he ultimately settled on who he was inside and out.
  • Side note; we're not transphobes.. We're not against the idea of our own kid being trans. This was just a gut feeling we had based on the kid my wife had raised for 13 yrs at this point and I had known for a few years.
  • So we told our friends and family that Maggie was now Ali and that he went by he/him pronouns. both of our families are fairly conservative and they took it about as well as could be expected... they tried their best to use the new name and pronouns but we got a sense that several family members were not supportive, didn't believe in the concept, or felt that perhaps we as parents were doing something wrong...
  • As the years have gone on, Ali has (self-admittedly) gone though pretty much every color of the rainbow flag, identifying as male, identifying as female, identifying as nonbinary, gender fluid , used some obscure pronouns relating to animals (cryptopronouns or something like that? ), been diagnosed with multiple mental conditions which overlap such as a provisional Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis, bipolar disorder, depression, eating disorder, autism, has gone through bouts of substance abuse, and has been to inpatient hospitals around 20 times since 2020 for self-harm related events. There's quite a bit more to this , honestly, but I don't know how relevant it is or whether I should share it all...
  • Midway through all of this, Ali decided that he didn't like the name Ali anymore (I don't quite remember the reason at this point) and wanted us to start calling him Lynk and kind of decided sometime after that , that they were going to go by they/them pronouns, though they also began wearing more pink outifts, getting into lolita fashion, loves to do their hair and makeup , etc.. we also noticed that some people referred to them as "her" . At one point they also seemingly decided that they weren't actually trans but didn't want us to change how we referred to them due to a grudge they were holding against their sister (I won't go into it)
  • Recently though... They've told their therapist during a family session that my wife and I don't support their gender identity and won't let them get hormone therapy , etc. which took us by complete surprise because from our perspective, they were coming full-circle and heading toward living as female again. They've also changed their name again to Zelda and wants us to start calling them that and using he/him pronouns again (at least I think? they've never specifically said this to me, just my wife ) .
  • Aside from that not really making sense to me considering the video game characters genders, I'm REALLY struggling with this one... I want to be a supportive dad and I want my kid to feel valid in their identity , but everything inside me is saying that this can't keep going on. I'm supposed to go back to my family and tell them "Okay, I know that they were a girl, and then a boy, and then nonbinary , and that we wanted you to call them "she, then he, then they" but now they're Zelda and you need to call them "he " again. And yeah, I'm aware that their entire wardrobe is pink outfits , and that they wear skirts and outfits that show off their figure, and that Zelda is actually the female character in the games, but just go with this"
  • We've gotten ourselves into unsurmountable amounts of debt from all these hospital stays, multiple residential treatment stays (Including a trip out to California from our home in the Midwest to get them to a facility we thought could really help) , We're stressed 24/7 due to some of the behavioral traits that go along with autism and BPD, I'm constantly worried about them... I just don't know how much longer I can keep on taking these blows in life. I've got a decent job which I've pretty much never felt good at becuase of all this other stuff we've been dealing with . We don't have enough money for things we want , I can't focus on my career because I'm never fully able to focus on work with the world crashing down around me...
  • Its all just too much and I don't know what to do . :(

Posted Jul 8, 2025, 4:43 PM UTC

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