About fighting with your parents

A little before I quit my job, I started hanging out pretty often with a non-binary person I met on Tinder. At the time I was still presenting completely as male, and they were presenting as a gay man. We started talking because we were interested in each other, but after a while we ended up having a lot of conversations about gender. That's when I finally opened up about never really identifying as a man and about how transitioning had been a dream of mine for a long time. During those conversations they also told me about their own gender identity, and we both realized there wasn't really anything wrong with us going out together, hooking up, but a relationship probably wouldn't work in the long run.

So we just became really close friends instead. We started going out all the time, to bars, clubs, and they introduced me to a lot of other queer people. Little by little I started feeling more comfortable with my own gender expression.

One day they gave me a skirt as a gift. I was so happy that I wanted to wear it the next time we went out. I shaved my face, shaved my legs, put the skirt on, and literally ran out of the house before anyone could see me. My mom noticed I left in a hurry without really saying goodbye.

I had already bought a few feminine clothes before that and kept them hidden in my room. Whenever I felt confident enough, I'd put them on and leave the house as fast as I could, hoping nobody would see me. One day my mom followed me to the front gate while I was waiting for my Uber and asked, "Why are you hiding from me? Is it because of your clothes?" At the time I was only wearing a crop top and regular pants, nothing that unusual. I just told her I was trying out some new styles and didn't want to deal with criticism that day because I wasn't in the right headspace for it. She just nodded and went back inside.

A few days later, before leaving for work, she came into my room and basically said, "I'm not going to keep avoiding this conversation with my son just because I'm afraid of what might happen." We ended up talking, but it wasn't really a conversation. She kept criticizing the way I expressed myself. She said she didn't care if I wore a different shirt, but she never wanted to see me wearing skirts or dresses. She said I didn't love her, that none of this made any sense, that I wasn't thinking about how much I was hurting her, that "I've never been like this," that "this isn't who I am," and even had the nerve to tell me that I'd never actually felt this way, as if she somehow knew my own feelings better than I did.

The last thing she said was, "How do you expect me to see a woman when I'm looking at... this?" while looking me up and down.

As someone who's struggled with really intense dysphoria for years because I don't have feminine features, that completely broke me. The only thing I could say was, "This is who I am, and you're going to have to accept it, whether you want to or not."

The problem is... I kind of just gave up.

I pretty much gave up on transitioning after that. I quit my job, stopped seeing my therapist, canceled my first laser hair removal session (which was actually free), stopped paying for the treatment I'd already signed up for, and just put everything on hold. I felt so defeated that I basically raised the white flag and let her win.

Whenever that friend called me and referred to me as "she," it hurt. Whenever my best friend did the same, it hurt even more. He's been my biggest supporter for the last 14 years, even though I lied to him for most of that time. We met online, and from the very beginning I told him I was a cis woman. Since we never met in person, he had no reason to think otherwise. When I finally told him the truth years later, he just said he didn't really care because, in his words, I was still a woman. It wasn't "100% a lie."

Before I completely stopped talking to my therapist, she shared a little about her own past as a trans woman. She also talked about my mental health, and about how my BPD and bipolar disorder could be making all of this even harder because of how terrified I am of being abandoned. Then she said something that's been stuck in my head: maybe I was so afraid of other people abandoning me that I had started abandoning myself instead.

Some time later my mom came to my bedroom crying. She apologized and asked if she'd hurt me. I assume she overheard one of my conversations with my best friend, or maybe my last session with my therapist. I don't really know. Either way, nothing actually changed. She still calls me her son, still uses masculine language for me, and has never even acknowledged that maybe I don't like being referred to that way.

It's been about three months since all of this happened, and I think I spent 90% of that time lying in bed just waiting for the days to go by. Last week I finally started looking for a job again, but everything else is still kind of on hold. I still haven't gone back to taking care of myself, shaving, removing body hair, or anything like that. My plan is to find a job first, and then hopefully start taking care of myself again and slowly continue my transition, even if it's only socially for now.

I guess the whole point of making this post was just to explain where I'm at and ask for some advice. If you've been in a situation like this, I'd really appreciate hearing your perspective. How did you keep moving forward? How did you deal with your parents? If they eventually came around, what helped? And if they didn't, what helped you convince yourself that you still deserved to be yourself anyway?

I want my mom to understand me more than anything, because i love her. But the truth is that I'm so scared of having that conversation again that I've become almost non-verbal whenever I'm at home.