& meet dozens of singles today!
User blogs
Hi Captain!
I’m a 21 year old trans man, (he/they) who came out on New Years and I’ve been trying to help my mother deal with it and learn. My mother is so so so much like yours as described in Letter 1233, and so desperately wants to understand things, but has no clue how to deal with all the complicated feelings my being trans brings up about me and about her own gender. She doesn’t get it and won’t rest till either I’m not a man or she’s able to understand how I feel and why the hell I’d feel that way about my body and self in a way that works for her.
It’s not been the worst because I’ve got college classes resuming this week as a buffer, but I’m already so exasperated because I cannot do the work for her to understand this the way she wants/needs to but don’t know how to help her further. I wrote some of my feelings, I gave her S. Bear Bergman’s Butch is a Noun to read some passages I listed from, I suggested Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation and Kate Bornstein’s My New Gender Workbook, and a myriad of articles about how to support trans people. But she doesn’t feel this way about herself as a woman and is just so fundamentally struggling with why and how do you know this, and are you sure, you haven’t even dated anyone so maybe things will change when you do things with another person (I wanted to melt in my chair).
I’m a women’s and gender studies major! I should be able to do this, but I’m so far away from where she is I don’t know how to bridge the gap, and while it’s academically invigorating as an interest it’s becoming personally exhausting. Any advice for me, or a message that might help her?
Thanks!
Tired Trans Man
Dear Tired Trans Man:
Happy New Year and congratulations on taking a really big, hard step! Aside from your very fraught parental relationship, I hope that coming out brings you a ton of joy and comfort and self-discovery in the coming year.
First, per #1233, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relentless need to “understand” as a derailing tactic that people and institutions with relative power use to withhold compassion and help from others. Of course we want to help, we just can’t deliver any help until we are sure that it’s exactly the right help, better commission another study and think about it more. Or, what if we help, and that just makes the situation worse? Better not to do anything until we know for sure. In the meantime, can you try explaining it again? And you needn’t have such a nasty tone when you ask! Do you want help or not?
Ugggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
This is how we treat people who we don’t believe are experts about their own experiences. Their needs are always debatable, “understanding” is presented as the key to unlocking compassion and care, and it’s irresistible, really, because who wants to go against increasing understanding? What wouldn’t you attempt in a quest to “only connect” with someone who is so important to you? Surely if you just explain yourself well enough, your mom will understand, and once she understands, she’ll care, and then she’ll do the right thing. It’s a perfect trap because you’re a scholar of this stuff, because you believe in reading and well-reasoned arguments. And it’s a perfect trap for her, too, because the well-worn position where she imagines that she is the authority on what’s best for you is far more comfortable than than the reality where you know more about certain things than she does (like yourself)(and the course of study that you are a relative expert in). But your identity is not disprovable by people who aren’t you, even if everybody does the required reading!
I think it would be wonderful if your mom would come to understand where you’re coming from, and I, too would love it if she could read the perfect argument that would make her say, “Yes, okay, I get it!” and treat you right. But I also think that she needs to do right by you right fucking now whether she understands or not. As it stands, the more you try to persuade her, the more the framing persists that this is a project of persuasion, with you as the one who must persuade and your mom as the arbiter of how much persuasion is possible. To disrupt this dynamic, I want to get you out of the persuader-and-comforter-of-Mom role and reset the relationship a little bit. It’s time to enforce a set of boundaries and expect a set of loving and respectful behaviors immediately, and hope that understanding follows.
First, if you can safely get a little physical distance from your mom, do it. The dorms, another relative’s house, a friend’s house, walks outside, do something so that she’s not in your face and in your head all the time. This is a gift to both of you, I think. She needs some time on her own to process, you need some time to not feel like a freshly picked scab.
Next, I want you to take stock of all your supportive resources – emotional and physical – that don’t depend on your mom. If she gets nasty and starts throwing out ultimatums, do you have safe people and safe places to go? What can your school offer? Who’s got a couch you could crash on for a while? Do you have access to bank accounts and your important paperwork? Hopefully this is too much caution on my part and you’ll never need this list, but a lot of people who never thought they’d need it have turned out to need it, so emergency planning is going to be an unfortunate part of the coming out process until we make a different world.
For now, it’s also time to limit conversations about gender at home, not deepen/expand/footnote them. You told your mom a fact about yourself and gave her some reading material. You’re not Transgender Siri, open for 24-7 Thought Experiments. “Mom, I know you have questions, but I’m kind of exhausted talking about it right now. Can we just watch some TV together?”
Then, as soon as you have some time/headspace, could you grab a journal or blank document and make a list of things you need from your mom right now? “Mom, whether or not you understand why, I need _________________. “
You don’t have to show your mom the document or express all – or any- of these things to her now or ever. I just want to yank this back from being all about what she claims to need from you in order to do right by you. You’re a young adult in the middle of a huge, transformative thing. What do you wish your mom would do about that? What did you hope her reaction would be like? Now that you’ve told her, what do you need her to actually do in the day-to-day to make this easier on you?
Possibilities that come to mind:
- “…I need you to use my correct name and pronouns.”
- “…I need you to use my correct name and pronouns without arguing and without every conversation becoming about your feelings about my gender. If you mess up, apologize quickly and move on!”
- “…I need home to be a safe place that I can decompress and spend time with you, just hanging out, without having to justify or explain my whole existence.”
- “…I’ve shared some resources that were meaningful to me, personally, but I can’t actually teach you how to process this while I’m in the middle of going through it. If you want to discuss gender identity and transition more in depth, there are groups and resources for parents, and I need you take some of your questions and anxieties there, especially while this is all still so new for both of us.”
- “…I need what every kid needs: I need you to tell me that you love me and that you’re proud of me.”
- “…I need to be able to tell you true stuff about myself without having to comfort you because I turned out different than what you imagined.”
- “…I need you to accept that I have the final say in how I identify and describe that identity. You’re not going to be able to argue me into being different than who I am, and I can’t keep discussing this with you if that’s your end goal.”
- “…Mom, I could use a trip to a tailor and some money to replace some wardrobe pieces with stuff that fits me better.”
- “…I don’t need you to earn a PhD in gender studies, I need you to be my mom right now. As my mom, you don’t have to understand everything about everything in order to be nice to me and be on my side, right?”
- “…Telling you my gender identity doesn’t mean you get to comment on my body or my dating/love/sex life. That stuff is private and not up for discussion!”
- “…I need you to help me spread the word to the extended family, and I need you to help enforce name & pronoun expectations with them.”
Your list doesn’t have to include any of what my vicariously-generated one does, and it will almost certainly have stuff that hasn’t even occurred to me here, and that’s fine! It just matters that it’s authentic to you. Once you have your list, pick some basic actions that would make you feel better and that you feel like you can consistently insist that your mom do, whether or not she understands or agrees with the why. These will be the seeds of your boundaries, stuff where you can repeat “Oh hey, he/they pronouns please, thanks” and expect her to do what’s needed without engulfing you a long, draining discussion about it. (I keep mentioning names, both because they are important, and because cis people change their names all the time and everybody rolls with it. When Miss Thing from college got married and changed her name to Mrs. Dicksmack Elderberry Wiggenspoof IV, your mom may have had private opinions about that, but I bet she managed to not be an asshole directly to the lady in question when she wrote out the annual holiday cards, so surely she can muster the same baseline of good manners on behalf of her child?)
Once you shift the territory from “What does your mom need to understand in order to be nice to you?” to “What does your mom need to do in order to be nice to you?” it gets much simpler. Not easier, but simpler, in that the more your mom does affirming and supportive actions without creating additional friction for you, the better relationship you’ll have. The more she makes you fight for basic politeness and respect, the more you’ll shut down boundary-crossing conversations and the less time you’ll spend with her. Making it simpler also means that your scripts can stay fairly consistent and incorporate tons of positive feedback for the behavior you want to see, while still refusing to make fixing her heart your job: “”Mom, I don’t really know how to explain that to you, but thanks for [doing the thing I need you to do] anyway, it really means a lot to me!”
If she really wants to be a supportive mom, her way forward is clear: Do the kind, supportive, necessary thing for her son now AND seek more resources/readings/discussions understanding on her own time, until actions, understanding, and heart align. If those things can’t happen all at once, she should start with kind, affirming actions and words.
Important: Often, when you first set and actually enforce a boundary, the other person’s words and emotional reactions get worse as they try to bluster and bully and manipulate you into compliance, but their behavior gets better. It’s often referred to as an “extinction burst” when the boundary-crossing or -disrespecting person senses their control slipping and in panic they throw everything possible at the problem in hopes that you’ll decide it’s just “easier” to do what they want. They’ll often “neg” you – calling you “selfish” or “ungrateful” is pretty common – in order to try to blame you for how they are behaving and trick you into proving you are not that thing (by doing what they want). When you’re dealing with someone who Just Wants To Talk About It One More Time, So They Can Finally Understand, it can be really, really hard to stay consistent with your boundary, because you want to communicate, dammit! If you won’t engage until the boundary is respected, it becomes so easy for them to paint themselves as the Great Peacemaker and you as the one who is perversely refusing to engage. It’s a tempting trap, but until the boundary is respected, it’s still a trap.
If you can anticipate and plan for the traps, it can make it easier to hold your course. To do this, when you’re just starting out with enforcing a certain boundary, try to give the other person’s emotional outbursts as little attention as you can manage, and treat evidence of each behavior change as signal that it’s working and proof that you should continue. Examples:
- Mom rolls her eyes and dramatically sighs every time she gets your name right = Mom got your name right = It’s working, so keep insisting!
- Mom uses the wrong pronouns, but immediately corrected herself = Mom used correct pronouns = It’s working. Keep insisting!
- Mom calls you “selfish” or “childish” or “inconsistent ” for having a boundary, but does the thing you asked her to anyway = She did the thing = Keep insisting!
This grace period of “she was annoying about it, but at least she did it” has a limited shelf-life, and I’m sure readers could tell you stories about “Family Member, I transitioned TWENTY YEARS AGO, come the fuck on with pretending you ‘can’t remember’,” but in the very beginning, getting the actions to accrue in your favor is the first step to building a new normal where good behaviors are routine and performative backlash and outrage are way too much effort – for them – to continue.
Finally, before I go, I just want to reiterate: Your mom’s journey toward understanding and acceptance is ultimately her own project. You’re not harming her by being who you are, you’re not being trans at her, you owe her neither defense nor restitution nor an annotated syllabus. You’ve been generous so far in sharing yourself and trying to educate her in the right direction, but your worth was never subject to her limitations, and it’s entirely unfair that you should have to do all this work to be accepted in your own home. I hope your mom does the right thing and tries her best to deserve having such a wonderful, thoughtful, beautiful, lovable kid. I’m sending love, and I know everybody in AwkwardLand is rooting for you.
Dear Captain Awkward,
I was wondering if you could either please help me with the problem I have, or let me know if I’m making too big of a deal out of it. I (33, nonbinary transmasc, he/they) need some strategies to deal with adults who interrupt me. I am a tour guide and a lot of my interactions with guests go like this:
Me: “Hello, everyone! Welcome to the [historical site]. Would you like me to tell you a little bit about the–
Guest: “When was this house built?”
Me: “Oops, haha, I was just going to tell you that! This [site] was built all the way back in [year], by the famous [historical figure]–”
Guest: “How long did [historical figure] live here?”
Me: “Oh, I was just going to get to that! The [historical figure] family lived here from–”
Guest: “How much of the furniture is real?”
Me: [Internally dying]
Because of my painfully long history of both being socialized as a woman and having worked in customer service since my teens, I always stay smiling and pleasant throughout these interactions, no matter how grating. I am proud of myself that in recent years, I have taken to speaking up at home when family members interrupt me by saying things like, “Oh sorry, I actually wasn’t done speaking yet,” or, “I’m sorry, I hadn’t finished the end of my sentence yet.” I feel safe doing this at home because my parents cannot demand to speak to my manager if they feel offended.
Why I feel that this might be a “me” problem is that I’ve heard from multiple sources about “collaborative overlapping,” where people from some cultures/backgrounds are used to interrupting each other. I honestly don’t know if I’m savvy enough to distinguish collaborative overlapping from people who are being just plain rude and thoughtless. Where is the line?
Is it ever appropriate to gently let adult customers know that you weren’t done talking? I honestly don’t mind if kids interrupt me, because they are still learning manners, but I feel like adults should know better. Or is that just me being insensitive to other ways of talking?
Tired Plebian
Hello from a former college teacher who had to learn how to deal with being constantly interrupted by student questions! I am using exclamation points because I am excited about helping solve a very fixable problem that I have a lot of experience with!
First, I love the example scripts you provided, I can picture the dynamic perfectly. However, I’ve noticed that they all contain a little morsel of pre-apology to the person who is doing the interrupting. At work: “Oops, haha…” “Oh, I was just going to get into that…” With family: “Oh sorry, I actually wasn’t done speaking yet,.” The person is throwing you out of your groove, and you’re apologizing for not reading their minds and working even faster. At work, at very least, I want you to actively practice not apologizing when this happens. Not even a little crumb of “sorry.”
:Brief commercial break while Canadian readers recover:
To accomplish this, I want you to stop thinking of the constantly-interrupting people as customers who need to be catered to at all costs and start thinking of them as participants in a group. You’re in charge of leading a group through an experience. In your opinion, does the interrupting behavior enhance or detract from the experience of the group? You’re worried about potentially pissing off the interrupters, but if you cater solely to them, what about everybody who doesn’t interrupt you? What are they missing when you don’t get to everything you wanted to say because one person kept interrupting you and dominating the experience? How much of everybody else’s time is spent catering to this person? I’d argue that learning to manage this isn’t about your own customer service abilities or personal standards for rudeness, it’s about managing a distraction that impedes your ability to do your actual job and serve everybody who visits the site.
With that framing, here are some practical steps:
1. Set clear expectations from the start. “Hello and welcome! Before we get started, there are a few housekeeping rules. [Insert info about what can be touched, where exits and bathrooms are, rules about photos and recording devices, etc.]. Finally, in every room/stage of the tour, I’ll deliver some information for everybody first, and then I’ll pause so that you can ask questions. If a question pops up at other times, I’ll ask that you kindly hold off until those periodic discussion breaks, so we can all hear each other and stay on topic, thank you.”
Laying out expectations doesn’t mean nobody will ever interrupt you again, you will definitely be interrupted both by people who are extremely enthusiastic and curious and people who heard you and assumed “Surely they don’t mean ME,” a.k.a. the exact same people who interrupt you now. But setting it up from the start gives you more room to maneuver, and it tells everybody exactly what will happen: a) Don’t worry, there will be time to ask questions, so there’s no pressure to absorb everything all at once, and, b) People can certainly ask questions as they pop up, but they won’t be attended to until the Q&A.
2. Pause, then try working the interruption into the flow of what you intended to say anyway.
For example, when a guest interrupts your intro to ask “When was this house built?,” if that’s part of what you were just about to cover, pause briefly to reorient yourself, then use the question to continue speaking to the whole group. “Everybody in? Great. Gather round. Now, the house was built in [Date] by the [Family], but the part we’re standing in was an addition in [Date].” Spiel continues….
The pause is important. It can be short, but don’t skip it. It’s an efficient way of silently communicating with multiple audiences at once, delivering “Oh, yup, I heard you,” “There’s a rule about asking questions, you’re not misremembering that!,” and “Don’t worry, I got this” to whoever needs to hear what.
For added effect, try holding up a hand or finger in a non-verbal “”One minute!” or “I see you, please wait!” gesture during the pause to acknowledge the question asker before you return to addressing the group, so they aren’t tempted to keep repeating their question even louder.
3. Remind, redirect, and thank people in advance for doing the thing you want them to do.
If the same guest then immediately interrupts to ask, “So how long did the [historical figure] live here?”
Briefly pause again, take a breath, reorient yourself in what you were about to say, and only then address the person. Try keeping a smile and a very even tone, but be firm. “Good timing, we’re about to cover that period in detail, so please hold onto that thought for when we get to questions! Thank you!”
Then, do something with your body language and attention to consciously return to speaking to the group as a whole: “Now, this room was used for [purpose], which is interesting because ….”
It’s tempting to think that it’s easier to just answer each little quick question and move on, and sometimes it is! Every group is going to be different, so calibrate these strategies as you go depending on who is in the room and how you’re feeling about all of it. Just, keep in mind, people are here to hear from you and learn from you for a reason. If it takes you a second to get back on track, go ahead and take that second!
4. When it’s Q & A Time, definitely *do* go back and invite the interrupters to ask their questions.
Give them lots of friendly attention and praise during those intervals.“I appreciate your patience! Now, I remember, you were asking about [historical period], Sir. To answer your question, it’s _______.” If the rest of the group isn’t really asking questions and is more talking amongst themselves, definitely take time to go up to the person and engage more one-on-one. You want the interruptions to stop, not the enthusiasm!
In fact, a very good classroom practice that may be transferrable to you is to give people breathers to talk amongst themselves between “lecture” time and “Big Group Q&A” time. While they’re discussing or just taking the place in, circulate around quietly to each individual and small group, and bring the best insights and questions back to the bigger group before moving on to the next thing. “You all have such interesting questions! For example, who knows what a ______ is?” Having a loud, interrupt-y, “this group activity is more of a 1:1 chat between me and the teacher” person in the room can have a quelling effect on everybody else, where, even if the quieter people CAN get a word in, they don’t want to come across like That One Person, so they don’t speak up, to everybody’s loss. Doing something like this gives the louder people some of the individual attention and affirmation they crave while also making sure more voices and insights make it into the room.
5. Remember, there’s only so much you can do.
If one person is really determined to make it all about themselves, there’s only so many ways to be like, “Okay, only one person can be talking at a time, and right now that’s me! We’ll get to your questions and comments in just a moment, ma’am!” or “We also conduct PRIVATE tours of the space, if you’d like to book one of those just check in with the reception desk!” and keep your cool, so if you’re not able to successfully pre-empt it or shut it down every time, assume this person is this way everywhere, with everyone, and it’s probably not you. There are a lot of turds in the world who feel entitled to be catered to in all things at all times. They won’t perish if you shush ’em.
This advice isn’t about being perfect, or never being interrupted again, it’s about restoring a sense of agency and control so that you can incorporate interruptions into your flow without letting the tour be hijacked in a way that upsets you and disrupts the rest of the group. I hope it helps, happy explaining!
