In the previous post, I shared about how my son came out as female-to-male (FTM) transgender in 2016. In the following posts, I will share some backstory.
As I’ve reflected back upon the time of my son’s FTM transition, I remembered all the struggles we had faced. The times when we didn’t know how to continue when all the odds seemed stacked against us. The agony of helpless anger. But also the events where we got sudden help and things turned out for the better. Lovely synchronicities. Keeping the faith and staying hopeful.
The journey was about being present with someone in a transformational time period. I had often received metaphorical signs on my spiritual journey which seemed to indicate that I was going to meet people in breakdown/breakthrough transformational life situations. It turned out that my son was one of them.
In order to show what having a trans son meant for me and how that fit into the story of my life, I will first share what it meant for me to grow up as a girl and woman. This will span a over a couple of months before I get to my son’s trans journey.
My feminist path: In the next posts, I share how I grew up into a self-confident woman despite bumping up against gender stereotypes in a patriarchal, misogynist environment.
I will share about my own journey in some detail because I want to illustrate how my path in life had set me up to react to my son’s coming out along the lines of reasoning that women can be strong and self-confident and can be interested in masculine stuff and dress in a masculine way and that they didn’t need to become trans men for that. Luckily, I reacted in this clueless way towards my trans son only for a couple of weeks.
Shattering gender stereotypes: Another aspect which connects both my and my son’s journeys is that they are about shattering gender stereotypes. How does society and how do I expect a girl or a boy to dress and behave? And much of my spiritual journey was about shattering of world views. Huge paradigm shifts. And shifting gender stereotypes is just one part of that shattering process.
Questions about gender: I also want to show how the transgender topic answered some points which had come up for me during my own path of growing up as a woman, especially regarding the question of where do the differences in the behavior and gender roles in society for men vs women come from. Is it all just due to genes and hormones? Or is it due to upbringing in the culture? Or what? It turned out that there is a third aspect involved, an ineffable inner knowing about one‘s identity.
Following our inner knowing and being who we are. Last but not least, both our journeys were about the courage to be who we were unapologetically – regardless of what other people said. The prerequisite for that was following our intuition and inner knowing. Taking the right-hand path at the fork in life’s road even though everyone else around us said, “No, you better go left.” And there were many forks. And many others who wanted to give ‘wise counsel’ and tell us to take the well-trodden path rather than our own path.
Even though just being oneself should be the most natural thing in the world, sometimes it can take a lot of courage when it does not seem safe or fulfill other people’s expectations and a backlash is to be expected. Overcoming that fear of self-expression and doing it anyway was and still is a part of our life’s journey.
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This post is part of an online book about my journey with feminism and my son’s transgender journey. You can access the table of contents with links to each chapter here: TOC.
Spiritual Awakening 