So a friend of mine has recently come out as transgendered. One one hand, I am trying to be supportive of him because he has been my friend for years. Yet I am faced with a conflict; I loved this individual like a brother, I don't know if I could love them like a sister. Not to mention my stance on this subject has been one of a mental disorder. I do want to be supportive of them through this, but at the same time they no longer seem to be the same friend that I had.

So, does anyone have any advice for a hopeless bigot such as myself?

Well, if you "loved" this person's gender and what they are, opposed to who they are, then certainly allow something like this to get between you two. It's not easy from their perspective to be accepted for what they are, because there's likely going to be a bunch of [censored]s pre-occupied with otherwise trivial things. I'm sure it would cap it all off if their best friend disowns them.

But it seems like you've made the choice, and already feel different, and if this is truly the case, may you wind up with the very same thing happening to you.

I know it's not easy for them, and I am sincerely trying to be supportive. But things are, to say the least, different from now on, and I'm simply having trouble getting around this fact. If he decided to be gay, I wouldn't mind the least because that would only be a shift in their sixual identity of which I am not a part of. But in this case, they plan on changing their name, insist on using feminine pronouns, changing their behavior, and the way they present themselves to society. Essentially, the friend I have known for years is no more, because they have made the decision to be someone new. Trying to stick with this friendship might only be clinging to the memory of who he was before, without accepting who they are now.

I have not made the choice quite yet. If I had, I wouldn't be asking for the opinions of others. I am just conflicted.

One of my better friends had a six change operation about 6 years ago. For me that wasn't really an issue, I already saw her as a girl anyway. Also, I was never pushy about this subject, heck, I never started discussions about it. But when she did and wanted to talk about it, I was supportive.

But she did lose contact with a lot of people. The vast majority of her childhood/teen friends are people she no longer have contact with. Not only because they might have found it "weird" or whatever, but also because she wanted to begin her new life from scratch and not surround her with people who knew her from before.

I support my friend no matter there choices, that is what a true friend does you love them for who they are not what they are. if you are truly incapable of that kind of loyalty then no amount of soul searching can help you as Leonidas told Ephialtes, "You there! May you live forever."......My advice...Try, because the only things we truly regret are the chances we didn't take, the friend we lost to illusions and the words we never spoke.

Technically, that is not true. (S)he has been what (s)he is essentially since birth (because these things are not a matter of personal choice nor of a mental disorder, though one could say that it is a "disorder" in the same manner that homosixuality is a "disorder" but both are something which happens long before birth and can't be changed) and this is who (s)he is, only previously (s)he has "shielded" this part of his-/herself from others due to fear. True, some aspects of his/her personality have previously been shielded away as well, but essentially that is the person who is your friend. Your friend hasn't changed, you are merely discovering more about him/her. The whole person you knew already as your friend is still there, only now you see more of him/her.

You can treat this as a learning experience for both of you. Like Third said, the last thing your friend needs is to lose your support. After all, if he didn't want to stay friends, he would have just cut you off with no explanation.

Just ask her out.

:laugh: I apologize, I just had to. Anyway, I say try and "start over", per say. Playfully reintroduce yourself and see where it goes from there, assuming she wants to go the way of Freddo's friend.

I guess I always considered the possibility that my friend was transgendered. They've always been a rather effeminate individual and never shied away from accusations of it. As a matter of fact, I had brought up the possibility with some other friends of mine just the other night, who all dismissed the idea as eccentricity (because my friend has always been a pretty outgoing and eccentric individual). But I guess considering the possibility and being faced with the truth are two different worlds, the latter of which I wasn't prepared for. All of us are being supportive and plan to continue being so during this summer when he makes his transition. But I don't know who I'm being supportive of, the friend I knew who sincerely wants this, or the different person that will be, who is not the friend I knew.



I suppose that could be the case, though that would only make the person that I knew a platonic conception created in my own mind, and would leave me in the same position I am in right now regardless. What we will still have are memories, and I hope those memories are sincere and not just lies that they have been putting forth all these years.

I've viewed it as a minor disorder mostly because your biological self is not something that you can dismiss easily, and in many cases, rationally. A sixual identity is one thing, it merely affects your relationship with others romantically. But being transgendered is a more serious commitment, where you assume a new identity because you feel you were somehow born into the wrong gender. Sometimes this can be as a result of some form of mental distress, which has me more concerned if my friend is undergoing other emotional problems that he won't talk about.



Haha! Unfortunately, they have decided to be a lisbian, and I myself am asixual anyways

Thanks for the input everyone. I guess I should probably talk it over with him when he returns from college for the summer, and sleeping on it could help as well (because it's pretty late - or early for that matter - over here)

Educate yourself and accept your friend for who they are, mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. Love of a sibling is familial, so gender issues should have nothing to do with it. BTW, it's not a mental disorder, he's not crazy or insane. Good luck to your friend. He isn't going to change from the outside in, in becoming a woman, she/ he's going to be coordinating his physical self to his emotional and pyschological self.
She'll finally be who she was born to be. It should be a cause for celebration. Instead, you assume they are crazy. Sounds to me like you define people more by physical characteristics instead of psychological ones.
I suggest contacting the local chapter of LGBT or a support group, if you really, really care about your friend and want to be supportive.

About the same as what I was going to write. ^_^

I'm going to ignore the fact that you believe that being transgender is a mental disorder. All I will state on this is that, according to the APA (http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/transgender.aspx) and mainstream psychological literature, being transgender (just like being homosixual) is not a mental disorder.

What you seem to be expressing here is, to put it bluntly, selfishness. You express that you feel that your friend's desire to physically transition into the sociological gender she believes she is to be a kind of ending point - as if your friend will no longer be the person you know because of this transition. Obviously this is false - your friend has made the decision to express herself fully to you and your friends - and I am certain that she has wrestled with this decision for many years, if not her whole life, and trusts you enough as a friend to confide in you. I'm likewise quite sure that she agonized about telling you and your friends about her feelings regarding her gender - worried herself sick that you would reject her for who she feels she is. And yet she felt that the bond you two shared was strong enough to overcome it. The relationship you two share will only truly end if you will it to be so.

I'm sure you don't want my advice after all that, but I would strongly recommend that you be honest with your friend. First, however, I would advise that you talk to a local LGBT chapter about this. Supporting your friend's transition while inwardly feeling that it is a mental disorder is simply not being honest with your friend. And before you tell your friend that being transgender is some sort of mental disorder, I'd recommend you do your research on the subject and come up with a damn good reason you think it's a mental disorder, 'cause "But it's not rational!" ain't gonna cut it.

I think that if you try to force yourself into a "politically correct" mindset (one that refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem - a conflict between how you see them and how they see themselves) then you are more likely to find it difficult. Just telling yourself that you have to change your mindset - your sincere belief that there's something wrong with them - isn't going to help you in this situation.

In my view the way to work through it is to start with what you know: that you love this person as a sibling. Forget everything else for the moment - what you should be thinking and what you should be feeling - and just concentrate on that. This is someone who's meant a lot to you in your life and that they have trusted you with this information and not tried to cut you off speaks volumes about their regard for you.

So what if they had a "mental illness"? A lot of people do in life, and plenty more people have behavioural and psychological quirks that would fall into a disorder spectrum. It's immaterial whether you approve or not of these things - you can't will them away - so if you want to continue to be that person's friend then you have to learn to accept that as being part of the spectrum. Say if it was a physical rather than mental irregularity: what if your friend was blind? It wouldn't matter much whether you loved or hated that about them, it's just something that's part of their existence. You might not want to cheer and say "good for you!", but they wouldn't much appreciate you being morosely pitying about something they just view as being something that makes them a bit different.

As far as your friend is concerned, it is you who is blind, not them: you see a boy; they see a girl. They just want to fix everyone else's eyesight so that when you look at her, you see a girl, just as she does when she thinks of herself. Like the transformation, though, it won't come overnight but be a long process over a number of years. That works to your favour - you'll have plenty of time to get used to it. In that time, your friend will have to undergo a lot of therapy, so she'll be in the best of hands - the therapist will find out about any underlying traumas or conflicts that your friend is not discussing with you. There might not be any at all. Gender isn't quite as cut-and-dried as we like to think it is - some people are born with male and female six organs, and sometimes that isn't even obvious. An estimated 1% of live births have some measure of gender ambiguity - which is a surprisingly high number to me. Only 1/10 of those are obvious enough to raise questions of whether later medical intervention (gender assignment) is necessary - in many cases the ambiguity is very subtle, or not externally noticeable at all. Conversely, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does list transsixualism as a gender identity disorder (GID), and specifically differentiates between GID and intersix (hermaphrodite) conditions. This in itself is controversial, since there is a campaign to remove GID from the Manual of Mental Disorders, on the basis of it being an inherent trait rather than an illness. GID is more normally associated where there is an element of distress in the conflict between assigned six and self-perception.

Wikipedia says this:



Even after nearly a century of gender reassignment, and millennia of people living as a different gender than the one into which they were born, it's still something we don't know a great deal about. We are naturally worried about the things we don't understand - this is normal and natural.

There's just one thing you do know: that you love your friend, and that she loves you. Whatever else you need to know, you'll figure that out in good time.

Just to make this clear - the DSM-IV-TR specifies explicitly that in order to make a GID diagnosis of any sort there needs to be a level of discomfort or stress associated with the desire to transition to a different gender.

If this person is a friend their gender should not matter to you one way or the other.

You should continue to be friends with this person. If they're a true friend, you should also be able to talk openly and frankly with her about the whole thing. Your friend probably feels awkward around you as well; being honest and not being afraid to ask direct questions as to how she's feeling about the whole thing might break the ice and lead to an even stronger friendship in the future.

This is what everyone in this thread is saying, but, quite frankly, it's not so easy if it happens to you. I can't quite imagine one of my friends suddenly turning his life around into another gender. Sure, there's nothing wrong with this, but I'd be lying if I said I can continue to view them just the way they were before. It would be very different. I doubt this will ever happen to anyone I know though, so it's not really a problem.

This.

Now is as good a time as any to learn a bit of tolerance and acceptance of things you can not change.

One can't turn love off and on like a light switch. If you loved this person, you would accept him/her as they are regardless of gender, regardless of choices they make and without conditions. That is how love works. Unconditional is difficult sometimes but it's the purest love of all and most worth having and/or giving.

Accept your friend as he is. He's always been who he is.

Something to ask yourself on this point would be, why?

I've also noticed you using the worse "chose" several times on several subjects through this thread, as well as dismissal of things as minor mental disorders. Traditionally far more difficult than accepting someone as a transixual, you may have to come to terms with the idea of being wrong about some things. Pretty much every transgendered person I've talked to has not mentioned any sort of revelation, or sudden decision, but something that has plagued them for their entire life. Imagine something you have some kind of moral or personal objection to (like, say, drinking alcohol for someone militantly opposed to it), and then imagine that out of fear of rejection, attack, or worse from those around you, you have to embrace that thing and pretend that's who you are, year after year, hating your life and yourself because of it. While some are willing to take the risk and advocate for themselves early on, many others do not come out on it until they've finally been pushed to a breaking point. If you care about this friend, you don't just need to support her, you owe it to both of you to understand what's being dealt with, lest your support come across as halfhearted lip-service done just to be polite, in which case it will be you being looked at as a friend they only thought they knew.

Most of the values and behaviors we ascribe to genders are transient social constructs. If your ability to be friends with this person seems threatened, would that mean there's something inherently wrong with being a woman? Would you be unable to ever be friends with this woman if you saw her as such from the beginning? If there's nothing "wrong" with being a woman, what's the problem with the change in perception? You never know everything about anyone. Before he moved out, I knew my older brother as aggressive, short-tempered, impatient, and incredibly competitive. Then he got a wife, and daughter, and mellowed enormously. Someone who had stolen my possessions to give to his friends and was actually kicked out of the house, wound up a better father than most people I've known. I would not have expected this from him at all. Friends can and will change in ways you don't anticipate, and will have features of their personality that were always there but you never knew about. The only threat to the friendship, or whether they're the same person, is on your end, and whether you allow your own discomforts to control you.

This.

OP, you should talk to your friend a bit more about their gender identity. Try to find out a bit more about how they feel about it. That might help you become more comfortable with it. You could also be upfront with your friend about the difficulties you are having with this. Either way, you gotta talk to her about the issue, whether you talk about her feelings or your own. It's not going to help you if you just put on a happy face and nod.

I wouldn't be able to register something as big a change like this, but I salute your trying to be supportive.

I personally could not be supportive of something like this because of my beliefs but I can still say that a friend is a friend, but stances on friendship shifts often; it will probably strike you and be shocking for a while but after a while you may come to accept it.

Some of this is more or less what you've already read, but hopefully different enough.

Okay, I want to start on the Mental Illness bit. I actually understand how you feel on that bit myself; but before someone jumps down my throat I am actually very close to someone with a diagnosed Mental Illness and don't see that as a reason to treat someone negatively.

The fact is, if I were to pull out the DSM-IV (the big book of every recognised mental disorders), I'm reasonably confident I could find everyone in there, somewhere, at least once. I truly believe that everyone on the planet can be thought of as having a mental illness, to some degree. The questions that remain are simply whether something should be done about it, and in most cases the answer is no.

But I digress.

Back to your friend. I think the following has got to be a key statement you can't forget here:

Deep down, nothing has really changed.

Your friend is still the exact same person they were the day before they came out - they still had the same impulses, the same desires, they were still TG - you just didn't know about it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this should be easy for you or for your friend, but truly the only thing that has changed really is that today your friend has been a little more honest with you, with themselves, and with everyone else about who they are.

They still like all of the same things that they liked before, and they'll still like them I'm sure.

As hard as this is for you. this is going to be harder for your friend, and for her sake I hope you can be there for her. I've worked with a few transgendered people in the past, and even with people who are normally nice and understanding it can make them uncomfortable as they simply don't know how to treat them - should they act all Bro-y or Flirty, so what you're feeling isn't unusual.

The fact that someone does or does not have mental disorder isn't the point - the point is the OP seeming to associate (from his words) that simply being transgendered is equal to suffering from a "minor mental disorder." And as I've stated, Gender Identity Disorders (GID) are in the DSM-IV-TR, but the requirements for a diagnosis of GID are:
(source: Wikipedia, since I don't have my DSM-IV-TR handy)

In a nutshell an individual would suffer from GID if they identified as transgendered and also were discomforted by the fact of being transgendered - not, from my understanding, of being discomforted by how other people may react to their being transgendered (which is more of an issue of confidence and locus of control).

Lifes too sort to loose a friend like that