Instant Transmission

Many things have happened! Kind of! I have spent most of the past however-many-months-it’s-been-now either feeling exhausted and sad for no specific reason or being extremely busy, and therefore tired. So no internet rambling occured.

So, the first thing that happened, which will probably end up long:

As far as the coming out to my maternal grandmother has continued, it has been a bit more.. interesting than I expected.

I didn’t really see her again until Christmas-ish dinner, where she tried to ask me about ‘something’ in a vague and really obvious way that I had to shut down. Either it was the trans stuff or the crush (is it still a crush if it lasts for several years?) I have on a friend, neither of which are things I want other people hearing about right now.

So yes. We decided I would come over and hang out and we could talk about whatever without having to worry about anyone but my grandfather hearing, and he doesn’t pay a huge amount of attention, so I figured it would be fine. When I got there, she hadn’t gotten home from work yet, so I wound up waiting and talking to him.

He’s the kind of person whose opinions on most things are so extremely offensive that it doesn’t bother me much to argue with him, and we wound up arguing about, basically, queer and gender stuff. It wasn’t too weird, because he says junk like that all the time, so I just did my usual impersonal pointing out of flaws in the things he said. (ex/ “If a guy hit on me, I’d punch him in the face! That’s just what you did in my day!” – “You.. could just say ‘no thanks’, you know. Or nothing. Like, that’s completely possible, and then they’d just leave or something.” There’s almost no point in going into why it’s wrong to punch people in the face.)

So we circled that topic for a while. (“That’s how things were!” – “Well that’s not how things are now, and it’s not how they should be, so maybe you could try not being a jerk!” etc. Also not weird.)

So yeah, there was a lot of that. Also a lot of implying I was young and naive and silly, for he has life experience and is therefore automatically correct. I guess that’s totally just based on cumulative years spent alive or something, because I’m pretty sure he’s never knowingly interacted with a non-cis and/or non-straight person in his life.

So then he segued into “You know nowadays I could go to a bar and meet a beautiful woman and go back to a hotel, and then gasp! She’s a man in a dress!”, which is basically what I assumed his thoughts would be but still got me kind of angry.

So there was basically the same conversation. (“So? The ‘no thanks and leave’ plan still totally works here, you know.” – NO THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLE AND HUMILIATING – “If it’s such a big deal to you, maybe you should just ask everyone you meet first.” – SOMETHING COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO WHAT I JUST SAID) So I was kind of suspicious of this topic change, but I didn’t call him on implying anything.

So when my grandmother got there she heard the topic of conversation and was all “I thought we talked about this, stop it”, so yes. Apparently our conversation last time, in which she explicitly said ‘Don’t tell your grandpa’, really meant ‘Don’t tell your grandpa, because I am going to do that and not ask or tell or even warn you afterwards’.

So then I got from him:
-You look like a girl! You’d totally be a pretty girl, you just need make up and dresses!
-So what, you expect me to think of you as a boy?!?!
-You can’t be something else! No, what are you trying to be really?
-I saw a horror movie with something like that (non-binary people, I guess?) once. Is that what you want?
-“If I were your father, I wouldn’t just be angry, I’d be hurt”

-And spent a lot of the rest of the day trying to explain to my grandmother:
-The difference between sexual orientation and gender identity;
-No, some people are asexual and/or aromantic but I am pretty sure I am not, I told you about my friend, remember?;
-Please refer to people by the correct pronouns please I am not even asking you to do it for me yet;
-It’s not bisexual if you can like more than two genders;
-No I am not a lesbian for at least two reasons, it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe I could like guys too;

I still have no idea if any of these ideas took, since I don’t see her often and rarely without a bunch of other people around. She tends to forget things I tell her in between the times we have to talk pretty consistently.

I’m relatively confident that my grandfather won’t say anything, since I think she made him promise and the whole family’s still kind of trying to avoid major conflict since my sister leaving. So that’s pretty stable, anyway, if awkward.

I didn’t manage to articulate to her that she shouldn’t have told him without asking me, and I doubt I could have made her understand it. I ended up complaining about this to my sister, too, but with a lot more capslock and sarcasm. And that’s where it stands.

I’ve told four people about my being neutrois so far, other than the people I volunteer with: my younger sister, my younger brother, and my maternal and paternal grandmothers, in that order. My siblings I never really decided to tell, and they don’t really seem to care. Especially since it doesn’t really matter much at this point, I suppose. Might have a harder time later, but probably not much.

I told my maternal grandmother a couple of months ago, and she was cool with it. Pretty much. It was relatively easy to explain to her (though I didn’t actually use the word ‘neutrois’, now that I think about it), and she said she’s not surprised. Which is.. good, I guess? She said she’d call me but hasn’t, and I haven’t really seen her since, but she does that a lot.

I talked to my paternal grandmother about two weeks ago, since I go to her house for a few hours every week because of school. It’s proving to be a little more difficult. She refers to people by the wrong pronouns, doesn’t understand the difference between sexuality and gender, and doesn’t seem to care much about learning any of this.

I wonder if the reason there haven’t been any problems is because I haven’t asked anyone to actually change anything they do, though. I mean, I can’t really do anything more while I’m depending on the parents (and everyone advised me to not tell them anything), so it’s not like they have to change pronouns or names or anything at all, really. I don’t even look different, since I’ve pretty much looked the same since puberty. I don’t know.

Oh, and note to the world. If someone tells you they are not a girl, saying that you can’t look at them as anything but a beautiful young lady and that you can’t believe anyone would perceive them as a guy (or anything else) is not particularly nice.