Breaking the cycle

[Saluki]

It is!
We humans need to be able to talk about things openly without being verbally and even physically attacked in the process.
Especially difficult to understand is that his abusive behaviour and meltdowns have absolutely nothing to do with him being trans: they're to do with him being emotionally disregulated. Yet he refused over and over again to get professional help for his severe emotional disregulation.
He knows I've been supportive. He does know this.

It's never been that I have a problem with him being trans, (though like any other parent, I very much want him to be sure he's making the right decision. Not sure if he's giving himself the space to find out). It's that I have a problem with his obnoxious and often abusive behaviour that's gone way beyond the "normal" teen rages that many teens go through. In fact it's been getting increasingly bad the older he gets.

Let's just say it's really, really hard for him to cope with gender dysphoria: that doesn't give him an excuse or even a reason to attack me and behave like he has been. He wouldn't even join the forum for people on the waiting list for the gender clinic his GP gave him; he also refused to engage with any of the specialist support that the private therapist who diagnosed his dysphoria recommended. He said he goes on Reddit. In my experience, Reddit is a cesspool of trolls. The more he looks at all this stuff on the internet, the more aggressive he became towards me.

It's horrible feeling a sense of relief that he's not here. And also feeling terrified that he's not mentally stable and pretty much alone in the world because he's pushed his supportive family away and made it impossible for him to live here any more. I just want him to be okay.

I also want him to get some good, regular, long term professional care for his mental health.

I completely accept that if he's *genuinely* going to have a happier life by medically transitioning, that's his life, his choice, and I'll always be his mum. I don't accept that he's taken all the steps required to be of a sound enough mind to know whether the path he's taking is going to make him happier. I really don't. I'm unable to talk to him about this and haven't mentioned it for years because I was made aware that this topic was a rage trigger. That's pretty narcissistic. I lived with the psychopath ex husband long enough to recognise a pattern of blowing up at anything I said he disagreed with in order to control me. I walked on eggshells for most of my marriage. I recognise narcissistic control techniques and I have boundaries.

What I can't accept is being treated badly. What I also wish is that he'd accept some help to talk this gender incongruence thing through in depth. Because it's been feeling to me for quite some time that he's scared that if he gets regular therapy, that they'll somehow talk him out of being trans. Which doesn't make sense at all. Because if he really is, how can someone talk him out of it? And why would he be scared to be talked out of it anyway? It's not like he's a biological male wanting to transition to female whose voice has deepened and who's developed a big, chunky, masculine face and body. It really is different for female to males- they can get the same results long term if they leave it til their 40s and beyond, whereas a person who was born male isn't going to be able to. So why the desperate, obsessive rush?

I don't talk to him about this stuff any more because I'm guaranteed to have my head bitten off.

The obsessiveness of it and the complete refusal to have any calm, open discussion about it is a red flag to me. The absolute rage that happens if I even slightly disagree about something eg) whether or not Elon Musk is a horrible individual, is a red flag to me.

I guess as a parent, I can't be right, no matter what I do or say.

If I'm thoroughly supportive, I'm wrong because I trigger him by calling out his abusive behaviour eg) if he shouts abuse at me or throws things/breaks things and I say "your behaviour is abusive", I get told I'm being abusive by using the word abusive to describe his behaviour. I even go to the lengths of explaining that it's not that I believe he's deliberately trying to hurt me, but that he needs to understand that certain behaviours are abusive, and that he needs help to learn healthy coping strategies and help to regulate his emotions. It's not like I'm even arguing with him about anything: I just say I don't feel able to talk about that if I feel like the conversation is going round in circles. It's okay to not understand someone completely. He desperately wants/needs me to understand every little weird thing about him and when I can't understand, he becomes completely enraged. If I set boundaries and limits eg) no, I'm not having that conversation because I don't understand it and I'm not going to be able to understand it, he gets so furious. It's not my fault if I genuinely don't understand something!

Ugh.

It feels like in the world there's no middle ground in this gender thing. It's either extreme gender ideology that strives to fit everyone into a specialised box, and forces people to conform to their ideology, otherwise they're evil, or on the other hand, people who want everyone to have very strict traditional gender roles where females are all soft and feminine and men are quite macho.

I'm somewhere in the middle - just being me and minding my own business. I just want to be treated in a reasonable, respectful manner and I don't want my son (or anyone else) trying to make me tiptoe around him in case some word I say offends him.