Influence of your parents on your gender identity

I know there was a similar thread to this quite a while ago now but....

What influence, if any, do you think your parents' personalities have had on the formation of your gender identity?

I was inclined to believe that it was all down to nature rather than nurture but actually, when I think about the personalities in my family, I'm starting to believe it's probably a mixture of the two.

For example, my mum is very extroverted. She has always had her emotions on show so whether she's angry, hurt, or whatever, we certainly all know about it. In fact, it often seems as if she over dramatises, to make her pain well know. My dad on on the other hand is very introverted. He might be noisy when he's at home compared to when he's among lesser known acquaintances but he never let's on how he feels. The only emotion I've ever seen from him is anger and he may express this aggressively in a sudden outburst but not very often at all.

Interestingly, my brother is very much like my mum in how he expresses his emotions whereas me and my sister are a lot like my dad, hiding how we feel until we explode with anger or break down in despair. We seem a lot colder emotionally because we're quite distanced from how we feel whereas my brother is impulsive and acts out like my mum. My brother was a real mummy's boy until he got to about 16 and in some ways he still is. He can do no wrong in my mum's eyes and she almost worships him whereas she had a different relationship with me and my sister as we were growing up. If we didn't do what she wanted, look how she wanted, she'd kind of shun us so we had to go along with what she wanted to maintain our relationship with her.

I find it interesting that I'm more like my sister personality wise and we were both brought up as girls whereas my brother is more like my mum. But obviously I am trans and they are not.

What do you think? Do you think your parents and upbringing has influenced your personality and gender?

 

Simply put? No, I do not.

 

I mostly raise myself. My dad wasn't really a present in my life until a divorced when I am 10, and my mom, while she loves me a lot, doesn't have a lot of time for me as she have to work as a single mother raising both me and my brother. I kind of just stumbling through everything by myself. Even my discovery of gender identities and sexual orientation was by my own lonesome.

So I don't think there is any parental influence there.

 

No, just no.

 

I don't think they influenced my gender identity (or lack thereof) at all before I figured it out.

 

I grew up in a pretty non-stereotypical household, and I think it gave me a looser view of gender than most people have which has helped me understand my genderfluid nature.

 

No. They were both role models in different areas, and I never saw their strong or weak points as something related to their gender.
I'm a mix of both, it's hard to tell the %. Too close to 50-50, you know.

 

No, I don't think so.

 

My parents never affected my gender identity in any way, but my mom did raise both my siblings and me in a very gender neutral environment when I was younger. I was raised on LEGOS and K'nex as a kid and any traditionally feminine toys I had were hand-me-downs from relatives. She basically believed in toys as something to stimulate our creativity rather than a distraction to shut the kids up for a few hours. Though it didn't affect my gender identity, I do feel like it made it much easier for me to come to terms with being trans* later on.

...sometimes, I wonder if she regrets raising me in such an "ungirly" environment :lol:

 

OP, my parents are exactly like yours... And I am like my father while my mother tends to get on my nerves. My counselor also thinks that because my dad is so feminine (not girly, but quiet, always obeying my mom, etc.) that I may have felt the need to be the male presence in the household to make up for the lack of one.

I am very much in favor of thinking that it's both nature and nurture factors that make some people trans... And that probably even depends from person to person. Some people probably know from when they are 2. I don't know why some of us are affected by nurturing and some aren't, but I know nurturing definitely made me who I am today. My mom never wanted me to grow up, and still doesn't. This in itself made it hard to become independent and while some people call it "being spoiled," I think of it more as a curse and bad parenting. This makes me question a lot whether I'm trans or not, because I'm never sure of myself in anything I do. I'm never confident that I can do things by myself; in this case, decide for myself that I am transgender.

My mom made me wear very girly clothes all through elementary, skirts and tights and dresses. My name is very girly (it's two girls' names [neither having male counterparts] smooshed together) and I hate it. My mom pretty much went overboard with wanting a little princess and tried to force me into as much femininity as possible, and my natural reaction was to recoil and go in the opposite. With factors like these, it's very difficult to tell whether I would have these same feelings if my mom had let me express myself the way I wanted to. The problem was, I didn't know what I wanted and she made all the decisions for me, making me be dependent on her so I wouldn't grow up. It's still something I struggle with and makes me question myself. I think, "Am I really trans if so much of it depended on my mother pushing me towards femininity? Surely I don't have a male brain, but it is impossible to tell if I would have these same feelings if my mom hadn't pushed me towards being a female." It feels like such a fake kind of trans. In the trans community, I envy the people who know and are so sure of themselves that their brains are what they feel, and they know nurturing didn't affect any of it. That seems like such a natural kind of trans, while mine seems fabricated.

Sorry, kind of turned into a vent.

 

Definitely not an influence. They were the sort who loved me "Just the way I am," you know. Not really stressing that I should be more one way or another ... although they wished that I took better care of my appearance. I'm inclined to believe I would take better care of how I looked if I had a body with an appearance worth caring about.

 

Nothing at all. Though my mom used to be a feminist to the extreme, which always pissed me off.

I am what I am, and no one made me this way. Unless you count the malfunction in my mother's womb that made me born without boy parts. Then you could say she made me this way.

 

All my parents influenced me to do was to keep it a secret my entire life.

 

I don´t think that parents can influence your gender identity. But they can sure influence the way you deal with it at the end. I find it somehow more important than the identity itself.

 

I wonder how would your counselor explain my case : My father was a dictator, had a temper, and could even get physical. We were fighting against each other since I can remember. And everybody said back then I was so much like him, both physically and personality wise. I was also very masculine when I was a child : Loud and I loved fights or anything physical. I was truly an animal, there was no grace or elegance in me, I was a raw, muscular live wire.
I sometimes wonder if I had an oedipus complex or something, 'cause my mother's beauty always touched me in a strange way. I've been always attracted to her. Even today she is one of the most beautiful women I know. I just love her beauty.

She tried, but she soon learned it wasn't a good idea to spend money in clothes that had misterious holes or ink stains only a day later:lol:

On this one I felt tempted to say blame your father, but
my tendency to doubt everything I think I know came to rescue.

I Don't blame anyone, not even the damned nuns, they were trying their best with the information that was available back then. Actually, I think they did a good job raising me up the way they did, but it had zero influence on my idea of gender : I often looked outside, 'cause I was aware as a child that the world is bigger than a simple household.

 

I wonder about this is sometimes.

Despite the fact that my mom always told stories about wearing capris under her skirts at school, playing baseball with the boys, driving a Datsun 270Z, etc., I don't think that did anything more than reassure me that stereotypes aren't solid fact or very enforced. My dad's a typical dude, if a bit on the emotional side, but again, I don't think that did anything either. Except give me a chance to learn about cars, go to the race track, play street hockey, and learn that men can cry.

My worries come in more with my brother. He's much older than me and he left my family when I was 4. Sometimes I think that maybe I started playing the 'big brother' role way back then because I missed him and I didn't want my sister to not have a big brother.

In the end I don't think that matters though. Just because there is some nuture to my nature doesn't mean that it's any less real or significant. It's like when people say "it's not a choice, people are born gay". It shouldn't matter! We are who we are, whether through nuture or nature we should be able to live our lives in a way that makes us happy and comfortable (so long as it doesn't hurt others).

And this turned into a rant...blame it on the alcohol...>>...

 

My mum is EXACTLY like that and I feel similar to you, not really feeling quite sure of who I am without my mum's idea of who I am, and that I'm not a 'genuine trans' because I just never had a strong sense of my identity and for the most part, still don't.

It's interesting to me that so many of you are so clear on who you are, as a distinctly separate person from your parents and their plans of who they wanted you to be, that you can accept the influence of their nurturing while knowing that in spite of it, you're who you would have been anyway.

I often worry if me being trans isn't some sort of late teenage rebellion because I never went through it with my parents, like 'some kids turn to Gothic culture, but no not me, I turn to transsexualism in my mid 20s' sort-of-thing.:dry: Maybe it's because I might have Asperger's Syndrome, or maybe my parents made a really good job of preventing me from growing up but I really can't grasp who I am independent of their influence, whether it's who they wanted me to be or the warped views of gender and sexuality they have left me with.

I wondered a similar thing about my sexuality. I've struggled with it my whole life. Ever since I was a child, I had some kind of attachment problem to female teachers and women in similar kinds of positions. I started to realize I liked girls as a kid, which ended up badly when a best friend came to mean more to me. It frightened me so I withdrew from our friendship and was afraid to get close to another girl friend again. While everyone else was going through teenage crushes, I suppose I admired girls from a safe distance (physically and emotionally) but I never crushed on anyone. The feelings towards female teachers etc continued though, and because I wasn't allowing myself to have feelings for people my own age, I thought that these feelings that I had towards older women was a sexual thing since everyone else my age was going through it. I would vie for their attention and sympathy, try to impress them with my efforts in class, put them up on a pedestal and admire them and I suppose I craved physical affection (not sexual though, hell no). It still bothers me to this day why I had/can still fall into the trap of these feelings. I've always been so ashamed of it.

 

I have no idea what my counselor would say. However, going back to my "feeling like I fabricated my trans feelings" in rejection to my mother's push on femininity, you would just be one of those people that had it in their brain from the start. Or, you learned the masculinity from your father and melded yourself to be more like him. I don't know. But I still know that I am a very feminine person by nature. If I were to transition to a boy, I'd be called one of those submissive and scrawny boys. That doesn't change this feeling like I am male, despite all the femininity. And my dad is feminine. So I probably got some of that from him. And you may have gotten your masculinity from your dad.

With that attraction to your mom... I guess I can kind of understand it? There's something about women that attracts me, but not sexually or anything like that. Maybe it's knowing their struggles, having been a young woman myself at one point. I don't feel this towards my mom, but I do to other women. I kind of thought of beautiful women (not necessarily by appearance, but by character and soul) as almost goddesses, in a way. They were beautiful, nurturing, caring, and gently powerful. I know men can be this way too, but I never felt that alluring respect for men like I did women.

---------- Post added 20th Mar 2015 at 09:44 AM ----------

Yes, I understand. It feels awful to be tied so much to my parents when I should be able to make this decision myself.

 

Update: Worse shit has happened. I've been to a lot of assessments these past 3 years with psychologists/psychiatrists. At the last one, it was a requirement that one of my parents came with me to give information on my development as a child. My dad would be completely clueless on all of that stuff. I doubt he'd even taken any notice when I was growing up because as far back as I can remember, he has lived in a world of his own with his fixations, so I asked my mum if she'd be the informant. The psychiatrist saw me first for about 15 minutes and asked me a few questions and then my mum. I was invited back in the room at the end and the psychiatrist told us what he had gathered so far. He thought it was unlikely I needed any further assessment. I was devastated. I'm not good at expressing myself, especially on the first time meeting someone so now I'm kicking myself because I didn't get across what I needed to while my mum had seemed to successfully present her view that there is nothing wrong with me and that I was a completely normal child growing up. I feel like the feelings I've had my whole life have just been discounted. My mum said, "There you go. What did I tell you! You should have let me come along to all of your assessments and they would see there's nothing wrong with you." So now she expects me to just go back to who I was before, her daughter who let her mother make all her decisions for her.

 

As far as I can tell, no.