March 22nd would have been my mother's 102nd birthday.
It's hard to believe it's been nineteen years since she passed.
She was a pistol. Very intimidating.
Years ago, it was quite fashionable to suggest that effeminate men were the product of women like my mother.
I don't consider myself effeminate but I DO consider myself quite feminine.
I wonder what the rest of you think about the theories regarding a mother's influence.
Personally, I think my personality, including my T-nature were there the moment I was born. My earliest recollections of wanting things to be made right were when I was four.
Jill
Comments
Although I do believe......
That we are all influenced and molded by our experiences in life - I know I certainly was - that having a dominant mother does not result in an effeminate son. In fact, it quite often ends up resulting in quite a different situation.
Case in point, my maternal grandmother dominated her husband terribly, or so I am told - he shot himself 10 days before I was born, so I never met him. But to all accounts, she was a very domineering woman who made his life and that of her children miserable. We were never around her much since even her own children didn’t like spending time with her. Eventually she remarried, driving that poor bastard into a massive heart attack.
My father’s reaction to her was basically to become an overbearing bastard. Not to mention an angry drunk - but certainly not effeminate. Just the opposite in fact. So yes, he was definitely shaped by his experiences with her, but definitely not effeminate, and definitely not in a good way.
On the other hand, being around him did have an effect on me. It drove me away from home and made me want to be a better person than he was. We never reconciled and when he died a few years back I had not seen him in nearly ten years.
I know that my experiences growing up in that house and with that family definitely shaped who I am, as did my later experiences in the service. I can only hope that the people I have known and the things I have experienced have left me a better person - scarred and flawed for sure, but I truly hope and pray that I am better than he was.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
Pretty snarky...
Angela,
Ma is 91 and has gone thru 4 husbands. To hear her there was little shown affection to her as a youngster by her family. Her mom ran off with a new love when she was a teenager. She was/is always right on all matters at all times. I feared to bring friends home so they wouldn't have to feel her wrath & disdain... always walking on egg shells around her.
My interest in cross-dressing & things femme began around 5 when there was just the two of us. I was raised by a very protective (I guess that's just an excuse) single, hard to please, bitchy mother. Having 3 step dads ain't a thrill... proves she was a not so latent man hater, always was dominant... I thought it was her survival mode of being a single parent, I also think she suppressed her fondness for women as she had a lot of 'butch' girlfriends (no offense intended by my use of this term).
I don't consider myself feminine in demeanor but am appreciative & sensitive of things that could be considered as 'girly'? Ma didn't overtly try me to 'switch teams' but I was used as a dress form & high heel shoe stretcher for several years.
Yup, I have a dominant mother. Do we fit a pattern? Probably so. I hope you get a lot of comments.
Best wishes. I'm going to paint my nails now right after I find my new hoop earrings.
PS: There was no father figure or male role models in my life
Donna
I had a weak "people pleasing" mother
The most agonizing thing you could do was as her what she wanted. She'd wrack her brain trying to figure out what you wanted her to want. Her dynamic with my father was like Archie and Edith in that old comedy series ALL IN THE FAMILY; but not funny at all. I wanted her to stand up for herself but she was too damaged by her own childhood.
So maybe for me it's part of my rejecting everything my father was; or it's something in the water...
Or maybe God wants a little variety in his creations + waves his magic wand over all the babies
coming down the conveyor belt, and goes "Straight"..', "Gay...", "Trans...", "Furry..."; etc...
~hugs, veronica
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
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Not sure, Nature or Nurture
My mother would have been turning 100 soon this year and she has been gone 14 years now herself. I don't know if i would call my mother dominating or intimidating, but she had a wicked Irish Catholic wit that would make you go ...Hey! about five minutes after she got done saying her less than kind innuendo of what she thought toward you. Having eleven children she didn't put up with any crap from us or anyone else but was usually very respectful to my dad as he was to her. They made it 67 1/2 years together which is something I will never have with a spouse. For that I am kind of jealous. I knew I was different from a very young age. didn't know why and I sure as hell couldn't make it go away no matter what I tried. I definitely wasn't coddled. I had eight older brothers who were always ready to knock those thoughts out of my head. Usually quite literally. Rules on the basketball court with the rim mounted to the side of the barn were simple, no blood, no foul. I learned to scrape, fight and hide my feminine side well breaking more that 20 bones along the way through my life to prove how tough I was. I'm pretty sure mom knew something was different about me when I was growing up but back 50+ years ago, what would you look up to learn about it? For me, this is something I was born with, plain and simple. A very unfulfilled yearning that will never be realized or understood. My two youngest sons know about it and are pretty nonplussed with the issue. The rest of my life is a non-starter as far as acceptance goes and that has to be OK. Unlike many others who share this platform I had it pretty good growing up. Never a lot of money, never a vacation as the farm took priority but, no complaints. Thankful for every day I am still looking down at the daisy's. Peace!
Francis G.
I Don't Have All The Answers.
At first I was the youngest of three, and remained small. Even as a young adult, I was 5'7" and about 145lbs. Very young, three or four, I decided I was a girl. My birth name was Gwinn, which sounded like Gwen, and my older brothers called me Gwendolyn, among other things. They were mean and I hated it. When my stepfather came on the scene he was angry, mean and to me seemed daemonic. By the time I was adolescent, I hated men and hated that I had the bits of a male.
I was around 30 when a counselor suggested I was GID and should be living as a woman. In retrospect, I now see that I had the effects of PTSD, but the shrinks used counseling and drugs to get me to live as a woman, and I pass very well now.
Several years ago I tried to press suit against those who did all those things to me, and false imprisonment, but the statute of limitations had run out. Now, I'm just making the best of things. I'm 72, so it won't be long.
I think the best way to handle things is to cross dress as much as you want to but do not take hormones and no SRS. Get a castration if you want to, and can do it.
You probably did not expect to read this. Sorry.
My mother was later diagnosed
My mother was later diagnosed and BPD, narcissistic and a paranoid schizophrenic.
She tortured me, set me up, taunted me to suicide among other things. I spent a majority of my teenage years in aversion camps, wilderness camps, mental hospitals, juvie, boot camps or kicked out with the cops called on me.
I spent 20 years thinking I was crazy myself with the gaslight bullcrap she pulled on me.
Honestly no. If anything my mother is a major reason I stick to the Male side.
Dominant mothers.
Did I have a dominant mother?
You bet I did, she was also a religious bigot but as to influencing my nature, I cannot be certain. She certainly affected my life insofar as she had me 'put away' at aged six for 'being a pervert' but after that, I never saw her again. I believe nurture can only affect one's personality but nature fixes what you are.
Parenting can't change one's nature, but it can screw it up
We are all born with our unique natures, and no amount of abuse or intent can change it, any more than any amount of pruning, over- or underwatering, etc., can change a dogwood tree into a giant sequoia. I base this on my experience of myself and of my children growing up.
In my own case, my inborn nature better fits what society calls "feminine" and doesn't at all fit what society expects of AMAB ("assigned male at birth") people. Not perfectly, but nobody fits any social construct perfectly, and that's okay -- as long as society doesn't imitate Procrustes and cut off or stretch out the parts of us that don't fit perfectly. In my case, the people around me browbeat and tormented me to try to make me change and be what they demanded that AMAB people be, and came close to killing me
They failed. They berated me for being "lazy" and "stubborn" (and I internalized it all), but I now realize that it was just that I did not have the capacity to be what they wanted me to be, any more than a goldfish can climb trees like a squirrel. I transitioned because I realized that living as a woman fit my nature far, far better than living as a man. After all, if you've got a goldfish, it will be better for everyone if you just provide it with a pond and stop trying to insist on keeping it on a tree branch.
What people, such as my mother, could do is screw me up. My parents were too busy with their own emotional needs to pay any attention to their children's needs and would act out resentment when our needs were not convenient for them. But God forbid we should express our feeling that things were not perfect! From before I was 2 years old, I was having to deal with the fact that I couldn't rely on anyone if I needed something, and especially not emotional support or help, and if I tried, I would get blamed, yelled at, whipped, and mocked. I grew up feeling that life was a 24/7 high-wire act with no net. It left me with complex PTSD and suicidal tendencies which continue to this day.
But none of it changed who I am at my core. All it did was to delay my recognizing that was closer to "female" than to "male." At some level, I always feel that if I step out of line in even the smallest way, I would fall off the high-wire into the deepest pits of Hell. It took realizing that no matter what I do, I don't have all that many years left, and that if I kept trying to be what other people demanded I be, those years would be very, very few, for me to make the leap of faith to come out to myself as me. I couldn't even imagine to myself that I might be better off living as a woman until I saw enough examples of people who did and lived and lived well and by doing so blazed a trail for me to follow.
Not likely
My parents split up when I was 4. We lived in Kansas a the time. My mother took us kids and moved to Oregon, where she had a brother. My brother, 8 years my senior, decided to go back to Kansas within the year, because my mother, couldn't do without male companionship and he couldn't deal with that.
Two years later, my father came to Oregon to reconcile and my mother ended up running off to California with her boyfriend. Eventually Dad divorced her.
During my time with my mother, I don't remember her being at all dominate. My father, on the other hand, was indeed dominate. Not in a cruel way, but as in being authoritative and taking charge of how things were done. In many ways it was a good trait, in that by association with him I learned to fend for myself and not let the negative things in my life slow me down, but to analyze the situation and construct solutions; often in an instinctual manor. His example gave me the confidence to try new things and learn as I go.
My brother acquired the same traits. My sisters were attracted to the same kind of men and also had some of those same abilities. So, our mother, it seems had little if any influence on my siblings and the only thing that I might attribute to her in me is my gentle nature.
As to the feminine nature, my next oldest sister would have contributed to that more than anyone. It certainly wasn't by being dominate. Actually she unwittingly, I'm sure, fed my already feminine nature. I associated with her at home more than anyone else. From an early age, even before my father showed up to reconcile, I was fascinated with aspects of her life.
By the time I was nine, I actively asked the why and how questions about her life. She innocently answered the questions of her inquisitive (five year) younger brother. Two things I remember that would be definitely feminine were about perfume and dressing, specifically how take of a pullover top.
I observed her putting on perfume one day and asked, "How do you know where to put perfume?" She explained that she put it on the pulse points; at each elbow, each wrist, behind the knees and each ear and over her heart. I've decided that doing all that is overkill. One day she saw me struggling with taking off my tee shirt and instructed my to cross my arms in front of me and grab the hem and pull it up.
I learned later that men don't do it that way, but simply reach over their shoulder grabbing the neck behind their head and pull it off. All those years and I never knew that men did it differently.
There were other things she taught me, mostly by me observing her and admiring her technique.
No, a dominate mother, or any other female didn't influence me. I can't say that I had any adverse relationship with any family member, but each of them did influence my worldview. All of them in a positive way.
My personal relationship equation: absent mother; dominate, authoritative father, distant (ten years older) sister; masculine brother; caring sister (the five year older one whom I referenced above) all of whom were part of a pretty functional single parent home.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann