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In terms of their mom being an asshole: you don't have to say "your mom's an asshole". You can say, very clearly, "what your mom told you isn't true and is a really hurtful thing to say. I'm sorry she's not being supportive. Your dad and I don't agree with that stuff she said. We trust you to know who you are and we love you and we're on your side."

In terms of gender stuff:

I'm a Trans adult who transitioned as a teen, and now works with Trans youth. Hi. :P

It is extremely common for a Trans identity to first manifest itself at puberty.

See if there are groups for LGBTQ youth, and especially Trans and gender-questioning youth, in your area.

Tell your kid flat-out that if they're Trans or gender-questioning, binary or non-binary, it's completely fine with you, and you will support them no matter what. We have to actually explicitly say the words, or the message isn't clearly received. I'll never forget the wonderful PFLAG mom (join PFLAG, by the way, especially if your local chapter has a group for parents of Trans and gender-questioning kids) who talked about her gay son coming out in his early 20s; he was terrified to tell his parents, which confused and upset them because they'd very consciously never said anything about being gay not being okay. His response was "But Mom, you never said that it was okay either."

Remember, too, that you have to walk your talk when you say you'll support them no matter what. Support for Trans youth matters. Support doesn't mean saying "I support you" and then not letting them wear the clothes they want to an upcoming family event, or not using their name and/or pronouns, or telling them they have to wait until they're 18 to pursue medical transition. That isn't support. If they don't feel supported, they're in the stat group of unsupported youth.

This is more of a general resource dump, but I hope it helps!

Post to /r/ftm about the clothing questions. The folks there can give you lots of great information and advice.

The books The Transgender Child and The Transgender Teen by Stephanie Brill are the two halves of your new bible, seriously. There's also a new book out for Trans teens and their families, called Where's MY Book? by Linda Gromko, MD. I haven't read it yet, but it looks well worth a look.

Check out http://t-vox.org/ and http://camparanutiq.org/ . Your kid would love Camp Aranu'tiq.

Watch this great video too. It's about Trans kids and it's really good. (Ignore the line from one mom about how blockers are "brand new". They aren't. They've been used for decades. The books I mentioned above explain a lot more about all that.)

Run, don't walk, to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tyfa_talk/ and join it. It's a wonderful parents-only group specifically for parents of Trans and gender-questioning kids who are 18 and under. There's a lot more to it than "you should support your kid". There's lots for you there, even though you're already supportive. On Facebook, you can join these great groups for parents of Trans and gender-expansive kids: here and here. And here on Reddit, check out /r/cisparenttranskid.

Trans Youth Family Allies, Gender Spectrum (and their fantastic conference), and the Trans Health conference, among other resources, will help your whole family a lot.

To find a therapist who gets Trans issues (most don't, and are unhelpful at best and actively harmful at worst), see http://t-vox.org/medical and http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/ . For the second link, enter your location and then select Transgender from the Issues list on the left.

The nice folks at the Gender Development clinic at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago, the Gender Management Services (GeMS) clinic at Boston Children's Hospital, The Center for Trans Youth Health and Development at Los Angeles Children's Hospital, the Genecis clinic at Children's Medical Center Dallas, the gender clinic at Seattle Children's Hospital, BC Children's Hospital in Vancouver, and/or the Trans youth clinic at SickKids in Toronto can help your family connect with more providers and support networks in your area for Trans children and their families, even if you're not near any of those clinics. They do a lot of networking with groups and providers across North America and around the world.

Let me assure you, this self-hating issue you describe is common to human beings for a lot of reasons (and commonly for your reason) and YES, you can overcome it, absolutely. Therapy will help, but until you can afford it, you will have to work on it yourself.

Healing these sorts of things really is a process, and consistency (working on it every day, for a short time) will likely work best.

I am not a therapist, but I think it's pretty obvious when you are fed guilt and shame messages about being gay all of your life, there's a big buildup of emotional baggage that weighs you down. By 'weighs you down' I mean causes you to have automatically negative thoughts and feelings (e.g. guilt) to your own natural gay feelings and desires. Judgmental religious environments will, in a sense, train you to feel this way through explicit and non-explicit signals and messages they give you about homosexuality.

Your job is to recognize and challenge these automatic responses. Every time they happen, you should be prepared to slow down, pull the thoughts and feelings apart and have better, positive messages to replace them. At least, that's a start.

I would recommend The Feeling Good Handbook as a very good guide to this process and for other ways to combat your guilt and self-hate feelings. You are likely to find it in any decent library, so should cost you nothing to obtain, but if you can't find it, PM me and I will buy you a copy.

Don't limit yourself to this, though, find other reading recommendations and learn all you can about how to help yourself, if you are so inclined. Positive Psychology is one area to look into. In any case, don't hesitate to get a therapist once you are able to. I'm sure you can improve your mind on your own, but I think most research ties the best outcomes to having a caring therapist... and once you can, shop around for one - don't just take the first thing you can get!

Good luck!

There's definitely some critiquing of Steven Universe's queerness that one could do (for one, there's no outright human queer characters yet), but I would say with confidence that SU is very open about the queer characters it does have.

The censoring you linked to (featuring the same three characters involved in the love triangle in "It's Over") was done by Cartoon Network UK -- in the US the scene is left uncensored.

I think one would have to do some mental gymnastics to take "It's Over" as a "losing my best friend" song. Pearl, the character who's singing, says "You won, and she chose you" directed at the character Greg, who ultimately ended up with the character Rose (the "she" in the song). There can't be a winner unless Pearl and Greg are playing the same game, you know? You could probably argue that the two dads in The Loud House have the same last name because they're brothers, using similar mental gymnastics.

There is another ongoing, completely uncensored, non-subtextual same-sex romance involving two other characters, Ruby and Sapphire. There's an entire episode called "The Answer" that's devoted to how they met and fell in love (and there's a forthcoming children's book of the same name!). I'll gladly link you to more videos and images if you're interested, but since you're not a fan of the show I think that might just bore you. :P


I'll stop here...sorry about the overly extensive response!

As I said, groups A and B are associated with, but not necessarily exclusive to, individuals with specific types of genitalia (and thus also by extension secondary sex characteristics). In general, people are in fact assigned to one gender or the other, at birth (see this Wikipedia article), on the basis of their genital configuration. For the most part, that's pretty straightforward, and for the most part, the underlying assumption (people with penises are boys, people with vaginas are girls) works out just fine... but neither of those things is always the case. For example, in Western society, infants that are born with ambiguous genitalia are usually surgically altered in whichever direction seems easiest, and then assigned the gender that corresponds to that. And of course there are also trans people, who go "No, you said I was [this] because I have [that], but fundamentally I know I am not [this] at all." (And while that feeling is not valid for defining the categories, it is, in and of itself, valid.)

As far as "the first person to pick a group", I'm afraid that in practical purposes this is meaningless. The male and female genders have existed throughout history - as far back as we can tell - and no society exists in a vacuum. If you were to plunk down a thousand infants on an island and somehow ensure that they did not die without actually allowing them to come into contact with other humans, I'm fairly sure that they would organize themselves into at least two genders, with the two dominant genders corresponding to penis-having and vagina-having, within a couple of decades at most; and I would not be at all surprised to see a few vagina-having individuals identifying among the penis-corresponding group, and vice-versa; and I would expect that over the course of the next couple of generations, those genders would solidify, and you would occasionally see what we consider to be transgender individuals - whose parents expected them to be members of Gender A on the basis of their genitalia, and who said "No, I'm really Gender B".

If you want more on that subject, by the way, I suggest you read Leslie Feinberg's excellent book Transgender Warriors, which goes into a lot of the history of gender roles and of what we would consider to be transgender people, worldwide.

Yeah, I truly am glad that we're making progress, because LGBT kids shouldn't have to feel excluded all the time, but at what cost?

I recommend this book to pretty much everybody, but if you haven't read it, you should pick up The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner. I picked it up randomly at the library one day and I fell in love with it.

If they would be receptive to something written by an evangelical biblical scholar who is gay, I recommend God and the Gay Christian by Matthew Vines. http://www.amazon.com/God-Gay-Christian-Biblical-Relationships/dp/1601425163

He tells his personal story AND addresses all the biblical texts that have been used against gay people. He makes a very convincing case for an inclusive and affirming faith that's based in scripture. He also gives a compassionate account of his father's experience of coming to accept him as a gay Christian.

"Thank you for sharing that reading with me earlier. I also have some reading I was hoping we could sit down and look at." http://www.amazon.com/God-Gay-Christian-Biblical-Relationships/dp/1601425163

Sorry your parents are being jerks. Hopefully they'll come around.

Sorry. That took me a minute. I see you deleted the post and idk if you still see the comments but I'll leave this here just in case. I haven't read them all. Also, Dan Savage gives lots of book recommendations on his podcast. Good luck!

https://www.amazon.com/Gay-Revolution-Story-Struggle/dp/1451694121

https://www.amazon.com/Mayor-Castro-Street-Stonewall-Editions/dp/0312019009/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=the+mayor+of+castro+street&qid=1565617125&s=gateway&sr=8-3

amazon.com/Stonewall-Revival-Christopher-Theatrical-Adventures/dp/0999863703/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

https://www.amazon.com/Gets-Better-Overcoming-Bullying-Creating/dp/0452297613/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=it+gets+better&qid=1565617218&s=books&sr=1-2

https://www.amazon.com/Transgender-History-second-Todays-Revolution/dp/158005689X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1565617239&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/B002L7KS2K/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=history+of+aids&qid=1565617261&s=books&sr=1-1 (maybe)

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Pride-LGBTQ-Heroes-Changed/dp/0062571702/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Whipping Girl makes a convincing argument that even as homosexuals and women have gained greater equality in our society, femininity has become taboo - especially in the LGBT community.

Thank you!

Just to sure, it's this book, right? https://www.amazon.com/Gay-Revolution-Story-Struggle/dp/1451694121

Try a combo of Towel Dry Clay and Boldify Volumizer. Spray Boldify and style and blowdry. Use Towel Dry clay to shape. Combo of both should give you nice lift and a solid style without being "crunchy".

Towel Dry Hair https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CUQIHF2

Boldify https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0739NH8XC

In the book Whipping Girl, the author makes a convincing argument that dislike of effeminate gays has more to do with misogyny / anti-femininity than homophobia.

Not trying to attack you (as a masculine-born wannabe femme I experience this same thing as self-loathing), just offering the idea for analysis.

Notice how people react more violently to men (or people perceived as men) in women's clothing than the other way around? It's rooted in misogyny.

Check out Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano. Good stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1580051545