Does what my mom did to me count as a form of conversion therapy?
Hi, everyone. Basically, I began openly exploring my gender identity when I was 19, and my mom took it horribly straight from the get-go. She sat me down on a bench and ranted at me for 20 minutes about how the media is pushing this stuff or whatever. From when I was 19 to 21 she’d regularly force me to watch transphobic videos and content, or read me transphobic articles, talking about ‘transgenderism’ and ‘the trans agenda’ and how kids these days are just being tricked into being trans by way of a social contagion, peer pressure, the media, autism, or that it was a phase, all that crap. I got the feeling she was definitely doing so with the intention of trying to gaslight and guilt trip me into being cis, which is ultimately what this rhetoric all leads back to at the end of the day. I’ve, fortunately, never been sent anywhere or anything of that nature. It all happened at home. She’s also apart of these online groups of transphobic parents that neglect their trans children and justify it to themselves on there. She’s even told me twice that it’s “the trans cult” that makes kids cut off their parents. That bit in particular makes my blood fucking boil. Oh yeah, she also regularly tells me that I’m in a cult and has all but said that I’ve been brainwashed by the media into being trans, and seems insistent that I’ll grow out of it. It’s fucking awful. She doesn’t force me to watch shit anymore btw, which thank fucking Christ, but it was all that kind of rhetoric. Some was claiming trans people were dangerous, or creeps or groomers, that there was no such thing as a trans kid, you know the drill. Fucking awful stuff. It just slowly grated away at my soul. My mental health declined before her very eyes and she still refused to stop. Like, she’d have me come into the living room with her to watch some awful fucking video or whatever, or show or read me something from her phone. Sometimes when we were just sitting together in a space, she’d turn her phone towards me with some transphobic shit on it with no warning. From that point on I became anxious to just sit alone in the same room as her with nothing else currently occupying our attention. One time she asked me to look at something on her phone and I was so scared I got lightheaded. I began avoiding her around the house, or pretending to be asleep in my room to avoid interacting with her, because the less interactions I had with her, the less likely she’d say some horrendous transphobic thing to me or have it blow up into another stupid argument. I once physically hid myself in the house from her because there was another video she wanted me to watch, and I told her I wasn’t interested and went to go and stow myself away. My spot wasn’t IMPOSSIBLE for her to get to, just very difficult for her. She was downstairs, my hiding place was upstairs. I heard her yell for me to come down, first normally, like every few minutes or so, and then it would slowly get angrier and angrier. I heard her begin the video down there for a little bit a one point. She began screaming for me to get my ass down here right now. Incredibly loudly. She kept screaming until her voice literally gave out and she couldn’t anymore. She eventually came to where I was, and used the tv in that room to look up some other transphobic video because she couldn’t find the one she originally wanted to show me on it. I did want to still run at that point, but hoo boy would she have been livid if I did that. This continued for a little over 2 years. My mental health got so bad I’d cry to myself much more frequently than I ever had before. It was like every other day. Before I cried maybe like once a year. It got so bad I’d scream out throughout the house when the all trauma swirling around in my head was just too much for me to take. It got so bad I’d begin bashing my head into a wall or my fist when the trauma was far too much for me to take. It got so bad I began to see death as a comforting alternative. And before this I had very good mental health and self esteem. I was wholly aware every step of the way exactly how fucked this entire situation was. It was SO fucked up. I was genuinely terrified I was going to die for a couple months if she didn’t stop. I never became actively suicidal, but thank fucking Christ, she finally, FINALLY stopped. Not out of concern for my well-being, otherwise she would’ve stopped wayyyyy sooner. I didn’t tell her I was genuinely terrified I was gonna die at the time, she never once listened to me a single time I told her she was hurting me, so I didn’t exactly have confidence she’d listen about this either. Plus if she heard that and still refused to stop then I just wouldn’t have any hope left. When I eventually mustered the courage to tell her that and confront her on it, it uh, ended disastrously. She grew livid at me, told me I was villainizing her, that the only reason I felt that way was because of “the media”. I fucking shit you not. I screamed at her for that. She screamed back. It was fucking awful, and now I emotionally shut down whenever I’m around her. The sad part is our relationship used to be perfect before she became radicalized by this transphobic rhetoric on the internet. Literally every perfect mother in the movies or storybooks, that was her. That was us. We had everything. I miss her so fucking much. No one in my family is on my side about it either.