My family tends to be sprinkled throughout the different levels. My wife, grandmother and son, easily number 1 in support of my transition and identity.
Many of my cousins I grew up with are level 2.
Father and stepmother are level 5 - possibly level 6 when I was a child - still figuring that one out as new traumas surface.
Everyone else hovers around 3 - 5.
Just remember, I’ll always be a level 1 for you ❤️
Level 1: completely supportive
Level 2: mostly supportive but lacking some knowledge, or some transmedicalist attitudes due to ignorance, not malignancy
Level 3: neutral, not supportive but not opposing either, or “supportive” transmedicalist
Level 4: leaning oppose, but no forceful interventions, or refuse to gende you correctly but used neutral pronouns
Level 5: misgendering, not accepting you as their daughter or son, but still pretend to be “loving” misgendered you
Level 6: disowning or physically beating or etc, most extreme measures
(Stolen, with love, from the user Cormier643 on Reddit. Felt like this was a great way to get discussions going again ❤️)
-Olivia ✌🏻
i’m still closeted to a large part of my family, mainly because i’ve been living very far away from them for a long time, but i will add a tentative level based on prior interaction. a lot of this involves my partner’s family simply because i live with them.
level 1: partner and sister. sister was over the moon when she learned. our dad really did make some queerdos! were he still alive, i think my dad would also be a 1.
level 2: partner leans into this territory sometimes. his siring parent is an intersex trans woman who has been largely absent from his life but he never disparages her identity. tentatively putting my stepdad (i still call him this despite having divorced my mother) here as i recently found out through him that his sister’s kid is transmasc and he’s been concerned about anti-trans laws being passed in their home state. i say 2 for him because i don’t know how he’ll handle the complexity of my gender. that said, his current partner would probably also be 1-leaning-2.
level 3: tentatively putting my partner’s mother here. she works as a florist for a local grocery chain and we go shop at this store periodically and i do see a lot of visibly queer people working there, i just don’t know how she feels about them. and well, her ex is the previously mentioned intersex trans woman. second-hand accounts suggest they at least tolerate each other. would probably also place my sister’s mother here because i genuinely do not know her feelings on anything anymore. is there a level 0?
level 4: i’m putting my partner’s younger brother here, leaning 5. i am not convinced this dude is tolerant of anything outside of his narrow understanding of life from mainstream video games and whatever youtube he watches all day. and i’m a little scared it may go to 6 if my paranoid inclinations are correct. best case scenario is he calls his brother the f-slur (despite being scolded for using it while gaming before).
level 5: probably my mother, whom i haven’t spoken to in a decade and change and i don’t plan on ever doing so again. she did not take it well when i mentioned a friend of mine was bisexual, so i never came out to her as bisexual. she also didn’t believe me when i said i was a lesbian, and did the weird “you just needed to find the right man” response after i started dating my current partner. i think she’d have a conniption if she found out i was trans and genderqueer. could potentially be level 6 but just disowning, and i would be so fucking relieved if she did. also gonna put my formerly-adoptive father on this level because he has a trans sister he vehemently hates and always misgenders and also strongarmed me into breaking up with a trans girl i was dating when i was 18. were my father still alive, he’d have to pretend to tolerate me probably.
oh god this got long how to i collapse this