XVII Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Symposium
31 October - 4 November 2001, Galveston, Texas, U.S.A.

Self-Help Groups for Parents and Partners of TSs

KLENE, PETRA The Netherlands
E-mail: transsex@lb.humanitas.nl

When a transsexual resolves to enter the Real Life Test period before gender reassignment, it provokes huge emotion and anxiety in parents, partners and family. Their up to now reasonably happy and manageable world is of necessity hit by an emotional shock-wave, as if by an earthquake, when the message hits home that their hitherto trusted partner, son or daughter, brother or sister, nephew or niece, wants to change sex. From the point of parents, partner and family, all attention now appears to be immediately focused on the transsexual, as the centre of this upheaval an object of astonishment, anger and rage. The partner, parents and family quickly come to realize not just that their relative is changing, but that they are going to have to change too, whether they like it or not. Humanitas is not only concerned with gender dysphoric and transsexual clients, we also give the partner, parents and family support according to their needs, we give them help in keeping pace with the transsexual process, and we provide a release for their sorrow and impotence, their fury and their desperation. Partners and parents frequently do not dare to adjust in tandem with their relative’s change because of an overriding fear of everything that is so strange, scary, ludicrous and deviant. Via specific self-help groups where the family can find their own niche and can speak freely without the involved transsexual being present, it is of great help to find others who are in the same boat and who recognize in each other companions in misfortune. In the Netherlands such a group called (H)Erkenning – ‘Recognition’, has by now been active for about 13 years under the umbrella of the Humanitas Work Group for Transsexuality and Gender Dysphoria. In (H)Erkenning – ‘Recognition’ there is an outlet for the many angry words and vitriol which the transsexual’s family can pour out unhampered; in this group there is space for grief and also for the path towards acceptation of the other. Just the same, you exist together in a family and have a whole life to live through, with your children and your partner. If you hide it away, you both make yourself look ridiculous and you influence your whole family with your own state of mind. This backup for those closest to transsexuals is an essential link in the whole psychosocial support chain for transsexualism.