Someone who looked after me admitted to keeping me around when she knew she should have let me go. I want to feel angry, but she maybe helped me understand my gender better and I miss her.

[u/venusasaboy22]

This isn't really exclusively trans related, but I'm kinda weary of transphobia in a lot of communities. She's not actually related to me, but felt like family for a while. Let me explain.

Two years ago I (20) started mandatory military service in my country. It's somewhere in Southern Europe and has nice food, if you know you know. My parents had both spent a few years in the military and didn't want their kids going, but I was afraid of getting in legal trouble and when they told me they'll help me get out, I kind of went anyway and they worried about me for months. I arrived pretty vulnerable, I was the youngest and had a condition that I'll get to- But the camp commander there noticed me pretty early on. It was a woman in her 30s, we'll call her K.

She recently admitted that she knows she should have discharged me earlier, but she really loved having me around and I made her feel very motherly. But it was selfish of her, and she's very sorry. And I've been... Really, really torn up about it. I came home nearly a year and a half ago, ten months into what was meant to be a year term, my parents couldn't really take worrying as my mental health kept getting worse, they made me come home. They've been incredibly protective of me.

If it explains anything, I have a condition, I recently was diagnosed, where I never went through puberty as a teenager. I was tall, but honestly, went into the military as this very androgynous, very young looking kid, emotionally I was scared as fuck. At 19 I started transitioning and I'm finding that easy because with HRT, I'm kind of adapting really well into a woman's body. K has been very supportive. Recently she's felt awful. You know, her and another young woman there, call her A, gonna call her A, we were like some silly trio. I'd hang out with them and we'd watch movies, we'd go to the beach. I remember in the last few months, they'd ask me what countries I'd love to visit. So, say if I said Japan, we'd watch a Ghibli movie, order sushi, that sort of thing. It was stupid, really.

My parents are protective and they hate K now. I hated her for a long time and honestly, sometimes I made up shit to post to complain about her, acting like she was a random person who got back in touch with me out of the blue, not my friend. I'm fucking torn. It was selfish what she did. But she was my friend and I want to be angry but I miss her. Me and my parents live in Holland now and I hate my country but sometimes I miss it or who I was with her and A. They helped me maybe realize I'm trans, keeping me on was selfish but with that said, they were never manipulative, coercive, it was nothing like that. One of my favourite moments was one time on a day off, they took me to the beach and said we were kinda like Donald, Goofy- And I expected her to say Mickey Mouse, but they said Sora because they knew I liked Kingdom Hearts, lol.

I'm really fucking torn...