ROGD Parent Support

This is a very helpful article sent to me in a link from one of the sites I've been looking at.
It would be very interesting if it wasn't one of my children caught up in it all :(
4thwavenow.com/2017/12/07/gender-dysphoria-is-not-one-thing/

Where were they all 25 years ago?

I seriously think that 20/25 years ago they were hanging out on "pro-ana" sites and bulletin boards, swapping ways of not eating.

There is an element of "fashion" (although that makes it sound so frivolous) or social contagion, similar to the waves of anorexia. Indeed, there's at least one of my students who is TiM and anorexic and clinically depressed. I can't help feeling the transgender art of that is a symptom not a baseline.

And the treatment of young women with anorexia (and their families) was so totally different. Never was an anorexic "affirmed" in her bodily dysphoria ...

I'm reading this thread in awe. I have a niece who is now my nephew. And a younger nephew who is totally dominated by this transition. Rest of the family is cheerleading, and the child's mother kept the information of my niece/nephew's decision to transition from the child's father for a whole year. They are still married (I don't know how - I doubt I'd deal well with that level of control and/or deception). The mother is v happy to have a legitimate lace in the forefront of wokeness - I tend to think it's a matter of a kind of Munchhausens. And the mother & ticks off the dementia-suffering grandmother if she makes a mistake re niece/nephew's pronouns.

As you can see, I'm a tad angry about this, but my feelings are neither here nor there. I just look on in fear at what weekly testosterone shots are doing to the 17 year old child I have known since birth. I suspect s/he is a butch lesbian and I hope they reach some kind of peace with their body.

Good luck to you parents - being an aunt & watching this is awful enough

smallblanket i think the difference 25-30 years ago was that there were lots of gender bending role models - Boy George, Marilyn, David Bowie,Annie Lennox lots of men wore make up in the 70s and early 80s and never once called themselves. Its one of the things that makes all of this so desperately sad - men wearing make up and female clothing is not new, women presenting as male is not new they're not discovering something no one has ever done before but they really think they are :/

Im so desperately sorry for what everyone on this thread is going through and sending lots of love and support xx

I wonder if any one else has seen the documentary about the illness in LeRoy on USA on 2011? The film is called 'The Town that Caught Tourettes' and info on the situation is here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Roy,_New_York

Smallblanket I so much hope we are at a tipping point. For all our children's sakes.

I hope the De transitioners will literally be all over the internet. That you won't be able to Google 'transgender' without finding the real, true stories of people coming out the other side.

For a tiny minority I do believe transition is right (as adults) and personally I believe those people will have known of these struggles most of their lives. This will not include the deludge of teenagers currently presenting with ROGD.

My sincere hope is even the trans community will wake up to the reality of the situation and stop co-opting mentally ill or ASD teens into their permanent number and recognise this phenomenon.

Before my DD's announcement of being trans (around 3 years ago), I had not met anyone who is transgender. I had read about it and was genuinely intrigued and sympathetic to what I thought was an incredibly rare syndrome, glad that these individuals and their families were getting support.

Since then, I have of course been alert to it, so bound to pick up cases everywhere. So in my small village, 2 individuals; several relatives of residents. In the local schools - 4 or 5 in each.

Are our kids the crest of the wave? Or the tip of an iceberg? Where were they all 25 years ago?

I think, not sure on what basis, that the juggernaut won't continue for too much longer. Probably too late to save my DD from irreversible harm, however.

Dumonde 💐💐💐💐

So many flowers for you. Wonderful mother and woman

Best wishes to tiny 8 yr old, DuMonde.

My ds' GD developed after a period of his sister being very ill, and in and out of hospital (sucidality) in fairly traumatic circumstances, and his father being in the ICU, hovering between the living and the dying for a while. How anyone can dismiss trauma as an instigating factor in GD is beyond me. It's clearly present for a lot of kids.

DuMonde - I wonder if any psychologist with half a brain might wonder if your DSD might be attention seeking (however subconsciously), rather than actually dysphoric.

Kudos to your sense of humour in a clearly very stressful situation.

My flamboyant male youngest has taken to announcing that his pronouns are "Yes." Given that he wears a combination of his mother's clothes and cosplay items, and is prone to a scornful eye roll at things he deems truly ridiculous, I am confident this is a piss take, not an expression of inner essence.

Can you imagine the dinner table in our house? 😂

19 year old prodigal aspie son ‘triggering’ 13 yr old DsD over her ‘softboi uwu’ beanie hat’ and tiny 8 year old cancer patient quietly feeding giant rescue greyhound her leftovers while everyone is distracted.

I mean, I know GD feels real to DsD but the contrast between her problems and her sister’s are 80a/90s sitcom worthy (not PC enough for current day)!

4 Chan edgelord 🤣

You have to laugh at it, or we’d cry!

In our household DH does all the cooking (inc. grocery shopping) and I do all the DIY (inc. bricklaying and owning/operating power tools).

I asked DsD if this made us both non-binary? 🤗

@DuMondeB LOL at your last paragraph.
Our eldest is 18 and off to uni in September and is horrified by her youngest sister's announcement.
She has a few trans friends but was as blindsided as we ( her parents) were. She's basically moved out to live with a friend for a bit as she can't cope with revising at home. I don't blame her- wish I could do the same!

Welll, adolescence itself is traumatic so that’s a good reason to delay transition until adulthood (preferably 25 when the brain has finished developing)!

Our daughter’s ROGD feelings began mid puberty when she was catcalled by an adult man for the first time :/ (the same year her little sister had a cancer related illness) so we think it all connected. If only we could find a therapist to talk it all through with her without affirming the sex stereotype B/S :/

Luckily for us our eldest is more 4 Chan edgelord libertarian than LGBT sorting hat celebrator, so he wouldn’t dream of correcting our pronoun use for his sister! He’s surrounded by what he calls ‘Gender Neutral Nobodies’ at uni anyway (and his best friend is gay and sick of finding teen transmen on his dating apps!)

@DuMondeBe DD told me outright that the only trans people who detransition were the ones that had had some sort of trauma- she did mention the girl you refer to above.
She's a bright girl but she's not concocting these defences out of thin air. She's getting them from somewhere online.

But even the least neutral psychiatrist (who ds currently sees) is very, very comfortable taking a lot of time. Ds has been seeing them for a year, no treatment other than a/d's and talking therapy. They also recommended DBT, which unfortunately, is $$ for adolescents here, but also run by psychologists (some of whom are rah rah gender).

Re finding neutral care: it's a crap shoot.

My personal experience ? Psychiatrists are more likely to be neutral than psychologists. Take that with a grain of salt - we're talking our experience with 4-5 psychiatrists vs a handful of psychologists. Anecdote only.

But I have heard (esp older) psychiatrists talk about social contagion quite openly. One told me to forget about the gender b/s, that it would fade once we got a handle on dd's mental health.

Could have just been luck.

NonHypotheticalLurkingParent thank you I have messages you back.

I thought this was interesting - ‘Tyince’ an FTM YouTuber who’s phalloplasty Q&A video has over 1 million views recently detransitioned.

Ty’s most recent video is titled ‘I Am A Woman’.

I’m angry that Ty was sucked into this medical experimentation and hopeful that reidentifying will lead to a better life. I’m also hopeful that a YouTuber with such a big reputation ‘coming out’ as detrans will open the eyes of all our daughters (and sons) currently experiencing sincere gender distress.

www.youtube.com/user/tylerjvine/videos

Ty is often name checked as an influence by young, female gender questioners (see Pinterest as an example: www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/698128379708418220/) so perhaps some influence will happen in the opposite direction.

I suspect the algorithm angle can be overstated. I don't think AI is pushing this forward, there is something rather more organic going on - the YouTubers create the centre of the vortex, if you will, like a Charismatic leader of an 'in person' cult. But the radicalisation occurs from the comment threads and groups that provide the language reinforcement, love bombing and collective punishment by shunning if someone steps out of line.

It is clearly a field ripe for properly scientific investigation, but the way the scientific community approaches this topic, I can't see that happening soon.

JanesKettle Thank you.

Italian - I've messaged you back.

We have a lot of family history of OCD. There are a lot of common themes for obsessions and ruminations - religion, causing diseases and death, homosexuality. Basically, your brain gets stuck on a thought and won't stop. The only way to stop it is to do a ritual - either internally, counting, saying a certain phrase in your head over and over, or externally - switching lights on and off a certain amount of times, cleaning, washing hands, etc.

OCD involves a lot of magical thinking, for example believing you can stop people dying by doing rituals, you know it's illogical, you know it's not possible, but you still do it - that's the compulsion.

I'm not a therapist, but I saw a lot of magical thinking from dd when she identified as transgender. Each next step would be the panacea to quieten her internal distress. It didn't work like that. The obsessions and ruminations got worse in search of the ultimate goal - being 100% male.

www.ocduk.org/ is a good place to start!

On the topic of radicalisation and community via social media (and YouTube) there's a useful Twitter thread criticising some research that's had a lot of play (I didn't bold it):

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A new paper has been making the rounds with the intriguing claim that YouTube has a de-radicalizing influence. arxiv.org/abs/1912.11211

Having read the paper, I wanted to call it wrong, but that would give the paper too much credit, because it is not even wrong. Let me explain.

Radicalization via YouTube, as widely understood, is when someone watches a few partisan videos and unwittingly starts a feedback loop in which the algorithm gradually recommends more and more extreme content and the viewer starts to believe more and more of it.

The key is that the user’s beliefs, preferences, and behavior shift over time, and the algorithm both learns and encourages this, nudging the user gradually. But this study didn’t analyze real users. So the crucial question becomes: what model of user behavior did they use?

The answer: they didn’t! They reached their sweeping conclusions by analyzing YouTube without logging in, based on sidebar recommendations for a sample of channels (not even the user’s home page because, again, there’s no user). Whatever they measured, it’s not radicalization.

twitter.com/random_walker/status/1211263735999946752 [Thread continues.]

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This caught my attention because the family friend (upthread) mentioned that she'd heard that YouTube was creating communities, acceptance, and wasn't nudging young people towards extremes.