What Would You Do If Your Child/Grand-Child/Beloved Nephew or Niece Told You They Were Sure They Were Trans?

Hardcore feminist here. When my son asked me to come to a consult with his psychiatrist, I went. He said he was trans which came as a complete shock.

I found a psychologist who specialised in transgender issues and who worked with her to tease out what was going on. This took some months. Over the next few months she began wearing female clothes and began hormones. She saw a WPATH compliant psychiatrist who confirmed the gender dysphoria. She's changed her name.

She's currently on the waiting list for GRS which her father and I will be paying for.

I am quite certain that if we had not provided this support, she'd be dead. It's not as easy as some of you on this board appear to think to completely change your child's mind. I'd rather have a trans daughter than a dead son.

BilindaB
Check your privilege hon.

For a lot of us this isn't a fun hypothetical.

I second everything @FightingtheFoo said.

My 10 year old DD so far rather highly rates her existence as a girl so I’d be pretty stunned for one thing.

I guess my aim would be to give them as much space as possible to grow up without pressure to identify as anything. So stick to mixed sex activities, encourage them to do what they like with personal style, use an opposite gender nickname if they want.
If it was my own child and I had responsibility, I would try to not socially transition in any official sense and certainly not medically transition as a child, while talking to them about those things as last resort solutions (and why they're a last resort) for when they're grown up so they know we would ultimately still love and support them whatever.
I couldn't lie to them that I suddenly believed in gendered souls, they already know I don't believe that. We talk about respect for other people's beliefs too, so I hope they know that if they subscribe to a different belief to me whether that's religion or gender, they still have my respect and love.

The hypothetical situation also needs expanding. Has the child been expressing extreme distress in their body since a young age? Have they experienced and trauma or assault recently (which you may not be aware of). Could they be autistic or otherwise struggling to see how they fit with society? There is no 'one size fits all' answer to your hypothetical situation. Only a lot of very individual, and hugely personal experiences. I think this is why it feels painful. As you're not someone who's looking for support / struggling yourself. But instead saying 'what would you do if confronted by this really scary situation', when many of us have been.
Also don't know why on the feminist board!
OP maybe stick to reading the many already existing threads on how to people have reacted to these circumstances. Rather than getting us to dredge it all up for a hypothetical question.

Obviously it wasn't clear to me and some others

No it wasn’t clear to me either

Felt a bit like a trap or the set up for a ‘gotcha’ and I don’t understand why its on the feminism board

But ive assumed the OP is asking in good faith and ive replied accordingly

If its just a sentence use the copy function on your keyboard and put the quote in between two *

In the past we have found other ways to cope . Now trans is an option. They aren't doing it because others Are, they see others and realise they can choose that

I agree a large number of children have rejected gender impositions. Most of them learned to cope. But the current choice offered is not a zero-sum game.

Choosing a medicalised trans pathway can result in irreversible changes including mastectomy, which might mean you are unable to breastfeed, or sterility which might mean you can’t have children at all. It can also mean you require artificial hormones for life, even if you detransition and can result in appalling side effects from botched cosmetic genital surgery.

So casually suggesting that the children who learned to cope might simply take a different pathway now is disingenuous. Easy to wreck your life taking a pathway that wasn’t a burning need, but more a casual whim.

Can't work out the quote feature, but someone mentioned that they'd aim for their future kids to be immune from this. I thought mine was, I did everything right in ignoring stereotypes, and she still fell into this rabbit hole.
Her argument is not that she's running away from anything, or believes girls can't be what they like, but that this is an innate part of her - she's always been a boy, it's just that the doctors misinterpreted her genitals as being a girl.
I love her, and support her of course. That means doing what I believe is in her best interests in the long term, which means not affirming her delusion.
Just bear in mind OP that if you're just asking a theoretical question, and you're not in the situation yourself, you'll never truly know what it feels like.

If one of my children said they were trans I’d be supportive, i love and adore my children that wouldn’t change obviously

Social changes such as clothes, hair, names pronouns etc would be fairly easy to do and when it came to medical changes we would research and discuss as much as possible.

Any big medical changes would probably be left til they were 18

Nephews and nieces again id be supportive but would obviously have nothing to do with any medical decisions

My niece came out as trans three years ago when she was 11 - like previous posters she gave herself a boy’s name and chopped off all her hair. She was an early developer with breasts and periods when she was ten and a half. We all called her by her new name and didn’t make a big deal about it. She transitioned back a month ago after a family bereavement. Again, we’ve not made a fuss, just switched back to calling her by her birth name.

I mean in the end OP this is a chat board frequented generally by UK women, many of whom have children.

The FWR board used to generally attract left leaning posters / more definite left/ feminist activists / women who had been active in LGB rights things back in the day etc.

The board has got s wider group posting now but overall the flavour hasn't changed much.

The question is what would you do if your child said they were trans etc.

What were you expecting?

Something other than. Do our best, worry, find out what's been going on, etc etc?

What did you think people would say, out of interest?

I have an autistic daughter aged 11. Into anime and already talking about being bisexual (she didn’t know what sex was initially so I’m not sure she’s certain yet). A year or two ago she talked about being a boy but it was a friend encouraging this and it stopped when she drifted from the friend. I have a bet with myself/DH that she will at least talk about being non binary. I’m combating the female stereotypes and idea of gender by telling her there’s no boys clothes or girls toys etc. A girl can wear/play/work/enjoy whatever and they are still a girl. The only difference is genitals until puberty. Brains aren’t gendered aside from the affect of hormones. But it’s important to know men are much stronger and usually bigger.

If it’s non binary and she’s not really transitioning I’ll let her know it doesn’t change reality. I won’t use silly pronouns (she wouldn’t know anyway), I won’t panic and will chat about the subject generally to explain and encourage her to see women as varied and that having masculine qualities is normal. If it goes further I’ll ban the internet and find a decent therapist. If it’s school friends pushing it and it’s getting worse I’ll homeschool her, potentially from a cottage in snowdonia and volunteer on a farm/wildlife centre. Get back to nature and reconnect with her physical reality.

She can retake GCSEs later in life but she can’t reverse a mastectomy, restore a female voice or easily remove a beard or receding hairline. I’ll fight for her but pray it won’t happen.

A teen I knew transitioned, female to male, also ASD. It happened after meeting a trans boy. I was supportive but didn’t see them as male at all, just not a particularly feminine girl. I said this to another adult but not to the child. It was such a shame but it was none of my business. At the time I was very supportive of trans people, I just didn’t see her as a boy, she was a fab girl - insightful, empathetic and sensitive, nothing overtly masculine, and I’d love my DD to be as mature and helpful in a few years. I would have loved to have told her that. “What a woman is” was too narrow for her to fit comfortably. I really hope she desisted.

Here's my question for you OP.

Let's say your super skinny teenager came to you one day and said they feel fat. That every time they look in the mirror they hate how their thighs bulge and their stomach overhangs their jeans. You can see that the teenager is tiny - bones protruding, not an ounce of fat - but they tell you they need to slim down further.

How would you react? Would you "affirm" them by giving them a set of scales and a diet book? Maybe some laxatives?

I'd explain humans can't change sex.

I'd explain all the horrendous side effects from taking cross-sex hormones (which are usually used in breast cancer treatment and male chemical castration) from infertility to osteoporosis.

I'd explain that creating a "neo vagina" involves turning your penis inside out and taking bits of your colon or stomach lining and attaching it, that even Jazz Jennings - who supposedly had the world's best surgeons - has had four operations to try and fix the damage that has been done to him, that the neo-vagina needs to be dilated every day for life to stop it healing up and that, despite all of that, it will never function like a real vagina. I'd explain that even if you manage to have a successful operation you may well still lose all ability to climax. (Imagine trying to make an accurate model vagina from Play Doh. Now imagine doing that with skin, while trying to navigate scar tissue and bacteria and thousands of nerve endings etc).

I'd explain that creating a "neo phallus" requires multiple skin grafts from the arm or other part of the body. I would show them pictures of the scarring. I would explain that even after numerous operations a neo-phallus doesn't work like a real phallus and the best you can hope for is inserting a pump into some neo-testicles and pumping them during intercourse to make the neo-phallus erect.

I'd explain that even after all those surgeries - each one involving general anaesthetic, which is in itself dangerous - and inviting a range of issues from infection to sepsis that can occur with any operation - you still haven't changed sex. You have modified your body. And you may still not feel happy in it. You may even feel worse.

I'd explain that there is no one universal feeling of "male" or "female" - that we each are stuck with and in our own bodies and that whatever we sew on or chop off doesn't really change that.

And then I would sit down with them and try and identify what was causing them to feel so uncomfortable in their own body and how we could think about making them feel better without surgery or chemicals.

I have this experience, yes, and I feel extremely saddened by it.

I doubt that my young relative would have been in the old, rare cohort who ‘needed’ to transition. It seems to me to have been a combination of reaction to a difficult family situation, the near-fatal illness of a parent, and one of those bloody Stonewall Champion schools in which half of year 9 all come out as trans together.

I’ll use the new name but avoid much discussion. I sit on my thoughts about it to avoid hurting her feelings.

The grandparents were at first bemused and then utterly shocked, having vaguely thought ‘transman’ was a new word for lesbian, and not realised it meant breast removal, a broken voice and a beard.

I love the kid and hate the situation. How on earth anyone can think that this is a good thing to do to a very young, hurt, vulnerable woman beats me.

I have had experience of teens (16-17) saying this to me. Just someone I met a couple of times at work. I suggested that had they thought they might be a lesbian rather than trans. She said her dad would rather she was a boy than a lesbian(!) I asked her if she knew about the physical harm that transitioning, starting with breast-binders (she mentioned them), would cause. She didn't know. I asked her to do more research and consider that she may be lesbian and not trans, or just not like her body much at that moment in time, but that was a temporary feeling. I didn't get to talk to her much after that, but I hope it made her stop and think.