If your child has come out as trans what are you doing?

I think this is really important to understand. Maybe people who post here do for the most part, but in my experience people in general don't.

There is a certain amount of knowledge in the medical world about the best, and worst, ways to treat people with these kinds of issues around the body, with anxiety, with obsessions, with identity.

They are the opposite of what people are being told to do with gender.

The problem is that invalidating and alienating our children is not the way to bring them along to a healthier place.

Why do you think 'validating' an untruth would bring them along to a happier place? This is the opposite of how you treat OCD and body dysmorphia where it is recognised that accommodating obsessions is harmful as it is reinforcing them. It amounts to telling them they are correct in their belief that everything is contaminated/you will die if they don't do a routine.

We did find a gender specialist for our child, who was willing to talk to them. Child was looking for confirmation of their gender dysphoria and that transitioning would be the answer - therapist was fairly confident that it was mostly ASD issues that was causing the feelings of not belonging.

@BorgQueen , are you in the same position as some of us?!

I can imagine that's all true, and hard, Dwarf.

Issues like this tend not to have one 'solution' in my experience. So many internal and external factors interlinked.

Gender ideology seems, more than anything, to be designed to undermine identity.

Hm, by severing the link between material reality and words used to describe that?

By suggesting identity is completely a free choice it seems to remove all weight meaning and value from identity. They become something to cling ever harder to as there is no solid link to reality. May be that's why people need to fight so hard to prove their identity is 'valid'.

There is no real supply of therapists that we can rely on. Genspect will confirm this. They are trying to come up with a list but it’s very limited at the moment.
The next problem is that the child/young person would have to cooperate with the therapy in order for it to be effective. Given that most of our children here have seen the US ‘Gender therapist’ affirmation model of care in operation they are less likely to accept anything other than that. Another problem is that good one-to-one therapy takes years - at least 3-5 years and that is not affordable for most.
Therapy isn’t a solution unfortunately.

genspect.org/

I didn't see if genspect had been shared already? 're therapists who are not purely taking an affirmative approach.

@BorgQueen - really? You obviously cannot imagine how difficult life can be with a trans-identifying child. Parents on this thread are dealing with extremely challenging and complex issues. I’d like to see you walk a mile- or year- in our shoes. Then you can come back and tell us all how you fared.

What other highly damaging things would parents let their kids do to their bodies because they have ASD etc ?
You wouldn’t think twice about saying NO in any other potentially harmful situation so why is ‘Trans’ so different and special?
It’s absolutely crazy.
Grow some backbone and start saying NO.

Sorry, posted too soon. Yes, our experience has been that despite being really clear that we were looking for someone who wouldn't immediately affirm but would explore, our child's therapist immediately affirmed and now says "why doesn't matter".

Thanks for the book recommendation, I will check it out.

Yep @MangyInseamand you can’t even involve psychologists in helping your child because they are at the top of the queue in terms of accepting these beliefs.

**I would also add that when there are trans-supporting siblings in the mix, this makes it even more difficult to be the 'bad guy' who doesn't affirm. My trans-identifying child has two older brothers, one of whom has a close friend who transitioned in their early teens. The other brother has a non-binary partner. Feeling like the odd one out in your own home when all these people are enthusiastically using your child's new name and cheering them on in wearing gender-affirming clothing has been extremely difficult. Not to mention having your child's therapist warning you that you risk self-harm/suicide.

DH and I have taken different approaches. He has simply carried on using our child's birth name and pronouns. I have fudged and manage to completely avoid using any pronouns in his presence and use sweetie/darling/my love etc when speaking to them. My personal feeling is that this avoids any confrontation whilst also not tacitly affirming. I do not comment on his clothes at all. His brothers also do not use either name and as they don't live at home anymore, this means we simply don't talk about him, so no sharing of news, achievements etc. I feel like our family has been ripped in two.

A few months after our child came out as trans there was basically a row, when I said that I simply didn't agree with the whole trans thing and that it made no sense. With hindsight I think this was a mistake. Although I do think that it's OK to push back, we went about it the wrong way. We later had a conversation where we said that we loved him whatever happens, that we support him and accept him. Interestingly, this seemed to completely take the heat out of the names/pronouns thing and he no longer corrects DH.

My personal feeling for my child, is that if we affirm him then it will make it much more difficult for him to go back to his birth name if, as I desperately hope, he becomes at ease with his sexed body. I absolutely do not judge any parent who has chosen a different path, I really believe that we're all muddling along and trying to do our best for our children.

The whole society is supporting the belief. And those that aren't are painted as phobic.

It's kind of unprecedented, I can't think of another case where young people are being supported to believe in total fantasies.

I don't think there is any medical precedent for just deciding, at any point, that people should just be allowed their delusion as if it will be permanent. That's not what happened with sex changes in the past for people with sex dysphoria.

The only reason people are stuck supporting this with their kids is because of the wider social message and "support" which means kids may cut themselves off from family or parents rights may even be removed.

It's not always simple but I do think it's actually pretty straight forward that if you are starting with all the authoritative people in your like telling you that your feelings determine your sex, that you can't depend on your body to even be a particular type of body, you are starting from a foundation of sand.

We are our bodies, when matter is formless there is nothing in which to anchor a sense of self. This is why people recovering from trauma can so often be helped by connecting with the body and also connection with nature.

Gender ideology seems, more than anything, to be designed to undermine identity.

Well put @Dwarfcavendish , I relate to much of your post

I understand it must be very hard to deal with, of course. But if one starts from roughly the place where you are now, it's perhaps and hopefully easier?

I've watched this movement over a period of years - we had the claim first of all that puberty blockers were entirely reversible with no side effects, then seen the NHS delete that assertion, then seen the Cass report sound warning bells, the enquiry into Sonia Appleby, Sweden reverse their policy, etc, as we have steadily started to unravel the horrible tangle that's been held up as 'expert' service for children/young people.

Various organisations/people that had declared themselves experts have subsequently proven themselves to be very much not trustworthy - I'm thinking of people like Drs Helen and Michael Webberley - who style themselves as saviours of 'trans kids' but have been found to have harmful and substandard practises and suspended/struck off (respectively).

Wishing you and your daughter all the best. I hope that you find a way through this, and can heal.

I think from the outside it can be easy to have all the answers. When it is happening to you, it is much messier and more complicated.
We now use our daughter’s chosen name and pronouns at home. This was not an easy decision to make. Neither was it a decision we made on our own unfortunately. It came about as a result of one-on-one therapy my child was having to help her with self-harming/suicidal ideation (DBT). It was presented to us as being something my child felt very strongly about and that it would help her in relation to the problematic coping methods she had developed.
A depressed child that is harming herself wields a lot of power. It is extremely difficult to know what is the right decision to make as a parent. In our case we sought outside help and trusted those that were involved to know what they were doing. I’m not at all sure that they did now. So that’s why we are where we are. The one thing it has taught me is not to trust outsiders to understand what is going on.
Every trans-identifying child is different. They all have their own story. There are children that were gender non-conforming from a young age, another group that absolutely were not, children that are straight and others that are gay. Children with trauma, others that are searching for acceptance within a group because they are lonely and have no friends. Parents are for the most part just trying to do their best for their child. I might not agree with the path some parents are taking but who am I to judge.
My take on our situation is that our child has been indoctrinated by a cult. It had already happened before I could understand it completely. My job now is to build back up the relationship with my child, to ensure that she feels loved no matter what she believes. Even though I’m not happy about the name/pronoun part, it has taken the heat out of our family’s situation and allowed us to move forward in a way.