Speaker 13:
This may be just for the benefit of the video because I don’t have a loud voice. But I really wanted to talk to parents and I want parents to know what happens when your child is allowed to wait. When all you do is support your child and you wait, and this is what happens.
My son emailed me his story of his development and that’s all I want to do, I want to read it to you, so I’m going to read it to you right now.
“As a young child, I had always felt discomfort around being a boy. I was effeminate, shy and highly aware of the masculine boyishness around me that made me so uncomfortable. I can recall feeling devastated whenever a teacher would separate the class based on sex, and I couldn’t wait for the moment my imprisonment with these people was over. It was clear that they were them and I was not exactly part of an us, but I was definitely something other than them.
At that age I remember thinking ‘god I wish I’d been born a girl’. I remember being 10 or 11 years old and telling my mum that I’m not a boy or a girl, I’m something in the middle. I was aware of my male body but I saw it as something like a burden, rather than something neutral. And definitely something distant. Whenever my parents would call me ‘son’ I felt an almost blurry nausea and incongruity. ‘Please don’t call me that’ I said. During my teen years I pored over queer youtube. I learned the vernacular of the gays, I learned the gospel that Blaire White is sacrilegious and I looked up to people like Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube who was not Abigail back then. They and the others took me on an intellectual tour of the Terf Wars and other gay matters through a philosophical lens. I learned that gender was an innate energy and that attempts to define it was always shrouded in transphobia.
I was a very dogmatic 16 year old. I grew my hair out and I wore very flamboyant clothes of either sex. I was regularly referred to in the feminine, and although my goal wasn’t to be read as a woman this gave me that sense of gender euphoria. My goal, I believed, was to break free from the burden of gender.
At 18 I was depressed and it was at this moment I acknowledged the fear and suspicion that had been building for years. That I was one of the unlucky ones, born in the wrong body, that I was trans. I looked at my reflection with disappointment and fear at the upcoming changes the future had in store for me. I wasn’t excited at all but to me this seemed the only way forward. I didn’t want to transition, I just wanted to have been born a woman. A female. I can’t thank the stars enough that my parents never took me to see a gender therapist. Had they done so, I would have been overjoyed as a pre-pubescent child. It would have made everything make sense. ‘Aha, I’m a girl inside and I was just born in the wrong body. Tell me more. Wait, you can change my body to make it the right gender, sex, oh wow, please when can we start? ’. It frightens me how much I know it could have been me because it took me until I was 19 for my gender dysphoria to recede and for me to accept and make peace with the fact that I am male, and indeed a man. I felt there was no place for a gender non-conforming man like I was Had I seen a professional about it, I would have prayed now that they would have investigated the source of the rejection of my maleness Why did being perceived male hurt me the way it did? This is a worthy question that we should ask.”
And I’m going to stop there. But I just want any parent who’s listening, or any young person to know that when I ask him why he never asked to transition, he said it was because he knew you can’t change sex. And I think that’s a really important message for young people to have. That they know they’ve got anxiety, they’ve got issues, they’ve got fear, but the whole time they believe that you can’t actually fix that with surgery, they’ve got a chance to fix whatever it is that’s underlying. And sometimes it is just time.