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Original poster

On the certainty of the trans identifying teen - guidance for parents

33 replies

BettyBooper · 21/04/2026 10:22

I've just read this article by ReadsomePiagetPlease! and thought it might be helpful to share for parents with trans identifying children.

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1/status/2046106359247077884

Some excerpts:

'One of the most challenging aspects for parents, teachers, and clinicians, to understand and to manage, is the absolute certainty with which many trans identifying teenagers present. It is not the tentative, exploratory uncertainty that characterises most adolescent identity questions. It is categorical, resistant to examination, and often experienced by the young person as an existential matter. To question it feels to them like a denial of their existence. To suggest alternative explanations feels like an attack. The adults around them, trying to engage carefully and honestly, frequently find that careful and honest engagement is precisely what the young person cannot tolerate.'...

...'The identity is managing an internal state that was, before its adoption, genuinely overwhelming. To threaten the identity is to threaten the regulatory system. The young person does not experience a parent raising questions about their gender identity as an intellectual challenge to be engaged with. They experience it as an attempt to return them to the unbearable state the identity rescued them from. The ferocity of the response is proportionate not to the strength of the argument being made against them but to the psychological function the identity is performing.'

Read some Piaget please! (@prof_curiosity1) on X

On the certainty of the trans identifying teen

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1/status/2046106359247077884

OP posts:
2016NotATeen · 21/04/2026 11:26

It describes acutely the difficulty of navigating this situation. Some really astute observations. The sentence about it not being ‘an expansion of their understanding’ (ie. Query theory , turn-everything-on-its-head’ so words lose their long-accepted meaning) but a suppression of the child’s ’evidence of their own perception’ perfectly describes the whole ‘Mummy who gave birth to you is, in fact, your Daddy’ scenario. And I am not talking about any scenario where an adopting Mummy/Daddy is called Mummy/Daddy either before someone jumps in with that.

Bluebootsgreenboots · 21/04/2026 11:18

I think this is the best article on trans identity that I’ve read and I wish I’d had it when my child first declared their new self. One to circulate widely.

Turtlesgottaturtle · 21/04/2026 11:07

"For younger children in particular, this is not an expansion of their understanding. It is a demand that they suppress the evidence of their own perception in deference to a socially enforced claim."
That's the way I feel as an adult. It's a form of gaslighting and I experience it as a deliberate mindfuck. Don't others? Or am I missing an understanding of identity as distinguished from physical reality? We're not just told that transwomen are men who feel that they are women, we're told that they are women and so we should be happy to undress in front of them.

Original poster
BettyBooper · 21/04/2026 11:06

TwoLoonsAndASprout · 21/04/2026 11:04

And for the second article:

https://archive.is/tNwWg

Thank you @TwoLoonsAndASprout ! I was hoping someone would do that!

OP posts:
TwoLoonsAndASprout · 21/04/2026 11:04

And for the second article:

https://archive.is/tNwWg

TwoLoonsAndASprout · 21/04/2026 11:00

An archive link to the first article for those not on X (for some reason Nitter won't show it):

https://archive.is/CL2DC

OpheliaWitchoftheWoods · 21/04/2026 10:49

This reply has been withdrawn

This has been withdrawn by MNHQ at the poster's request.

Original poster
BettyBooper · 21/04/2026 10:45

Oh and this one for teachers and parents about the dangers to all children of teaching about GI in schools.

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1/status/2045390010560520341

'The effect on children who do not adopt a transgender or non-binary identity is also real and also underdiscussed. Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework describes the school as a mesosystem, one of the key environments within which children develop their understanding of the social world. When the school environment introduces a framework that treats biological sex as mutable, that requires children to accept that a peer who presents as a boy may be correctly described as a girl, and that to question this is to cause harm, it creates cognitive dissonance for children whose concrete operational understanding of the world is organised around stable physical categories. For younger children in particular, this is not an expansion of their understanding. It is a demand that they suppress the evidence of their own perception in deference to a socially enforced claim. The developmental costs of teaching children that observable reality is less reliable than asserted identity have not been studied. They deserve to be.'....

....'Developmental science does not support the introduction of gender identity frameworks to children before the cognitive, moral, and identity-forming capacities required to engage with them are in place. It does not support the use of schools as environments for the transmission of a contested identity framework to children who are, by developmental definition, in the most suggestible and identity-forming period of their lives. And it does not support the assumption that exposure to that framework is neutral for children who do not adopt its categories, because no exposure to a framework that reorganises the cognitive and social environment of development is ever neutral.

The children in those classrooms did not ask to be part of this. They deserved better than to become the unexamined subjects of an intervention that the institutions responsible for their care had not thought carefully enough about.'

Read some Piaget please! (@prof_curiosity1) on X

Not a niche issue: why gender identity impacts ALL children

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1/status/2045390010560520341

OP posts: