I’m a feminist with a trans son AMA

[Fraida]

I’m a long-standing member of MN (since 2006 when my eldest child was born) but have named changed more recently!

So I have a 14 year old who is FTM trans person and two other younger children. My son came out officially as trans earlier this year but has been exploring his gender identity since he was about eight. This has been an interesting journey for us all as DH and I have always prided ourselves on allowing all of our children to be individuals and trying to help them not get sucked into cultural norms from a gender perspective I.e. a saying in our house is there is no such thing as boys things and girls things just things Like what you like and don’t get bogged down by what society might expect of you. For a while my middle child - a boy - had the longest hair in the house and loves horse riding both things typically associated with girls, for example.

With DS1 coming out as male I have had to rethink and relearn many of my own beliefs about gender and the whole transitioning process as Ill gladly admit I did have preconceived ideas and concerns about, for example, any gender specialists going down the route of affirmation rather than assessment as well as concerns about medication being offered too quickly. However in our experience so far this hasn’t been the case and there seems to be many more barriers and much more in the way of caution than I anticipated.

I will say however that the overwhelming negative impact on his mental health has been devastating for us all to watch with a number of suicide attempts (not uncommon) and chronic anxiety, to say the least. I do feel that whatever your views are on gender health care for children it cannot be right that psychological support and help is not more widespread and readily available.

Anyways I’m being brave because I fundamentally believe that dialogue is important and active listening in order to truly hear what opposing views are is really important in such a sensitive area. So here I am, happy to debate and answer questions but please don’t insult me as I am a sensitive human at the end of the computer

@Butterer

In all honesty? I think the only thing that helped was time passing, and being able to heal a little. Psychotherapy I accessed a few years was also useful to an extent, in that it gave me space to unpack and unload and unpick various traumas.

I thought I was still experiencing it in a form until now because I still have issues with bathing. Im ok in my skin, but not in my bathroom.

Turns out I'm fine bathing anywhere but home (I went away the other month for the first time in years).

I was assaulted just next to my bath, years after, in a different city, and by a different person to the previous assault).

I've just had support to get a grant under reasonable adjustments for living with PTSD (thank you charitable foundations!) , and am getting my bath turned round 180°.
If I can get in/sit in a different space, I'm hoping it will be easier and less triggery. And I might become a little more nicely fragrant and better at self care than I have been since 2013

I really wish you all the best and hope the adjustments will help, you sound like you are making steps forward in the right direction x

@Thingybob

May I ask you a personal question OP, are you also on the autistic spectrum?

Also, do you honestly believe that a female can become a male?

I missed this question... no I am not on the autistic spectrum but my husband is along with my trans son.

I think it is more innate than a conscious choice if I am honest, I don’t think you become something I think you are something. DS describes the feeling as follows (copied and pasted from a text he sent me a while a go as sometimes he finds it easier to explain something in writing than verbally).

“ For me gender is my sense of self. For example, you may have a particular characteristic of your body that you identify with. Like green eyes or freckles. You don’t realise that your green eyes are there until suddenly you look in the mirror and have brown eyes. You are then confused. Gender dysphoria for me is like I identify with my penis, but when I look down it isn’t there. Like you may know that you are a woman due to your physical characteristics, I know I am a man due to my characteristics that arent there.”

Does your son want a phalloplasty when he is older?

Also my Dad committed suicide a couple of months ago and I can only imagine how hard it would be to watch your child attempt suicide. I only have an infant and I know that bond.

I know I am a man due to my characteristics that arent there

OP how is this different from someone saying they know there is a God or they know they were an xyz in a past life?

Personally I think you're putting far too much stock in an individual testimony. We cannot really know our minds - all we know is the narrative that we construct to explain our feelings. Human minds are incredibly vulnerable to external influence, you just have to watch a Derren Brown show to see how people can be convinced of pretty much anything.

If this is a helpful way for your child to cope with their feelings then great but the idea that reveals some kind of innate "gender identity" is, I think, quite naive.

My DS is 10. My dad is autistic, I have some autistic traits and DS has some strong autistic traits, but has never been diagnosed with ASD. I used to assess children for ASD and I also taught children with autism for a year so I have a fair bit of knowledge around it and find it very interesting as a condition.

Out of interest, did your son struggle to label people as 'him' and 'her' when he was little OP? My son used to use the words interchangeably up until he was about 6 - I couldn't tell whether he genuinely couldn't tell if someone was male or female or if he just didn't pay any attention to it!

My son is 10 and has talked about wanting to be a girl. He has long hair and regularly wears dresses. There is no way I will ever indulge the idea that he can transition because I feel that would be a complete misunderstanding of what he's getting at. Something about his ASD traits makes it very hard for him to understand gender and having to live as a boy is uncomfortable for him because he doesn't get the point of it, much like he doesn't get the point of a lot of other social conventions. Gender is the mostly highly relevant social convention for him at the moment, given that he's starting puberty, which is why he's fixated on it but it could just as easily be a lack of understanding as to why no one wants to listen to him wang on about minecraft for 30 endless minutes at a time. All of this is quite hard for him, it's part of being different. But IMO if I say 'yes you can be a girl' I'm abdicating my responsibility as an adult to get him through the difficulty of the differences he faces so he can live as happily as possible in the world as it is (rather than as he would like it to be). He is a boy who may wear dresses and make up and have long hair. He's not a girl because that's not what the word 'girl' means no matter what he might want. Differences in viewing and interacting with the world can't be treated or changed with surgery and no amount of surgery will ever make him into a girl and, IMO, it's my job to make that clear to him, as a parent.

The thing around suicide is a total red herring IMO. The fact that a child is suicidal doesn't provide more motivation to give them what they want - if anything it means that you should examine more closely what the hell is going on to make them so uncomfortable with the reality of their body that they're connecting it with wanting to die. To me it signals a really complex struggle with the reality of the world, which doesn't seem that unusual or hard to understand. That may be due to the fact that I have autistic traits and can relate to not 'fitting in' and not 'feeling right.' I genuinely think the gender element is a symptom, and treating the symptom is not going to solve the problem, it just creates more problems, some of them terrible, life-long ones.

Not sure if this has been linked to but an interesting development in Sweden here:

"Since publishing we’ve been made aware of an excellent article by Mikael Landén, Professor, University Hospital Chief Physician, Section of Psychiatry and Neurochemistry, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg

lakartidningen.se/klinik-och-vetenskap-1/kommentar/2019/10/okningen-av-konsdysfori-hos-unga-tarvar-eftertanke/

In this article (for which he won an award) he puts forward that “culturally-linked psychologial infection” (aka social contagion) is a possible explanation for the exponential increase in youth seeking gender transition. We’ll update our article with more info but he states:

An alternative is culturally bound psychological infection. If people in their early teens are encouraged to think about their gender identity and are taught that gender dysphoria is a normal variant, it is not unlikely that some young people will direct their identity search towards gender identity. Such a search can spread quickly in social networks, as described for a number of other phenomena such as bulimia, suicide (increases when famous people or someone you know has taken their life), smoking, obesity and more [8].

The increased use of social media coincides in time with the increase in gender dysphoria [9] and may have facilitated the spread of social networks. Autism spectrum disorders are more common in people with gender dysphoria [10], and it may be people who are more sensitive to such effects"

Hi OP, I don't want to get into a debate as it can be very toxic, however I just wanted to say you are doing a wonderful job of supporting your son. I'm sure this will help his mental health as support is known to reduce suicide attempts in trans youth. The suicide stats you quoted are real and you seen very knowledgeable about trans issues in general. Unfortunately there are people and organisations out there who are essentially trans-deniers. Being trans is real, the suffering is real and the struggle to access care is real. Trans teens are less likely to finish education and are more likely to end up unemployed. Detransition rates are actually low, but that is denied by people who don't want to believe it is a real thing. I'm sorry you and your son are going through this but remember there lots of people who support you both and are wishing you all the best. I hope he gets the right treatment at the right time for him. I know you are a great parent and will support him throughout his journey, wherever that may take him.

Some of the children I worked with who had autism used to bite their own hands as a way of managing their anxiety. It made them feel better and helped them to control their own emotions and many of them really really struggled to stop even when they understood why it was a dangerous behaviour. Most people don't bite their hands because it hurts and hurting themselves isn't comforting, but the ASD brain works differently and so 'standard' understanding doesn't always work. We could have said 'ok go ahead and bite your hands if you need to' on the understanding that a child allowed to bite their hands would feel calmer but also with the knowledge that in the long run they could cause very severe damage. Of course we didn't do that, because allowing a child to engage in a maladaptive behaviour that causes them damage isn't right, even if in the short term the outcome for that child (being calmer and less anxious) is good. We could have punished them and forced them to stop, but that would obviously not work either as it would only increase their anxiety and make the situation worse. So we worked with the child to get to the source of their anxiety and tried to find different ways, more effective ways to manage it. That involved actually getting to the root of the problem, not just looking at the outward situation or the behaviour.

I don't see gender dysphoria as being any different. IME it's very common for children with ASD to have a complicated relationship with their body - many have sensory problems, refuse to wear certain types or textures of clothes, won't eat certain foods because of the texture, will only wear their hair one way, can't stand wearing watches etc. Gender dysphoria seems to be me to a very obvious extension of that - discomfort with the reality of an adult body and what that means for them. Going along with the idea that they can be cured by changing the superficial appearance of their body strikes me as nothing short of lazy thinking - there's no attempt there to understand 'why does this child see gender as the centre of their difficulty?' - instead it's essentially of the equivalent of 'let them bite their hand, it makes them feel better.' It amounts to a refusal to really engage with the issue IMO, which is likely to be complicated - understanding the ASD point of view is a job and half sometimes.

For non-ASD children puberty and hormones usually creates problems of some sort - including hatred of their body and depression. It seems logical that for children with ASD the problems caused by puberty are likely to be more complex and difficult to deal with (as with a lot of things experienced by children with ASD unfortunately). Seeing the problems of children with ASD as pathological and in need of medical treatment up to and including major and life-long body changes strikes me as on a par with measures of the past like castration for gay people and lobotomies - a lack of understanding combined with an underlying fear that leads to a horrific 'treatment.'

Absolutely agree.

t.co/KWEk6h0wUI?amp=1

"Swedish child psychiatrist, Sven Roman has compared the explosive growth in the number of cases of gender dysphoria to other psychiatric conditions, such as eating disorders and self-harm behaviour, that are known tospread with social contacts. He documents the process of discovery that the medical community went through to understand how to best treat these kinds of conditions. Over the past decade, he says research has proven that supportive psychotherapy can reduce or stop self-harm behaviour within 3 months."

Just for information, the word dysphoria literally means being in a state of unease or dissatisfaction with life.

It is not the same as a sexual orientation, because the only negatives about sexual orientation are about how it is perceived in society. This is categorically not true of trans identified individuals.

wonderrwall what do you mean by "trans is real"?

Do you mean some people are literally men born in women's bodies and vice versa? Because that's magical thinking.

If you mean that some people genuinely believe themselves to be the other sex then I can agree with you as that is self evidently the case but it doesn't get us any further forward in working out how to help.

I'm also dubious about statements such as "trans is real" because they seem to be a catechism and if someone does not respond with the appropriate confirmation, they are accused of literally erasing people. Whereas what is actually going on is that people are trying to understand what people mean by "My son is trans". Do they mean -

"he is literally a boy although every cell in his body is female" or do they mean

"my son hates being a girl and feels intense distress about it and knows with certainty that he is supposed to be a boy" or do they mean

"my son hates being a girl and his feelings of disconnect and discomfort are alleviated by dressing and performing as a boy and if he could do more, he would"

Two and three make sense although three is the most accurate description of what is happening.

And that's why we should be able to refer to Trans Identified Individuals on here. It's truthful and accurate and not offensive. Unless you are very determined that the world must collude in your need for affirmation.

The suicide stats you quoted are real

Can I ask what you mean by “real”?

If you mean they have really been published, you’re right. But they have been debunked, so they can’t be true, unless true is not what you mean.

Unfortunately there are people and organisations out there who are essentially trans-deniers. Being trans is real, the suffering is real and the struggle to access care is real.

I don't think anybody here is denying trans people are "real" nor that they can suffer. But just because some adults have dysphoria & choose to transition it doesn't follow that all the tennets of mainstream trans activism are true nor that we shouldn't proceed with extreme caution with children.

I agree with you about lack of access to care. You may not be aware that this is partially the consequence of mainstream trans activism insisting that gender dysphoria is not a mental health condition and pressing therapy accreditation organisations to sign the memorandum of understanding. This essentially adds trans to a prior agreement not to practice conversion therapy on gay people. It fails to consider the fact that for some* families, affirming their child as trans is a way of denying they are gay.

I know several therapists through work. They are scared to take on trans clients. They tell me there is little unbiased training. Anything other than affirmation risks not adhering to the memorandum of understanding. But therapy by its nature is about challenging self-perception and exploring root causes. These therapists are also scared of being sued later on if if they do partake in affirmation, given the severe adverse physical ramifications of medical transition on adolescent bodies.

*Not saying any of this is the case with OP here by the way!

@BrassicaRabbit

Unfortunately there are people and organisations out there who are essentially trans-deniers. Being trans is real, the suffering is real and the struggle to access care is real.

I don't think anybody here is denying trans people are "real" nor that they can suffer. But just because some adults have dysphoria & choose to transition it doesn't follow that all the tennets of mainstream trans activism are true nor that we shouldn't proceed with extreme caution with children.

I agree with you about lack of access to care. You may not be aware that this is partially the consequence of mainstream trans activism insisting that gender dysphoria is not a mental health condition and pressing therapy accreditation organisations to sign the memorandum of understanding. This essentially adds trans to a prior agreement not to practice conversion therapy on gay people. It fails to consider the fact that for some* families, affirming their child as trans is a way of denying they are gay.

I know several therapists through work. They are scared to take on trans clients. They tell me there is little unbiased training. Anything other than affirmation risks not adhering to the memorandum of understanding. But therapy by its nature is about challenging self-perception and exploring root causes. These therapists are also scared of being sued later on if if they do partake in affirmation, given the severe adverse physical ramifications of medical transition on adolescent bodies.

*Not saying any of this is the case with OP here by the way!

That’s really sad - that one of the reasons why therapy for trans identifying children is so hard to get is because therapists are afraid of being sued whichever way they approach the issue.

@WomanWithAWo

Does your son want a phalloplasty when he is older?

Not sure at the moment but yes he has talked about Metoidioplasty or Phalloplasty in general, that is a very long way down the line.

@twoHopes

I know I am a man due to my characteristics that arent there

OP how is this different from someone saying they know there is a God or they know they were an xyz in a past life?

Personally I think you're putting far too much stock in an individual testimony. We cannot really know our minds - all we know is the narrative that we construct to explain our feelings. Human minds are incredibly vulnerable to external influence, you just have to watch a Derren Brown show to see how people can be convinced of pretty much anything.

If this is a helpful way for your child to cope with their feelings then great but the idea that reveals some kind of innate "gender identity" is, I think, quite naive.

This is not an isolated testimony to be fair but yes anecdote does not mean data. The brains plasticity and ability to create new connections and reinforcement of learning and memory is known but one could argue that I know I am a woman and I would still be a woman regardless , god forbid, I had any damage or removal of the body parts that mark me out as female. Could the same not be argued for my son, that he knows he is male regardless of what the physical evidence says.

And it's not your body parts that mark you out as female, it's your entire body - the totality of you, (if you don't believe in the soul). The xx runs through every cell in your body.

@TheDailyCarbuncle

My DS is 10. My dad is autistic, I have some autistic traits and DS has some strong autistic traits, but has never been diagnosed with ASD. I used to assess children for ASD and I also taught children with autism for a year so I have a fair bit of knowledge around it and find it very interesting as a condition.

Out of interest, did your son struggle to label people as 'him' and 'her' when he was little OP? My son used to use the words interchangeably up until he was about 6 - I couldn't tell whether he genuinely couldn't tell if someone was male or female or if he just didn't pay any attention to it!

My son is 10 and has talked about wanting to be a girl. He has long hair and regularly wears dresses. There is no way I will ever indulge the idea that he can transition because I feel that would be a complete misunderstanding of what he's getting at. Something about his ASD traits makes it very hard for him to understand gender and having to live as a boy is uncomfortable for him because he doesn't get the point of it, much like he doesn't get the point of a lot of other social conventions. Gender is the mostly highly relevant social convention for him at the moment, given that he's starting puberty, which is why he's fixated on it but it could just as easily be a lack of understanding as to why no one wants to listen to him wang on about minecraft for 30 endless minutes at a time. All of this is quite hard for him, it's part of being different. But IMO if I say 'yes you can be a girl' I'm abdicating my responsibility as an adult to get him through the difficulty of the differences he faces so he can live as happily as possible in the world as it is (rather than as he would like it to be). He is a boy who may wear dresses and make up and have long hair. He's not a girl because that's not what the word 'girl' means no matter what he might want. Differences in viewing and interacting with the world can't be treated or changed with surgery and no amount of surgery will ever make him into a girl and, IMO, it's my job to make that clear to him, as a parent.

The thing around suicide is a total red herring IMO. The fact that a child is suicidal doesn't provide more motivation to give them what they want - if anything it means that you should examine more closely what the hell is going on to make them so uncomfortable with the reality of their body that they're connecting it with wanting to die. To me it signals a really complex struggle with the reality of the world, which doesn't seem that unusual or hard to understand. That may be due to the fact that I have autistic traits and can relate to not 'fitting in' and not 'feeling right.' I genuinely think the gender element is a symptom, and treating the symptom is not going to solve the problem, it just creates more problems, some of them terrible, life-long ones.

This was an interesting post to read so thank you for your thoughts.

No he never had any difficulty in identifying who was male and who was female, other children struggled to identify him as male or female though from a very young age. He’s never struggled with social conventions rather conversely he’s understood them and it’s caused him great anxiety having to learn and mimic these. Part of the decline in mental health when he came out as trans (like I say he is better now) was that it would be yet another thing that would mark him out as different. He wishes he didn’t feel this way but he does and thus the latter is easier to adapt to and accept. It’s that acceptance and not fighting that he is trans that has bought him more peace.

I do slightly disagree that as parents we have to shoehorn our autistic children into a non autistic world. I think there is much more room for neurodiversity now than there ever used to be

I do want to stress strongly that I am not going along with this because he has attempted suicide, I am actually shining a spotlight on the pain and the difficulties and ensuring that these are helped and hopefully resolved so he can move forward.

As you rightly identify ASD is a complex condition and I would be doing his mental health a disservice if we purely focussed on the gender dysphoria and not everything else around it too. I need to be sure that we are not missing anything else or that there is not a root cause that can be addressed before he even thinks of going down a medical transition route.

OP, sorry if you’ve already answered this upthread and I’m aware that answering all these questions is keeping you away from your work and your children.

Do you actually believe your child is male? Not asking if you refer to them as a young adult male, but do you believe that your child is somehow actually male, rather than just wishes they were?