DS trans - I am GC - how to talk and avoid conflict

[Inapickleiam]

Hi, name changed for this for obvious reasons.

DS has been at Uni for a year. Had a great time. Told me at Christmas he is, I think, pansexual, i.e. attracted to a person, could be boy, girl, whatever. This didn’t bother / surprise me. He now has a GF who is trans.

This summer a few things have been different and I had a suspicion he might be planning to say he is trans too and some other things have now occurred that have confirmed this suspicion & he is now using a female name at Uni.

We haven’t spoken about it so I want to get my thoughts and words straight. I am GC, he knows that, we have argued about it before.

Maybe we won’t speak about it, he will be a girl a Uni and stay the same at home & maybe this is for the best?

Ultimately I love and adore him and really don’t want there to be issues between us. I would struggle to accept calling him anything other than a man, because I just don’t ‘believe’ it. My biggest fear is medical intervention and doing anything that is permanent or might damage him. Secondary fears are the consequences to his family, career, relationships, plus, I guess, a belief that it is a fad, a trend, he is going along with the crowd, he doesn’t actually have a medical condition of gender disphoria. I am also acutely aware that the trans community is very welcoming and almost encourages estrangement from disapproving parents and I desperately do not want this to happen to us but fear if I fully expressed my views, I would be pushing him into the arms of this, well, it feels like a cult.

So, I think I am looking for advice on how to tackle these conversations.

Please help, I have read this back and know I sound fairly calm but actually, I am having palpitations and sleepiness nights over this!

thanks.

'So two trans women in a relationship together (ie the op's child and their partner) are gay men 🤔…. I wonder how that would go down with the trans community.'

You know what, I don't care 'how that would go down'. These are internalised homophobic gay men, who find it easier to invade and co-opt a space they're not invited into, i.e. 'lesbian', rather than accept their male homosexuality.

You know one of the easier places in the world to get 'trans gender care'? Iran. Where every effeminate boy gets his dick chopped off as 'transgender' is far easier to accept than 'gay'.

Your child is gay,

That's not remotely n like the OP's son and please stop using emotional blackmail as a tactic to make women and girls feel uncomfortable that your son wants to use women's spaces.

This about covers it!

Clymene, He worries over what toilet to use in the future when he starts his transition. The fact he is even considering he can use the womens is where it all goes wrong. Somehow he thinks he can actually become the female sex. He can't. And this goes for all transitioning children, if even the parents will not have that hard conversation that what the children want is impossible and many people will not accept them as the opposite sex, the parents are part of the problem that transitioning is seen as the resolution to a problem it is not. Sometimes parenting means telling your child the hard bitter truth.

I'd wager most GC feminists appreciate that young trans people are victim to this ideology.
It's not about hate, but pity and a refusal to let one group's preferences ride roughshod over women and children's hard won rights and legal a protections.

Your son should use the men's toilet at all time.

Transition isn't a panacea, I believe the most likely point for trans suicide is 6-7 years after transition. Navigating this is a Herculean task but not choosing the affirmative school of response doesn't mean you love your child any less.

sanluca trust me we have had numerous conversations about this and he is not presuming anything. The difficulty lies in the abuse he will face in a male toilet (we already know from the abuse he faces at school that no male will tolerate him in a male toilet) but he also accepts that he doesn’t belong in a female. The answer at the moment is he just won’t use a toilet when he’s out which will store up a whole load of problems. If you believe that the problem lies with parents not having difficult conversations then you clearly don’t know anything of what the parents are going through. Of course we have difficult conversations, of course we doubt everything we might say, of course we want to strike a balance between showing our child how reality will be and also show them that we still love them. Because we do still love them and everyone just wants their child to be happy.
the support out there by the way is non existent. We have had every door closed in our face. So yes we may be floundering but of course difficult conversations are being had.

Thanks for this info. I am concerned about private online clinics, I noted a medical company name popping up as a suggested address when he was sending an email recently and wondered if it was something he had used.
The idea of rushing anything is awful, I'm sorry you have had to deal with this.

I wonder how that would go down with the trans community.

As well as denying them anything else that they want to make the rules up for, I imagine. But too bad. Lesbian isn't any empty, meaningless word that males can use if they feel like it. It has a meaning, and it isn't anything to do with either gay or straight male people.

It's very fashionable at present.

So he is a biological male and his 'GF' is also a biological male. They are attracted to each other and would previously have said they were gay. With some current TRA pushing gay and lesbian is out and so same sex attraction is relabelled so male is girl and other male is girl and now both trans and wow what a pickle.

There is a social contagion at present with this stuff. Many youngsters who haven't found their 'tribe' say they are trans and so fit in with the them they etc group.

As you know you cannot change your sex your DNA is there in your cells and cannot be changed from one biological sex to the other no matter how much you believe in the fantasy ideological religion. Maybe one day some of these confused youngsters might realise well biology is well biology

Im in this situation too. Total nightmare. My son is 22. Suddenly, with no warning, informed me a couple of months ago that he is now a she and then didnt speak to me for a week.
Longest week of my life - he lives at hours away so I cant pop round for a chat. A couple of weeks later the ice broke and now we are chatting again, pretty much getting on as well as we did before his "news".
Ive been GC for about 5 years. Until recently he essentially agreed with me on this topic - weirdly he still agrees with me! And yet...........hes still calling himself a female name and is "her" on social media. Makes no sense to me at all.
He has never ever expressed any issues re gender or body dysmorphia so this appears to be much more a ROGD thing, social contagion etc. Hes gay which he knows Ive got no issues with at all.
I was a mess when this news first dropped into my life but I knew right from the start what approach made sense to me - remind him how much I love him, affirm how wonderful I think he is, how much I appreciate him etc but that I will not and cannot compromise my own MH or opinions to somehow fit in with his. He was born a boy, I changed his nappies - he isnt in anyway now a woman! No magic wand has been waved.
He had a birthday recently and wasnt at all bothered that I addressed his card to his actual name. We are getting on really well. So Im hoping that by continuing to affirm how much I appreciate him, love him etc but refuse to accept the nonsense - that this will be a storm that will pass.

This.

They are 2 gay men playing at being what they think a woman is. They have no actual idea since neither are women. They use women-face, dress up and guess work as all trans women do, that's all they can do since they will never really know what it is to be a woman. Often the trans woman version of woman is extreme, over made up, dressing from the 1950's, as Little Britain said "we're women you know" whilst everyone nodded on with a snigger 'of course you are dears'.... sad really. What sort of life is that.

@Madlifebadlife your son will always be your son. No amount of altering the way he dresses, hair, make up, drugs or surgery will alter that fact. He will always be your son.

Thats a hard facts reality many people seem unwilling to accept but its the truth. In exactly the same way that no amount of alterations is going to magic me into a fairy or a dog.

FFS you either love your kid or you don’t. Your ideology as GC is irrelevant, even if you think they have been taken in by an ideology of ‘trans’. You need to speak from a position of caring and love about their time at uni, what they’re up to, what they need day to day and from you as a parent.

They don’t need you to lecture them about something you don’t understand.

So just be a parent. Don’t be ‘GC’ parent.

@Tukmgru
They don’t need you to lecture them about something you don’t understand.

An interesting position. Shut up and stick with what you know, eh?

And yet we parents are often compelled to toe the line (new names, new pronouns), be lectured in something "we don't understand". Why doesn't your logic work both ways?!

I’m in a similar situation to you in many ways (see my most recent post WWYD about my gender questioning DD who has recently gone off to university)
So far she has only spoken to me (not her Dad) and has alluded to changing pronouns/top surgery) but also said she wouldn’t do anything without our support (which puts a lot of pressure on me/us to not potentially destroy our relationship whilst feeling- like you- that she is just gay but is being swept up in this social contagion)
Part of my conversation with her was that she needs to get serious therapy to really explore why she feels the way she does.
Of course, she has gone out and started seeing a ‘supportive’ therapist who I’m afraid will just affirm whatever she says.
Just from reading this thread it seems like there are so many parents like us who are going through the exact same thing- when kids are younger everyone says ‘wait until they are 18 before medicalization happens’ but realistically, these young adults are still not mature enough to make life altering decisions about their long term mental health, future fertility and body altering surgeries. I’ve found this board to be extremely supportive even if I haven’t figured out what to do long term. I’m always worried the conversation will come up again and I don’t know how to love/support her whilst trying to get her to press the brakes and give herself time.
Like a pp I also am scared that once she is out of university and not financially reliant on us then she’ll just avoid us in the future.
this is the hardest thing to deal with and not something you can just chat to friends about either. Good luck- you’re not alone!

@Inapickleiam
If you look back at some of my old threads I have been in your situation for many years. Mine sort of announced to us when he was at school but in 7 years has never come out to anyone properly at home. I suspect he's in the autistic spectrum but nothing formal diagnosed.
However he won't talk about trans issues to us. Once he got to 18 he registered at Uni as a female name and I suspect he has a female name on his degree certificate but we were never invited to his graduation.
One of my old Mumsnet threads was something like I have a transgender teenage elephant in the room.

He never moved home after Uni. This may be because his Uni city is good and we live in a tiny village or it may be because he keeps his female identity from us. No romantic relationships to the best of my knowledge. Which is sad.

We still message daily, he comes home for Xmas and holidays etc. It's him who will not talk about things. My love is unconditional but I gave birth to a boy. He can pretend to be a woman if it makes him happy but it's just pretending.

I disagree entirely with this.

Firstly, 'trans' is not a sexual orientation.

Secondly, you can support your child, the person, without agreeing with their choices, and can be respectful in communicating that. Of course, as OP is doing, it is important to check your own reasons for disagreement (that our not prejudice, for example).

However it's the role of a parent to be a supportive & still sometimes challenging presence in our children's lives.

The steps OP's DS had embarked on are problematic & indicative of needing support.

(There's no need for the inverted commas around GC, either).

Where parents may be 'supportive' by saying just don't do it near me while. Ie a bit of a don't ask don't tell type thing but that means my friends are hiding a large proportion of themselves.

That's not at all what is being said. OP was referring to an identity & choices her DS may be exploring at university, which is away from her.

The reality is that the actions are coming from some place of confusion - engaged, listening support is wise, but not validating potentially harmful choices.

That sounds like a good starting point OP!

he feels he is a girl

@Madlifebadlife

What does this even mean? How does anyone 'feel' like a girl? That was where you should have started, in dialogue with your son.

Have you actually met any young trans women recently? Because the trans friends that dd has don’t fit this stereotype. Genuinely wouldn’t know they were trans until dd told us. All of them - they’re all aged 19-21- have been on hormones and puberty blockers (privately, mostly funded by their own part time work) since they were 14ish. Currently on the waiting list for surgery. They have curves, they’re slim, size 6-8 like dd, feminine. They’re not obviously male in any sense, even facially. When dressed up for an night out you genuinely wouldn’t know, infact dh showed someone at work a photo the other day of dd next to 2 of them and because he chats to them about things and they hadn’t actually seen a photo of dd before they asked whether dd was the trans one. These are the trans women walking amongst us, using toilets - and I would rather dds friends- who are vulnerable young adults - use the female toilets because they are far more likely to cause shock and attention when using the men’s. When using the women’s people do not realise they are trans. There is no issue, no weird looks. My elderly ex parents in law have met them all and do not have a clue they are trans - and they would absolutely query it if they suspected; they’re very close to dd and have lots of conversations about these things.

Mumsnet will frequently have posters say things like your post as if these are 6ft 2 14 stone men with beads and bald heads walking around wearing make up and calling themselves a woman like some drag act but that’s not my experience and others experience of modern, young transgender people. It doesn’t mean it isn’t part of it - I’m well aware of the many male prisoners who suddenly claim they’re a woman overnight and put a wig on and off they go and the whole spectrum of people in between. But people saying they can absolutely identify a trans woman do make me laugh a little because that’s not the day to day experience of dd or me or the trans people we know, at all.

Hi OP. My experience of teaching lots of trans children is that most of them grow out of it and don't end up getting surgery. Most are gay or autistic. A small number are 'genuine' and pursue medical interventions. Your DS sounds like he will grow out of it if left to it. Be supportive - however hard that is. But make it clear you fear him having any medical interventions. I always ask students what they want to be called - when they know I'm 'onside' I express my support for their life choices but my fears about hormones etc. All have been willing to listen to me - which has surprised me. He's more likely to listen to your fears if you're otherwise supportive. I'd put my own beliefs aside and even use female pronouns if that's what he wants. You need to maintain a relationship at all costs and he'll almost certainly come round. Good luck OP.

@EarringsandLipstick of course we have had dialogue about what he says to me “I feel like a girl in a boys body” means exactly as it says - plenty of dialogue about it believe me !

Please encourage your child to use the spaces that align with their biological sex. Women should not have to accept males in their single sex spaces because that male may or may not be suffering with gender dysphoria.

Are there any stats on transwomen being attacked in male toilets on the basis of being trans? Your son being scared to go into a male toilet isn't a problem he should then be foisting on women. Fight for a third neutral space then.