Are parents of trans-presenting children; being manipulated?

[speakingwoman]

At one point in my past I formally refused to allow my son to go through a diagnostic process for ASD. By that point I was pretty expert and had the support of school. Nonetheless I had to withstand some pressure from
-the paediatrician
-the SALT

• other parents of children who were going through the diagnostic process.

I kept making sure I had a plan B for if my d3cision was wrong.

can’t help thinking I would struggle to resist now though if threatened with child’s suicide.

Thoughts?

My personal view is yes, but is this more of an LGBT question or a parenting question? Not sure it should be here in feminism. Maybe if you move to Parenting it will get more responses from parents who are in the middle of it. I don't think FWR is really a repository for anything trans-related. Sorry to be a debbie downer.

There seem to be a lot of agendas with this issue rather than just focussing on the mental health of the child and how best to help them.

I would repost on the SN boards if I was you. You'll get lots of great advice there regarding asd.

Not sure what ASD has to do with your title? Or why this is a feminist issue? However I am interested why you would refuse the diagnostic process, with all of the help that a diagnosis would give your son were he to be diagnosed?

Yeah I'm sorry but am more interested in being reluctant to look into ASD when a diagnosis can help so much.

I do think parents of children who say 'I am trans' are manipulated. I think it's quite a different process/set of pressures from ASD though. With ASD I often feel there's pressure not to look into a diagnosis as it's resource-heavy and if children are currently managing, there's a sense of 'what's the point'. Whereas with trans id you get social workers, teachers, CAMHS etc putting the pressure on to allow binders, hormone blockers etc

I'm not clear of the feminism link. Do you think mum's in particular face this pressure? I'd say this might be better in parenting. Or special needs for ADS.

Why were you worried about your son possibly being diagnosed with ASD? Do you think he isn’t autistic and he might be diagnosed by mistake (unlikely - it is actually pretty hard to get an ASD diagnosis) or do you think he is autistic and you want to avoid him having a ‘label’? In with case you also avoid him developing a proper understanding of himself which may lead to difficulties in future. Rest assured that if you do get an ASD diagnosis you won’t get anyone rushing over to offer you any support or therapies. Not sure why you mention Trans in the context of your post?

Yes OP, I believe many of them are being manipulated in order to try and justify nefarious motives of some other people.

I was assuming this was a trans thread not an SN thread. So OP could resist an SN diagnosis / medical intervention but wouldn’t be able to do so for a trans child threatening suicide

Hi sorry for poor wording. Sometimes I think an idea is clear in my head and the responses prove it isn’t.

I was on the SN needs board for ten years before all the geese analogies -once even got called royalty when some awful web chat bloke kept ignoring my question! Still get PMs all these years later.......We all understood each other’s positions there but the history disappears when you name change and people just think you’re ignorant. That’s how it goes.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the decisions we made along the way, I have powerful memories of the following:

1 concerned health professional doing the mask-face compassion thing while you talk and then talking about you being or not being “ready”
2 contradictory advice about my parenting needing to be more relaxed or more active .
3 a general feeling of fear that I had missed something.
4constantly calculating the risks of going down one path or the other -of what we might miss out on if we took a wrong path.
5 vocabulary that sounded neutral but isn’t (“so that he gets the help he needs”) etc.

As said above, the consequences of my decision being wrong could be seen as relatively mild but didn’t seem so to me at the time. It felt like a big deal.

So what’s the analogy? Well, in a future NHS taken over by Mermaids ideology, there would be parents who would be facing far worse pressures. Instead of “if you don’t consent he might miss out on there being an extra TA in class and you can’t go on an Early Birds course” it would be
“We wanted to let you know about the suicide rates......”
all said with a kind face....

And a peer group saying “better a sterile teenager than a dead teenager”

I don’t think I could resist that pressure if my child was gender non conforming.

It's really hard to stand against a prevailing orthodoxy even though it feels desperately wrong at a gut level, even about yourself.

It's magnitudes of order harder when it's about your kids. I've gone against prevailing orthodoxy once or twice about my kids and even though it was always about something much less important than this, it was still incredibly stressful and caused a lot of angst.

Yes, it is very hard to stand up against orthodoxy when a one size fits all approach becomes the norm. I have found that with the screening programme too - my so far rather tentative attempts to get off it have not gone well.

Yes.
Though why so many members of a parenting forum should be discouraging the parents from seeking the best possible advice, and actively promoting fake "treatments" that are regarded as unethical and/or abusive by all the reputable professional bodies is anybodies guess.

Sadly, you won't get unbiased advice here on a forum that has been taken over by anti-trans activists. Your best bet is probably to go to the NHS website for unbiased advice, and to the excellent Mermaids charity for support.

Yes, it is very hard to stand up against orthodoxy when a one size fits all approach becomes the norm. I have found that with the screening programme too - my so far rather tentative attempts to get off it have not gone well.

I took on aspects of the National Curriculum, bless my little cotton knickers. Fucking SPaG, ruining children's literacy and love of words up and down the land. It was scary though, being a non-compliant parent.

I've read so many of the GC parent with gender questioning kids testimonies and the main thing that always rises from their words in unmistakeable waves is the love and care they have for their children.

I highly recommend Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore's book 'Transgender Children and Young People: Born in your own body'.

Seconded. Excellent book.

Mermaids is the equivalent of a website selling chelating therapy for autism. Both snake oil salesmen with a dangerous message and pseudoscientific justification. Mermaids ‘expertise’ is just from subjecting their own children to their ‘treatment’ which they now need to justify.