Trans Children in their own words.

[CosmicCanary]

So there is a piece in the DM this morning about Mermaids and a recent trans prom they held.

The DM interviewed 9 children about their trans identity and what it means to them and how it started.

These are some of the childrens comments:

15 yo who was brought up by mum and nan since the age of 1.
Started blockers at 12 years old.
I liked to wear princess outfits from the age of 2
When I was 6 mum let me experiment wearing girls clothes
I'd get panicky if a teacher called me he
I wore glittery silver shoes

17 yo who lives with mum and dad who are Christians and 2 sisters.
Puberty felt wrong. I was very unhappy I tried to kill myself many times
I feel my breasts are a useless encumbrance
It was so liberating to go the the prom and wear what I wanted
A gay man had been thrown out of our church

16 yo lives with mum and dad. Parents were reluctant but blockers started at 14 years old.
When I was 4 I was in a fancy dress parade and forced to wear a bikini with a stuffed bra
When I was 6 at a party my friends were all putting on make up I hid so I did not have to join in
When I was 4 I wanted to be a boy
Aged 11 I saw a magician on tv and wanted to wear a suit like his I went on the internet and knew I was trans

15 yo lives with mum dad and sister. Mum is Christian.
To start with I thought I was gay so did my mum she found it difficult to reconcile her faith but then I learnt about transgender
We go shopping together now
I am getting blockers

16 yo lives with mum dad and siblings.
I hated dresses and always wore jeans
I was hysterical at the thought of starting puberty
I wore sports bras and bound my chest and cut my hair short
When I was 12 I realised I was trans
My brain is a boy and my body is feminine

17 yo lives with mum.
At 12 I said to a friend I hated the fact I am a girl. I want to be a boy
I looked it up and realised I am trans and want to change my body
Puberty was horrible I was repulsed by it
This prom waa great I did not have to worry what my body looked like

11 yo lives with mum and dad. Dad is muslim.
I was happy when mum bought me a doll when I was 4
I didnt want to wear trousers
I always like knitting singing and dancing
I socially transitioned at 9
I love sparkly things

13 yo lives with mum dad twin sister and 2 older siblings.
The prom was great and I was able to be myself
My school is accepting and inclusive
I knew from a young age I was different

The things that stand out the most for me is that for those born female it is about their body changing. Their breasts growing and puberty causing them distress. They just want to wear trousers and have short hair.

For those born male its about sparkles and glitter. Potentially their sexuality maybe causing them distress due to their parents religion and social views.

I dont think any of these children are trans and I dont think puberty blockers should be given to 12 year olds.

borntobequiet

That's interesting. Hormonally-speaking I think there's something there. Speaking personally myself I think I was probably at an unhappy period for me - started comparing myself to others a lot.

I remember incidences of black children scrubbing their skin in an attempt to lighten it. Even today in South Africa dangerous skin lightening creams are being pushed on the internet. We should be very wary of locating a problem in a child rather than the external pressures from society.
A childs brain goes through another huge developmental process during adolescence and isn't considered fully adult till early 20s. What we are doing to children breaks my heart.

The Scottish GRA consultation document stated that depression and anxiety in transgender young people in Scotland was due to discrimination, lack of acceptance, and the abuse they received. The study they referred to as 'proof' of this was a study of transgender sex workers in Mexico City.

Bloody hell!

More and more I think I was incredibly lucky to go to a very academic (non-religious) girls' school from the age of 11. Headmistress, Deputy Head, all Heads of Department and almost 100% of the remaining staff were female. The only exceptions I can remember in the first few years I was there were the rather creepy janitor who used to hang around the swimming pool when there was a lesson imminent and the Bursar, who had been a Wing Commander in the RAF during WW2 and was occasionally pressganged into talking about this at Prayers, to his obvious discomfiture. Later there was a male Physics teacher (who didn't last long) and a male Chemistry teacher.

As a consequence of that, we had:

(a) no sexual harassment from fellow pupils. Of course that was a theoretical possibility but it didn't happen, as far as I know. It was the 1970s and I knew of no girls in the school who were openly gay, which looking back now almost certainly means that there were several girls hiding their sexuality. There were several teachers suspected of being gay (by the pupils - lifelong spinsters, sometimes known to be sharing a house with another lifelong spinster). This attracted some dismissive or homophobic comments that I don't like to think about now, looking back. But nobody was subjected to groping or lewd comments on school premises, and from what I can see that was pretty unusual at the time in mixed schools.

(b) wonderful role models. Every single teacher in the school had either been to university or had gone to a specialist college (Art, Music, PE, Domestic Science). By the 1970s an ever increasing number of them were married with children. Most had taken career breaks after their children were born, but had then come back and continued their careers. So we all knew that women could go into higher education and have careers. This is undoubtedly why nearly 100% of my year group went on to higher education at a time when the national average was well under 10% and I think fewer girls than boys were going into HE. My estimate is that out of a sixth form of about 85, 12 went to medical school, one to veterinary college, one to dentistry school, one to physio training, one to OT training, one to nursing training, three to engineering degrees, one to astrophysics and a good 15-20 or so to other STEM degrees.

(c) No sexual stereotyping over which subjects we should study. We chose the ones we liked most and were best at. There was no pressure within the school that I was aware of not to take science/maths or conversely to go for languages/arts/humanities. Who knows what was going on at home for some girls, but at least at school there was nothing odd at all about choosing STEM subjects at O and A level. About half the year group did. Hence the HE choices above.

Thank you, teachers. You did so much for me and my peers. I didn't appreciate much of it at the time.

I read this unsurprised.

There seems to be themes. An overbearing mother, a religious parent who can't accept a gay child and teenagers with a simple but extreme dislike of their body mixed with a very rigid set of beliefs about gender stereotypes.

Teenagers disliking their bodies is a normal part of puberty but it almost seems to have been weaponised against them by capitalism intent on making more money from gendered products rather than gender neutral ones.

My sibling fits quite neatly in with the overbearing mother with very fixed beliefs about gender stereotypes.

One of the others in his cluster, was the younger brother of a girl who came out as lesbian. Her father was extremely religious and threw her out age 16. She then made a suicide attempt. She dated a few women before deciding she could not reconcile it with her religion. She married a gay man and had a family with him. Her brother later came out as trans. It has often made me wonder.

I would love to know if any of this was more than anecdotal and bore out as being real patterns beyond my direct experience.

Of course we'll never know since such research is 'transphobic'. Personally I wonder if that accusation is merely just all about the fact that research is not wanted by parents who have a particular interest to protect themselves rather than their children. Transphobia is a neat word to hide behind.

Perhaps there is no pattern at all. The trouble is that resistance to research makes me skeptical of that and believe more strongly that there is a predictable social contagion in all this.

I fear that this now will not see the light of day in my lifetime. I hope more than anything that it does, if only for my own personal need to reconcile this in my own head. Perhaps very selfish, but it's had such a huge impact on my life, I'd just like to be free of the wondering.

We should be very wary of locating a problem in a child rather than the external pressures from society.
^^YYY. Exactly, Imnobody

Do kids still read Judy Blume and Sue Townsend, to realise that puberty is a very confusing and scary time for most people? Or does modern YA literature not really discuss this stuff?

OlennasWimple a lot of kids don’t read books AT ALL these days. They just read shite on the net. This is the problem

Reading the comments by these children, I found a striking aspect to be the importance of different sorts of what we might usefully categorise in terms of (positive and negative) desire: 'I hated ...'; 'I love ...'; 'I liked ...';'I wanted ...'; etc.

Transwomen want to be women. Transmen want to be men. That seems fine, in a way. One of my grandsons expressed a desire - lasting some time - to be a girl, subsequent to one of his teachers asking him why he was wearing a 'girl's coat'. (Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Who knows?)

This seems easily dealt with in general. Generally, part of growing up - what that grandson perhaps has still to learn - is that we cannot have everything we want.

For some people, this is more difficult. Some people never learn that lesson, sadly. Well, perhaps, yes, sad. We might feel it incumbent on us to give what help we appropriately can to such people, young or old.

But then some posters write in terms of what it is to be trans, in a way that does not seem to take into account this basis in desire.

bespin, for instance, writes variously 'they might be trans' ... 'they are trans'...'young people who are Truely trans' (italics added).

There is what sometimes is called an ' order of determination ' issue here. Do (some) men want to be women because they are trans? Or are these men said to be trans because they want to be women?

[Is what god says good because god approves it, or does he approve it because it is good? Long history of this kind of question, see Plato's Euthyphro, for example.]

As for me, I suspect the order of determination goes from the desire to the (description of) the state. That is, the truth (or falsity) of 'A is trans' is determined by A's desire (or lack of desire) to be a woman, rather than vice versa.

This matters for the way we treat people, particularly young people. Of course it does.

Now, it does seem bespin and others assume - mostly tacitly, possibly unconsciously - that the order of determination runs the other way; from the state to the desire.

There is an assumption - which often goes unchallenged - that there is something that it is to be trans (or Truely trans etc.) that determines the desires of which those children speak.

I challenge that assumption. I say there is no such thing.

So I tell my grandson he wants something he cannot have. I often tell him this; he often needs help to come to terms with this aspect of the world and his place in it. Maybe it is not so sad after all that we tell our children such things. They will grow up better people for the knowledge.

[Pre-emptively: sexual desire is very different, not least by order of determination in the above sense. My grandson has that to discover too.]

It's horrific reading those kids' comments. Why the hell can't boys wearing sparkly shoes without believing that he must be a girl?
It feels like we've gone back in time. In the 80s you could wear what you wanted to wear as long as you never admitted to being gay. These days it's ok to be gay but if you love dresses then you must be a girl?
My heart breaks for the damage that is being done to some of these kids.

They are on the path to sterility and loss of all sexual function. As Posie once said: parenting 101 is 'don't castrate the kids'.

9toenails

this in relation to diagnosis is exactly what happens we are diagnosed because we say we are woman and wish to be that way for the rest of our lives we therefore are labeled trans for that. if some of my. youngest memories are of me wanting to be a girl or be like the other girls and I defiantly didn't come from a supportive family home then I have to assume that they have always been there and therefore after much trying not to act on them due to socilital pressure to be like everyone else I did act on them. acting on a deep seated knowledge of one's sence of self does not make you trans having the feeling that something is just not right in relation to your gender all your life is, transitioning does not fully fix that but it appears to be the closest thing we have to allow us to function in the world.
the reason it does not fully fix it is for the reason you all state we do not suddenly become biologically female or erase our pasts and the years we have lost to this will never come back.

so please forgive me when I don't beleive there is m no such thing. because we are unable to explain it in a way that you will be able to understand the. validity of it.

Pratchet no child in this country ever as that. though some people may take there children else where because this never happens in this country.

I don't doubt that you experience(d) gender dysphoria Bespin. Gender identity begins to form during the toddler years so it makes perfect sense that your earliest memories would include gender dysphoria. My dd also expressed a desire to wear the clothes labelled for boys as soon as she could speak. Likewise my other dd started to show a preference for clothes targeted at girls from very very young. Both developed a gender identity to a certain extent, though my second dd much more so. Gender develops socially. I am sorry for the suffering you have experienced and that you were pressured to conform to sex based stereotypes.

Sarah Carer thank you, I am in no doubt that socialisation played a part in who I am today, do I think there is a biological exploration somewhere in all this, who knows it's a very complex area. but supporting me being trans didn't stop me from being that it just stopped me acting on it at 16 and then at 21 due to the pressure of other poeples expectations. none of us can look back and who what would have happened in our life and I would not have had the life I have now or met my partner who I love but I will always wonder what if my. family had supported me or even understood. I'm not asking for people to push stuff onto children I just think that maybe we need to listen that dies not mean giving them everything they want right now but helping them work through who they are and sometimes that is trans which is only 1% at most of the population

I will fight the imposition of gender on all children. I am afraid of my autistic dd thinking she has a male brain. I am also afraid of my nt daughter thinking she has a female brain. Both ideas come from old fashioned patriarchal ideas.They are to both be free to express themselves however they are comfortable and I will always seek to embrace gender non conformity.

Bespin: English please.

Pratchet

please address the issues not the posters.

I don't understand your post. Please copy edit.

FFS auto correct why would ya change my words like that it does not make sence oh well its late. bugger it

It's not auto correct. The clue is in the word 'correct'. Perhaps, in fact, you have switched it off.

no its my phone keyboard it thinks it knows what you are going to type and as I'm dyslexic i need to to show me the correct words it sometimes seems to correct them to something else though.

bespin:

Thank you for your response. I am so sorry you have had such a tough life and I hope things are going a little easier for you now.

Whatever the cause of your desire to be a woman, it seems overwhelming. If we were to meet - in private - in real life, of course I would go along with the pretence that you are a woman. I hope you will not be too upset by what I and others have to say, by contrast, here on this public forum.

We disagree. You think I do not understand you and your feelings. I think you fail to understand what I claim about trans issues and children.

OK. We differ in our conclusions. The thing is, though, I claim my conclusions are based on well-attested facts and reasoned considerations. Yours are based explicitly on feelings; more, they are based on desires we know to be unreasonable.

How do we know your overwhelming desire to be a woman is unreasonable? We know because it is a desire for something impossible.

My grandson cannot change and become a girl. It is just impossible. It is part of his growing-up to learn that he cannot have everything he wants, and this is one of those things. He cannot go and live in up in a tree in the park next weekend, either - also a useful lesson to learn about getting/not getting what you want, albeit bound around with less public controversy.

More than this, though, I wonder if you can understand that many of us think - strongly believe - that both public policy and private relations, particularly with our children, should be regulated by well-attested facts and reasoned considerations rather than unreasonable desires?

One more thing. The ' should be ' in the previous paragraph is a moral imperative. [Also ethical, for those who distinguish.] That is, we would be doing wrong if we went along with a policy of maintaining children in their desires for impossible outcomes.

Doing bad things to children, I am sure we will agree, is the worst any person can do. So, in the words of Oliver Cromwell, bespin, ' I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. '