Teen doubting sexuality due to group she attends

[sealass91]

www.thesun.co.uk/dear-deidre/9514765/daughter-doubting-sexuality-because-of-group/

sorry if this is already posted, This is the first time i've started a thread and I couldn't see it when i started

I'm away on mini holiday to see a good friend and today i chatted to her about MN and WPUK and all the other stuff i've discovered since reading about Joan MacAlpine and the Scottish vote and she showed me this in the Sun newspaper. Betweeen us we have 5 teenagers and it hit a note after a few things my eldest was telling me he thinks his siblings (both teens at secondary school) are hearing and talking about.

Has anyone else seen this? Is it a good sign that it is being highlighted here? I don't usually read the Sun so i've no idea if a lot of people will read this in the agony aunt section? I'm hoping it goes from here to more full on articles?

Well, what do they expect if they attend an LGBT group? Of course they get attention there when discussing LGBT topics.

Weird scaremongering article.

Sun has pretty good reader numbers incl for the agony aunt section.

The response is fairly balanced but good they suggested speaking to the head if they have concerns - which if the group has gone from one gay member to them all questioning I'd say there are concerns.

ROGD needs investigating further and this sounds similar.

Not the same as rogd at all!!! If a teen questions their gender they are down a dangerous path involving surgery, hormones etc. If a teen questions their sexuality they might, er, kiss or have sex with someone of the same sex. So what?

I wouldn't be at all worried about a teen questioning her sexuality. In fact, isn't that fairly normal? After all, what's the worst that can happen? You snog someone of the sex the adult you eventually realises isn't for you. No big deal. (In fact given that it's a girl, surely experimenting with heterosexuality is the riskier route - it's the one that can leave a girl having to deal with a teenage pregnancy).

Totally different from ROGD, which involves blockers, irreversible cross sex hormones and mutilating surgery - which is a fuck of a hard course to reverse if it turns out teen you experimented with a path adult you isn't happy with in retrospect.

I'm not sure about the wisdom of the organisers of this group letting in a whole friendship group to "support" one child, for the one child, the friends or the rest of the group. I think the teacher should have tactfully shooed them off. One friend to support for a week or two till you feel comfortable, sure, but not the whole gang.

I meant in terms of social contagion and peer pressure which does seem to be involved here and has been linked to ROGD.

Also the T and queer theory are being pushed more than LGB. If it was an LGB group fine but I've read heart breaking accounts written by teenage girls joining such groups and then being bullied if they don't want to date trans members.

If it was me and a whole group of friends started questioning themselves I would be concerned.

A concern about the nature of the group itself and its take on trans issues is separate though. If a group of teens experiment with same sex attraction because of peer pressure, I still say 'so what?'. It's pretty much consequence-free, unlike most of the other activities that teenagers engage in due to peer pressure.

Not all lesbian activities are as safe as they used to be, not now males can be lesbians.

You are still conflating two separate things. The letter is not about transgender issues, it is about parents worried that their child is being 'pressured' into being lesbian. That's a homophobic trope as old as the hills.

Not only that, it's always as well to remember that all our threads are constantly monitored and screen-shotted. And the TRAs love the (mistaken) idea that we're all religious fundies, opposed to gay rights and in bed with anti-abortionists.

Which of course we're not. Nor are we opposed to trans people - most of us are live and let live. We are, however, opposed to the erosion of women's rights, and to the surgical mutilation of children and teens.

But this letter is clearly about a parent who's worried that their child will "catch the gay", which is of course a load of nonsense.

"a parent who's worried that their child will "catch the gay", which is of course a load of nonsense."

Not such a load of nonsense, if a very powerful ideology is being pushed/encouraged, and we know that this is the case with the relentless pushing of certain causes by very powerful groups.

Before no one ever did "catch the gay". That's why i find this strange.

Being gay is not an ideology

Even if this girl is persuaded by her friends to experiment, what's the harm? A few snogs, maybe a bit of fumbling. She won't get pregnant from (genuinely) lesbian sex. If she later decides it's not for her, well, who hasn't got a bit of a sexual history and a few mistakes behind them (barring the occasional deeply religious person who "saves themselves for marriage").

I would say (as an aging, frighteningly vanilla heterosexual woman) that actually the social pressure is mostly the other way round - enormous social pressure, right from that first Disney princess movie aged 3, to conform not just to being heterosexual, but to a particular, regressive, submissive picture of what's involved in a woman being straight.

I honestly don't think anyone was ever "made" gay, and even if they go through a phase of thinking perhaps they might be, but come out the other side, seriously, no harm has been done.

Oh, and if you think this is a new thing, go and re-read Brideshead Revisited. Charles experiments with being gay while a member of a particular "set" during his Oxford years - Sebastian, who genuinely is gay, is left bereft when Charles "grows out of it." Written in 1945, the action of the novel takes place between 1920 and 1940.

Young people not quite certain of what their sexuality is... a story basically as old as time. Sometimes they grow up straight, sometimes they grow up gay. Thank heavens we live in a society where it doesn't actually matter.

Maybe I'm just reading more into it than there is. If it's just a bit of harmless fun then fair enough and nothing wrong with being a lesbian - of the genuine variety.

Sorry everyone, my fault for not being clear earlier.

For me it wasn't whether the girl identified as lesbian or not (no problem with that here ) I was caught up in focusing on the whole group going to support one friend and then aligning with that friend, I think i've jumped from reading the figures of the sudden surge in girls presenting at clinic as being trans and linking up the whole 'getting caught up' ....and wondering if this is what is happening, but on a deeper level along with isome things my eldest son (openly bi) has been mentioning lately.

I think it's worthwhile to consider this, because it speaks to the way a lot of these issues are being presented to young people. I question whether those kinds of groups are really appropriate ways to approach topics like this. And they can be present at younger age than one might think, they were available for my daughter's school before they actually hit puberty.

There is this assumption that kids are ready to label themselves at quite young ages, in fact that it's very positive for them to be "true to themselves" in this way, and that the best environment for this is a peer discussion and support group. I think those are all pretty questionable beliefs.

don’t worry OP, I don’t think there are vast swathes of closeted heterosexuals out there.