Are you familiar with functional behaviours, Motherof?
They are most often discussed in relation to children with ASD or children who are misbehaving in school, but actually many of the weird stuff that kids and teens do can be assessed through the same lens.
The idea is that when a child ‘acts out’ in what appears to be an irrational way to adults, if you look carefully it is more rational than it first appeared:
This is an autism advice site, I can’t say as to whether it’s generally good for ASD advice but it was the clearest explanation of functional behaviours I found on the first page of google:
www.educateautism.com/behavioural-principles/functions-of-behaviour.html
If you think about these categories, what about a cross sex identity fits these that are relevant for your daughter?
As an example, using our own family:
#1 Social Attention
A person may engage in a certain behaviour to gain some form of social attention or a reaction from other people. For example, a child might engage in a behaviour to get other people to look at them, laugh at them, play with them, hug them or scold them.
A cross sex identity, or ‘coming out’ is an obvious attention grabber! In our case, we’d spent a year in and out of hospital with DsD’s seriously ill little step sister and her dad had started a new job while littlest sibling was in intensive care! So all eyes had been elsewhere for a while.
#2 Tangibles or Activities
Some behaviours occur so the person can obtain a tangible item or gain access to a desired activity. For example, someone might scream and shout until their parents buy them a new toy (tangible item) or bring them to the zoo (activity).
A cross sex identity is a great excuse for new things, clothes, bedroom decor, haircuts, even activities that might normally be stereotyped the other way (a sudden interest in ‘Male’ things might indicate a need to be near the male parent more often).
#3 Escape or Avoidance
Not all behaviours occur so the person can “obtain” something; many behaviours occur because the person wants to get away from something or avoid something altogether (Miltenberger, 2008).
There were two big ‘avoidance’ situations with my DsD - firstly, she was catcalled by an adult man for the first time (and dressing as a boy in baggy everything minimised the risk of this reoccurring) and secondly, she was being subjected to lesbophobic bullying in school changing rooms (‘don’t watch me getting undressed you gay peeve’ etc) and as a transboy she could change in the disabled loo. Also, going to visit the school counsellor whenever she felt ‘dysphoric’ was an efficient way to skip her least favourite classes/be elsewhere when homework needed to be completed
#4 Sensory Stimulation
The function of some behaviours do not rely on anything external to the person and instead are internally pleasing in some way – they are “self-stimulating” (O’Neill, Horner, Albin, Sprague, Storey, & Newton, 1997). They function only to give the person some form of internal sensation that is pleasing or to remove an internal sensation that is displeasing (e.g. pain).
Big saggy hoodies and an ever-present woolly hat obviously gave her some kind of comfort (as well as avoidance).
I did 6 months of multi systemic therapy with my eldest (who was wild around 14/15) and with that, the aim is to teach you to become your child’s therapist (so that when the service inevitably withdraws you aren’t straight back to where you started). Lots of what I learned then has been just as useful when dealing with my DsD’s gender distress. Equally, my youngest has regular pulses of psychological support (3 sessions and a break) to deal with her experience of serious illness and a lot of that is also transferable to my stepdaughter- it’s mostly exercises around self esteem and resilience building.
All this long-established, expert understanding of child behaviour and development seems to get chucked out of the window in favour of ‘affirmation’ by orgs like Stonewall, Mermaids, GIRES, Allsorts etc (and all the other smaller LGBT youth groups, many of whom were trained by the four I named anyway).
Gender distressed children are being let down left right and centre at the moment, either through a lack of curiosity in therapy or a lack of evidence in medical interventions - so whether you are a cheerleader of transkids or a skeptic like me, we should all be demanding better.