I read this thread on twitter yesterday and found it very moving. It's a mother's insights into what may be pushing her daughter towards this:-
twitter.com/WeAreLe30956108/status/1449366468651589633
As a mum to a 16 yr old daughter who is and whose friends are also experimenting with pronouns, new names, binders etc I think there is something that @AyoCaesar cannot understand about that mum and her fears.
We don't believe there's anything wrong with trans or NB adults. We are overflowing with empathy for our children and for how hard it is to grow up in this era.
Our ASD or otherwise non neuro-typical children find puberty and change in general to be very hard. They realise the pressure placed upon them to conform to rigid gender stereotypes but don't see themselves and their personalities reflected in typical media and social media representations of women. They're picked on or ridiculed for being different, for being geeks and nerds and socially awkward. They're looking for an easy way to sidestep these pressures.
@AyoCaesar is clearly a bold, confident woman. She is unafraid of her sexuality or her body. She is secure in her opinions and of her inherent rightness and righteousness. But this is not the lived experience of these girls I know. They have almost zero resilience.
They have no self confidence. They have incredibly low self esteem. They second guess themselves constantly. The slightest error or minor setback or tiny criticism destroys them completely. They dissolve into floods of tears for any of these reasons and hate themselves.
They feel worthless and like failures. Their distorted negative thoughts about themselves may cause them to hurt themselves or simply send them spiralling in a state of anxiety, depression, sadness and self hatred. It's heartbreaking to witness these kind, thoughtful, empathetic, smart witty, intelligent girls who deserve the world sink into these dark thoughts and dire self esteem.
Nothing we can say can change their minds that they're worthless. We pay for therapy for them. That helps but it doesn't stop the thought distortions about their worth. I don't know how they've ended up feeling so badly about themselves but they all do.
They all think their loving parents hold them to impossibly high standards and believe them to be failures if they don't achieve them. For the record we don't think that. Although I accept that something we did has fucked them up. (In new ways because we did our best to avoid the way our parents fucked us up.)
So anyway, this is the background to these girls trying anything to escape the pain of their existence. They cosplay. They role play in D&D. They try to become other.
LGBT offers them a kind of kudos that their geeky non neurotypical tribe could never afford them. It gets the bullies off their backs. They become a bit cool under the rainbow umbrella. They can try on new identities. New names. New pronouns.
But as parents we know it won't fix what's broken underneath. They can try to be a different gender with a new name but they still come home crying on the bus if a drunk idiot criticises their outfit or a teacher shouts at them or they make a mistake in a maths problem.
So @AyoCaesar's criticism that we're not accepting or empathetic for our kids comes from a place of fundamental misunderstanding about the lives of these girls. These are not bold, confident kids making choices to live as their true selves, these are scared, timid, damaged girls looking for a way to feel better about themselves and instead of cutting their arms or starving themselves they're hoping that being trans will achieve that.
But as parents with life experience we sadly know that it won't. For the vast majority of them it's very unlikely to. But we know that the rainbow tribe and the trans dogma will embolden them to believe this is the solution and they must start taking hormones and cutting off their healthy breasts to achieve the freedom from pain they're seeking.
And that's why we're seeing so many sad stories from detransitioners who realised the rush to affirm them was just masking the issues underneath, and left them with the same feelings as before but now with irretrievably altered bodies.
That's why we're afraid. Not because we think trans or NB is wrong, but just because we know our girls and we know this isn't the solution that will make them feel better about themselves. That needs to come from the inside. Not from trying to change your name, your identity, your clothes and your body. Ash's judgement as a non parent who can't conceive of a girl with no confidence makes hers a bad take.
[paragraph breaks added at what, I hope, are the correct places]
I don't know if the author of this piece ever comes here, but if so, I hope you don't mind me sharing your thoughts with other here