Help with talking to a 12 yr old about trans issues

[GoingOnce]

My son has a friend whose sister is apparently now his brother. I sense my son wants to talk to me about this and I want to have the right language to engage sensibly in a conversation. He has swallowed whole the ideology that people can change their gender as this has been “explained” to them at school. The child does not attend my son’s school but still attends a girls school - whilst going by a new name, wearing an adapted and having a special toilet assigned just for them.

The child in question (and the entire family) is struggling. There is self-harm and have been suicide attempts. I do not want to criticise them or their child. But I do want my child to realise that they are being presented with one narrative here. (I am quite certain the parents are simply going along with the whole thing because they are terrified of their child’s mental state and what they might do next. I feel very sorry for them).

Any advice for how I can discuss this sensibly? I can’t believe at age 12 we are already having to talk about all this.

I don't think that's a discussion for you to have.

I feel like this is a thinly veiled attempt to want to faun over the trauma of this poor child , like a sort of second hand soap.

If your child genuienly wants to discuss the complexities of transgender, let them.

I would think it's far more likely than the potential suicide (I hope you don't discuss this with your child) is far more traumatic.

Incidentally, why is this situation more about the sibling and not the child in question?

I did answer the question?

How does someone live as the other sex? (I know what the other sex means because there are only two.) If I wanted to live as a man, what would I have to do?

I don't think people here are denying the beliefs of other people. But we should be clear that they are just beliefs, not facts.

But that's not the same issue.

A trans man doesn't think he's a man. He wants to live, feel, operate as a man because that's how he feels. I'm sure he's painfully aware he's not a man.

However, we can choose to support this instead of the faux "but how can one change sex",

A friend of mine believes she'll be reunited with her mum when she dies. A view many of us talk about.

Would I leap onto social media and start saying "No you won't, don't be ridiculous".

No? Why?

Sorry I missed your first question.

The problem is , we can't answer that because we aren't transgender.

The people to talk to are real transgender people. They do exist. not the 2nd hand speculations of gossip concern.

It’s most definitely not a hardship to live with right now. A good proportion of my students are involved in gender activism and communities - many more so (I’m a lesbian) than at any time since I was a teenager. It’s a place to find community at the moment - especially online. It certainly wasn’t twenty or thirty years ago; but “transgenderism” did not exist then - “cross-dressing”, being gay and being “transsexual” were understood as vey different things. They have only been joined together in one “identity” very recently.

I certainly have known a few old-school transsexuals who had sex reassignment surgery. I think it is a very different thing to the current ideology of gender identity. But, as a historian of sexuality, I’m also highly aware that the whole construction of “transsexualism” only arose in the twentieth century, partly as a result of the popularity of early twentieth century “sexologists” who began to claim that homosexuality was a form of “sex inversion”. The idea of the “transsexual” arose out of that and out of new surgical experiments largely on gay men and women. That does not mean that there are no people who truly desire to change sex. But until very recently these were a very small number, largely male, and often also suffering from other psychiatric disorders.

Having researched the history of mental illnesses and social contagions for more than twenty years, I do think, yes, that a large proportion of those currently identifying as transgender are part of a widespread social contagion that looks structurally almost identical to the “identity” /pathology fashions of earlier periods. In 1890 they would probably have called themselves “neurasthenics”. In 1790 it would have been excessive “sensibility”. And to be honest, it’s probably as much related to the normalisation of cosmetic surgery during the last twenty years as anything else.

@stopwaitingforpermissiontobeyou
Can you use the quote function so that we can see which posts you're replying to? Just click on the three dots at the end of the post you want to reply to and select 'quote'.

Your message was interesting, thank you for sharing.

I totally disagree, but that's life. We all have different experiences.

Argh, sorry!

I've not used MN since the update, and I'm falling out with it!

Except we all know, don’t we, that no-one can actually know what it’s like to live as anything else, because we all know that we can’t get outside our own heads. So I have as little actual knowledge of what it’s like to be a man, say, as I do of being a fish, or an Olympic gymnast, or a small tropical bird. I quite literally cannot inhabit anyone else’s experience other than by any act of imaginative identification. To suggest I can “know” that I am really a man, or black, or a Buddhist monk, or deaf, is simply magical thinking, not reality. No?

So where does gender identity reside? Is it in the embodied mind where we experience only our own existence? Or do you have to believe in magical things like telepathy or the Jungian collective unconscious or the Platonic forms or the religious Soul in order to imagine that we can “know” things that are outside our own heads?

Since being transgender can only ever be an act of imaginative projection unless you really do believe in magical thinking or telepathy or collective souls, isn’t any of our imaginative projections just as good as any other? Why would we need to listen to anyone telling us what it “feels like” any more than we need to listen to someone tell us what Tantric meditation “feels like” if we don’t fundamentally believe it exists?

stopwaiting "How can you be "quite sure" of the motivations of people that you don't know?"

also stopwaiting: "And they don't think they are trans. They are."

Incredible.

@nightwakingmoon your posts are fascinating. Do you see any patterns in relation to the social contagion? To the extent that it may be possible to predict when the current one will end and be replaced by another? If so, any insight into what the next one may be?

Sorry to derail but genuinely interested.

Not really.

I can be sure that very few "think they're trans", outside in that shiny real world outside of MN.

As opposed to the OP that parents must only be supporting their child due to abject fear.

Thanks for the attack though. Anything else to contribute?

Agreed. I fundamentally disagree with the topic at hand but the posts are fascinating. I'd love to read more.

Not comparable.

I don't know what it's like to be Nicole Scherzinger, but I can imagine.

In the same way a young girl, or a young boy (because we get very hand wringing on MN about young girls while completely forgetting that the majority of trans are M-F) could imagine life as an opposite sex/gender/ as they see it every day.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not pro transgender fight to the death.

I just have a bit of a struggle with people telling other people what they can do with their lives. I really do.

@nightwakingmoon - thats so interesting. To add to what you have said, young people need something to rebel against. There is a void now where music and fashion cultures were. Identifying as trans can become your tribe.

OP; I work in education. All our trans-identifying young females, also have trauma, autism, fairly severe mental illness and/ or are care experienced. It's really sad, and it's such a negative way to get attention. Forcing everyone around you to call you the opposite sex gives young people a strange kind ot power.

In the same way a young girl, or a young boy (because we get very hand wringing on MN about young girls while completely forgetting that the majority of trans are M-F) could imagine life as an opposite sex/gender/ as they see it every day.

Are you not aware that the majority of children who identify as transgender are female? Twice as many girls as boys were referred to GIDS last year.

You are right that historically it has been something that has been more popular amongst males, and still is amongst older adults.

I think I wrote that badly.

My point is, MN is very keen on speculating why girls want to transition - be it sexuality or feminism.

I'm yet to see any concern over why a boy might want to be a female, other than of course to break his way into the girls changing rooms (an assertion I have never seen once, on any forum, made about a female into a males changing room).

In the nicest way possible, I really hope you aren't.

Somehow blaming care experienced or "getting attention" or your utterly absurd suggestion of power - I have no words.

Hope I aren't what?

Sorry, this is my opinion based on observation. It's both giving children power to control other people's speech, and also putting confused young people in a position which they may find hard to change (if they change their mind, as many do)

@YellowHpok it’s a great question - one one level I’d want to think it’s a transient social fashion that will fade out in a few years. I hope that will be the case.

However, I kind of also thought that the gender crowd would row back on the “most oppressed!” stuff when the reality of what’s happening in Ukraine kicked in - that reality might reassert itself a bit faced with real war and real bloodshed and violence (for example that we might hear a bit less about the nonexistent “trans genocide” when faced with the reality of actual genocide, twentieth century style, right in front of us.

But that doesn’t seem to have happened. The ideological juggernaut is still in full force despite all that, especially in the US, where being misgendered whilst in possession of some anime cat ears seems to be as great a psychic injury as fleeing from Russian tanks. So I think it’s got some Teflon-clad way to go yet, sadly.

Sometimes in my most despondent moods I ponder the fact that for the last couple of thousand years we have seemed to go through periods of idealism followed by periods of scientific materialism pretty regularly, swinging back and forth approximately every hundred years or so. So the nineteenth century was dominated by religious thought and individualist idealism; the twentieth century largely by empiricism and scientific materialism, and so on. On that model we might be overdue to a swing back to religious idealism - perhaps already emerging in the form of gender ideology and the weakening of Western societies’ collective trust in the scientific method. As I say, I hope that’s only a conjecture - but sometimes I do think we may be on the verge of a new era of ideological fanaticism, belief in immaterial “souls”, essences, made-up ideas and fantasies of personal and collective “identities”.

We’ve already seen a sharp swing away from the rationalism and internationalism of the late twentieth century, and back towards a fixation on “national identity” which for a while we thought we had left behind in the past.

I think that’s happening with our understanding of culture and psychology. We’re moving away from quite a sophisticated late twentieth-century social-scientific view of “identities” as social narrative constructions; and reverting to very limited late nineteenth/early twentieth century ideas about national identity, gender identity, cultural identity — which tend to be quasi-religious and all about innate souls and “feelings” and beliefs and stereotypes and mystification. So I do sometimes feel quite pessimistic about that, to be honest. Also sorry, v long post!

OP, I wonder if your son might be at the age where it is worth talking more frankly about puberty and the changes it brings, and that sometimes people can feel uncomfortable about this. For girls identifying as trans boys this is a key trigger, and while it’s of course a fact of life that bodies change, and girls/womens bodies keep on changing through life, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

Please don't suggest this.

This is equivalent to just coming up with reasons as to why transgender isn't really a thing, and let's make up excuses.

In education.

If you truly are, you will know as well as I do that kids know they can change, many times.

I dont know what power you think transgender children have.

Not comparable.

I don't know what it's like to be Nicole Scherzinger, but I can imagine.

In the same way a young girl, or a young boy (because we get very hand wringing on MN about young girls while completely forgetting that the majority of trans are M-F) could imagine life as an opposite sex/gender/ as they see it every day.

That’s exactly my point, though - it’s essentially imagination. I might dearly want to have what I imagine Nicole Scherzinger’s life might be. But it remains imagination, not any reality. Young girls of 13 or whatever see - what? Do they really know what it’s like to be an adult man? They haven’t worked in a workplace; some have barely spoken to any other adult man beyond their dad and their teachers. They have very little idea of others’ lives. I know girls telling me they “identify” as “twinks” - young gay men who date older gay men. They have zero idea or understanding of what this means or of what it’s like to be or live as a gay man - it’s all imagined via AO3 and Tumblr. Some of them know no actual gay men at all beyond teenage internet friends. Now this might all just be harmless fantasy - until you bring in a culture of taking hormones, top surgery and policing others’ language and beliefs too. But it’s all essentially based on imagination and fantasy, not any real knowledge of what it might be like to be or even to “live as” anyone else.