If your child has come out as trans what are you doing?

[Eatingchips]

I suppose I am interested in this because 3 years ago my DD suggested she might be trans and it is ongoing.

She says that some days she feels like a boy and some days she feels like a girl. She considers herself non binary and has the pronouns they/them - she/her and he/him and wants all 3 used interchangeably. She has given herself a male name but we don’t use that because a diminutive of her actual name is unisex/male and I have always mainly called her the diminutive name anyway so we have stuck to that.

She has all her life been gender non conforming whatever that means or an old school tomboy and coming from that experience myself I have always whole heartedly embraced that aspect of her.

She has some trauma in her past. She also has many traits of ASD which are becoming more pronounced as she gets older and a diagnosed sibling and another sibling likely to have ASD as well.

She is fully out in school and this is rife in her friend group.

My main focus at the moment is to embrace what she says in order not to alienate her. She feels how she feels and since that isn’t rational I’m trying to meet her where she is at. I have told her that we will support her no matter what and no matter where this journey takes her but I have discussed the perils of the medicalisation of trans people and how it is unlikely that anyone who could recover psychologically if they despised their body all their lives no matter how much surgery or treatment they had. I explained to her that the brain operates on patterns of thought and just because you change your body if you continuously have patterns of thought hating your body then most likely it will take an incredible effort to shift your brain from those patterns of thought even if you’ve changed your body. That seems to have helped her to make peace with her body as it is at the moment because in many ways she is a very rational person.

But it is an incredibly tricky path and we are very reluctant to involve psychologists or medical professionals given the culture of the moment. What are others doing? I’d love to hear from other parents in a similar situation.

Thanks @PearlClutch

Well put @Dwarfcavendish , I relate to much of your post

It's not always simple but I do think it's actually pretty straight forward that if you are starting with all the authoritative people in your like telling you that your feelings determine your sex, that you can't depend on your body to even be a particular type of body, you are starting from a foundation of sand.

We are our bodies, when matter is formless there is nothing in which to anchor a sense of self. This is why people recovering from trauma can so often be helped by connecting with the body and also connection with nature.

Gender ideology seems, more than anything, to be designed to undermine identity.

I absolutely agree that gender incongruity affects the formation of stable identities and stable identities are hugely important for good mental health in the present and in the future however parents alienating their children is also going to affect their identity formation so handling gender incongruity requires very careful consideration.

Obviously no parent out there is deliberately telling their child they are the opposite gender and we aren’t “letting” our child believe they are the opposite gender. We understand that our child currently holds that belief and we work with them to address whether that is a belief they will hold always or one which is an unstable belief which will change over time.

The whole society is supporting the belief. And those that aren't are painted as phobic.

It's kind of unprecedented, I can't think of another case where young people are being supported to believe in total fantasies.

I don't think there is any medical precedent for just deciding, at any point, that people should just be allowed their delusion as if it will be permanent. That's not what happened with sex changes in the past for people with sex dysphoria.

The only reason people are stuck supporting this with their kids is because of the wider social message and "support" which means kids may cut themselves off from family or parents rights may even be removed.

**I would also add that when there are trans-supporting siblings in the mix, this makes it even more difficult to be the 'bad guy' who doesn't affirm. My trans-identifying child has two older brothers, one of whom has a close friend who transitioned in their early teens. The other brother has a non-binary partner. Feeling like the odd one out in your own home when all these people are enthusiastically using your child's new name and cheering them on in wearing gender-affirming clothing has been extremely difficult. Not to mention having your child's therapist warning you that you risk self-harm/suicide.

DH and I have taken different approaches. He has simply carried on using our child's birth name and pronouns. I have fudged and manage to completely avoid using any pronouns in his presence and use sweetie/darling/my love etc when speaking to them. My personal feeling is that this avoids any confrontation whilst also not tacitly affirming. I do not comment on his clothes at all. His brothers also do not use either name and as they don't live at home anymore, this means we simply don't talk about him, so no sharing of news, achievements etc. I feel like our family has been ripped in two.

A few months after our child came out as trans there was basically a row, when I said that I simply didn't agree with the whole trans thing and that it made no sense. With hindsight I think this was a mistake. Although I do think that it's OK to push back, we went about it the wrong way. We later had a conversation where we said that we loved him whatever happens, that we support him and accept him. Interestingly, this seemed to completely take the heat out of the names/pronouns thing and he no longer corrects DH.

My personal feeling for my child, is that if we affirm him then it will make it much more difficult for him to go back to his birth name if, as I desperately hope, he becomes at ease with his sexed body. I absolutely do not judge any parent who has chosen a different path, I really believe that we're all muddling along and trying to do our best for our children.

Yep @MangyInseam and you can’t even involve psychologists in helping your child because they are at the top of the queue in terms of accepting these beliefs.

A few months after our child came out as trans there was basically a row, when I said that I simply didn't agree with the whole trans thing and that it made no sense. With hindsight I think this was a mistake. Although I do think that it's OK to push back, we went about it the wrong way. We later had a conversation where we said that we loved him whatever happens, that we support him and accept him. Interestingly, this seemed to completely take the heat out of the names/pronouns thing and he no longer corrects DH.

I'm currently reading a book called “How to have Impossible conversations” it is very very good. I’d recommend it.

Yep @MangyInseamand you can’t even involve psychologists in helping your child because they are at the top of the queue in terms of accepting these beliefs.

Sorry, posted too soon. Yes, our experience has been that despite being really clear that we were looking for someone who wouldn't immediately affirm but would explore, our child's therapist immediately affirmed and now says "why doesn't matter".

Thanks for the book recommendation, I will check it out.

What other highly damaging things would parents let their kids do to their bodies because they have ASD etc ?
You wouldn’t think twice about saying NO in any other potentially harmful situation so why is ‘Trans’ so different and special?
It’s absolutely crazy.
Grow some backbone and start saying NO.

@BorgQueen who is this directed at? Start saying no to whom? 18 year old adults? teenagers beliefs? women with life long gender incongruity?

Who needs a backbone? Parents trying to navigate a complex issue with confused teenagers?

This is quite an aggressive post, it is unhelpful and it is uncalled for.

@BorgQueen - really? You obviously cannot imagine how difficult life can be with a trans-identifying child. Parents on this thread are dealing with extremely challenging and complex issues. I’d like to see you walk a mile- or year- in our shoes. Then you can come back and tell us all how you fared.

genspect.org/

I didn't see if genspect had been shared already? 're therapists who are not purely taking an affirmative approach.

There is no real supply of therapists that we can rely on. Genspect will confirm this. They are trying to come up with a list but it’s very limited at the moment.
The next problem is that the child/young person would have to cooperate with the therapy in order for it to be effective. Given that most of our children here have seen the US ‘Gender therapist’ affirmation model of care in operation they are less likely to accept anything other than that. Another problem is that good one-to-one therapy takes years - at least 3-5 years and that is not affordable for most.
Therapy isn’t a solution unfortunately.

Gender ideology seems, more than anything, to be designed to undermine identity.

Hm, by severing the link between material reality and words used to describe that?

By suggesting identity is completely a free choice it seems to remove all weight meaning and value from identity. They become something to cling ever harder to as there is no solid link to reality. May be that's why people need to fight so hard to prove their identity is 'valid'.

I can imagine that's all true, and hard, Dwarf.

Issues like this tend not to have one 'solution' in my experience. So many internal and external factors interlinked.

We did find a gender specialist for our child, who was willing to talk to them. Child was looking for confirmation of their gender dysphoria and that transitioning would be the answer - therapist was fairly confident that it was mostly ASD issues that was causing the feelings of not belonging.

@BorgQueen , are you in the same position as some of us?!

The problem is that invalidating and alienating our children is not the way to bring them along to a healthier place.

Why do you think 'validating' an untruth would bring them along to a happier place? This is the opposite of how you treat OCD and body dysmorphia where it is recognised that accommodating obsessions is harmful as it is reinforcing them. It amounts to telling them they are correct in their belief that everything is contaminated/you will die if they don't do a routine.

Where were you able to find a gender survivalist @RafasLeftBicep. That sounds really good.

Gosh specialist

I think this is really important to understand. Maybe people who post here do for the most part, but in my experience people in general don't.

There is a certain amount of knowledge in the medical world about the best, and worst, ways to treat people with these kinds of issues around the body, with anxiety, with obsessions, with identity.

They are the opposite of what people are being told to do with gender.

In our case we use the chosen name and pronouns for my daughter. I buy her clothes she wants which are fairly gender neutral. I also buy her women’s sportsbras which she wears most of the time. I talk about periods with her (she is not distressed by them at all), and chat about having been pregnant and the menopause. I’m trying to keep a connection with the reality of being a woman in her mind somewhere. What we are not doing is arguing about it any more.

Yes @Dwarfcavendish i think that is so important. I think our children are far more influenced by what we do than what we say so by creating a positive role model for your daughter that hopefully will allow her to have a counterpoint for some of this stuff. I have an older daughter who offers this for my DD as well. My younger DD really looks up to her big sister. My eldest daughter actually also has major traits of ASD and is diagnosed with other ND but there is absolutely none of the trans stuff with her.

Yes I do agree with what you are saying. I agree that gender identity issues and other identity issues are being treated differently and that doesn’t make sense.

However I don’t believe that the solution to body dysmorphia from say anorexia is force feeding anymore than the solution to dealing with gender dysphoria is to force your beliefs around gender onto your child. It is to try to bring your child closer to what others have called a stable identity without alienating them.

You can’t change any person’s mind by forcing your views on them especially not your children. That is just so naïve.