How do you support other siblings when a teen decides they are trans

[Autumnleavesareslippery]

I've name changed for this, have been a member for 19 years since pregnant with DS. I'm going to try and be factual as I'm in shock and dealing with a whole host of mine and my children's emotions. Yes I'm using 'he' here as none of us have got our heads around this. I'm trying to be very honest in how I feel and really need some support from people who have more of an idea about how to handle this than me.

DS (19) came home from uni on Friday. On Friday night at about 11 pm in the family chat he declared he was transgender. He informed us what he was called. It was an unusual name choice for a 19 year old - that of someone perhaps born 150 years ago. Think Enid. He told us he'd known for years.

All of us were in shock. I have DD (17) and DD and DS (both 14). I sent a message privately to him thanking for letting us know as I wasn't quite sure what else to say. He didn't read it and remained in his room. Didn't even bother with the usual teen response of a thumbs up.

Saturday and Sunday he acted completely normally, like nothing major had happened and he had told us he was vegetarian now or something. He seemed calm and relaxed. He looked exactly the same - a 6ft 2 broad shouldered man.

He then came downstairs to get a lift to the train station dressed as what I can only describe as a stereotype of what someone might think a woman looked like. Badly done make up. An odd dress that didn't fit. And started talking in a completely different soft 'feminine' voice and doing strange things with his hands that he must have deemed 'female'. He had lace like gloves on. It looked so outdated and strange.

The best way to describe it was he looked like Dame Edna or the character out of little Britain from 20 years ago in that the clothing was odd and it seemed almost designed to get a reaction. But he appeared to be deadly serious and nonchalant about it. A woman would have been clearly mocked if she dressed like it. It just leaves me wondering whether this is what he views women as?! Not that he knows any women who would act like this - he's surrounded by many women who express themselves in multiple ways but not in an Edwardian lady about to collapse way.

I drove him to the station trying to make small talk about the weather and his course and came back to everyone sat staring in disbelief. He's never said anything, acted in any way 'feminine' (whatever that means). He's at a RG uni, studying a science subject with 3 As at A level, and has organised himself a part time job. I only say this because life seems to be going well for him, rather than a potential response to something.

He is however autistic.

DD 17 is furious and says he's making a mockery of women and that woman is not a costume. She says he better not be going in female only spaces.

DD 15 looks stunned and keeps asking why he thinks he can just become a woman and what he thinks that means. She can't identify out of periods etc etc. DS 15 is laughing in disbelief. DH just looks completely confused and keeps muttering about getting loads of tattoos when he wanted to shock his parents thirty five years ago.

I genuinely don't know what to do next. Please bear in mind I'm in shock, had only just 'got over' my first born leaving for uni and all the emotions that brings.

I want to support DS19 with whatever gender expression he wants. When he still looked like him (and didn't appear to be 'dressed as' a mockery of women) I was shocked but we just thought ok, this is him experimenting with finding himself or whatever. But now I'm really worried about him and his future and whether others will look at him and think wtf. I'm also angry at the very (sorry to stereotype) 'teen boy' way he told us - late at night, no response, informing us what he was called rather than perhaps asking 'could you call me'. No consideration of the impact but I guess that might just be being 19.

I agree with what both of my daughters are saying. How do I say this because it then directly criticises DS? Do I accept he is an adult, has made his choices and my care and focus should be on them? I can't gaslight them and tell them they're wrong.

I'm now worried he's going to go into female spaces, as a clearly visible six foot plus male. This would make me angry.

He is at a university where I know lots of his lecturers (I am an academic in the same field). I know many are gender critical. Do I mention it to them first or let it be the elephant in the room?

I don't know what to say to my 85 year old mother. I think she will be very shocked and worried. I'm trying to work out if we have to tell her (she doesn't live nearby).

I don't know how much to talk to him or challenge this. I feel a kind of grief. I'm worried he's going to take hormones or do something irreversible.

We all dislike the name / think it's a very odd choice - which makes me feel very alienated from him.

And at the end of the day he's my 'baby' - I want him to be happy. I don't want people to criticise him. I want to support him but how do you do that when you question so much what he is doing? It wasn't the fact he declared himself to have a different gender but rather what followed - the declaration of name, strange clothing and fear of him going in women's spaces.

I also do absolutely realise he is an adult and can make his own choices and face the consequences. He has his own life (albeit he's being financially supported by us).

I guess it was just so sudden.

Any advice on what to do next would be gladly received.

Kellie Maloney assaulted their ex wife, so can fuck right off.

@MaidOfAle 🌺I'm so sorry. I appreciate the insight as I've wondered a great deal. He's extremely articulate, however, so not sure if it's exactly the same, but maybe not feeling he can share emotion? Sometimes we manipulate to get help the only way we know how.

@MaidOfAle thank you for explaining alexithymia so clealy. My young person also says they do not know what happy and sad are. Some time ago they told me an event that happened and said that was the last time they felt sadness but they do not remember that now. They also say they dont know what love is. We put this down to the trauma of being bullied but maybe it is autism too. Or trauma accentuating the autism.
Undiagnosed or late diagnosed autism can cause great suffering to the individual

I think my son had this difficulty ... alexithymia, though I've only just learned the word.
Often after difficult conversations/confrontations I would ask him about his feelings and he would deny having any. I think many of us, especially if depressed or traumatised, have this difficulty to some extent, but with him it was often complete. Not always, and I eventually saw more and more of a part of him that was incredibly rich in feeling, and capable of reflecting on his feelings in therapeutic contexts.

He was also deeply perceptive of others' feelings ... as well as being also, in some circumstances blind to them. There are a million ways in which I don't understand what is conveyed by the diagnosis autism (given that of course each autistic person is profoundly different from every other autistic person), but one thing in particular that I don't understand is the claim that an autistic person can't read others' emotions. He could, definitely. But I guess there were probably complexities in how he processed this information.

Regarding self-harm, he did this a lot and was strikingly blind to its effects on others. I remember him once coming downstairs and asking for help with a cut that was deeper than he had perhaps meant. It was bleeding profusely. He definitely wasn't trying to shock or manipulate or pressure me (though I do understand that self-harm can carry these sorts of significances). It was like it simply hadn't occurred to him that I might have any feelings about it at all.

This strange combination of compassionate perception and total blindness was also present when he very movingly decided to attend the funeral of a relative with us, despite being ill and isolated. He was motivated by warm concern for the family, and an awareness of all the feelings present at a funeral, but when we arrived at the hospitality part I had to suggest to him that he put his jacket back on to cover the many many self-harm scars that were on show. He immediately understood that this was appropriate, but it simply hadn't occurred to him.

Being so lost in your own self, in a mosaic of deep awareness and contrasting deep blindness, must be very disorientating; and I guess that (combined with the rigidity of thought that also characterised his autism) it must have been tempting to imagine a single overall solution, a single lever that could be pulled, to make everything fall into place and become meaningful -- ie becoming a woman, or acknowledging that he was in fact a woman.

It reminds me of the early chapters of Jude the Obscure. As I remember (haven't read it for 40 years) Jude is full of confusion and ambition in his young life and he wants to learn a foreign language. But he misunderstands what is involved in learning it: he thinks it is like learning a code, that there is one simple code-breaking rule that you can apply that will make the foreign language completely comprehensible to you. Did my son (and others in his position) view transition like that?

Am so sorry again @EugenieGrandet to direct this at you, because it's a question for most parents in this situation but only because you've mentioned it.
You said the family have to pussy foot around one of your children and that engaging on this distresses dd2 but the family still does it?
I just struggle that one child's wants are placed so firmly above another's.

I agree it seems (from my perspective, in hindsight) to be almost unconscionable that a second child’s needs are de-prioritised, but when you have been fed a narrative that one child will kill themselves if you do not pander to them they necessarily become the focus. We were told that our DD planned to be dead by her 18th birthday. We were not allowed to make plans, buy cards or gifts because she was going to kill herself by then (acc to SocServs, CAMHS etc). The family was on an agency-imposed suicide watch for years: which meant I slept barely 2 hours a night for more than 2yrs because she is a night roamer and would be in the kitchen etc where medications and knives etc were under lock and key; I used to be physically sick every morning when she did not appear by my DS’s school run as I would have to go up and waker her. We lived in the fear that we would find her dead every morning. It kills you inside.

In your head, preventing death of child A has to be the imminent and urgent priority, but you justify it to yourself as being in Child B (& C & D etc)’s interests because you don’t want them to discover the body or suffer loss.

The fear, out of the narrative you are fed by the professionals, is so raw and acute that you have no choice. You are made to feel that if Child A succeeds, you have failed, been negligent. The onus is on you, even though it means Child B cannot access urgent medications (migraine drugs etc), even if it makes keeping the loos clean impossible because medications and bleach is locked away. It’s like living on a psych ward.

It is only afterwards when it becomes clear that they never had any REAL intention of doing anything, that they were just deeply depressed, distressed and had learned on line that presenting as suicidal MIGHt get them elevated up the Tavistick wait list, might get them PB/X-sex hormones sooner, might get them onto the surgery wait list immediately that you realise you have been totally conned. And that the professionals who should have discerned what was going on and not enabled it, have allowed you to psychologically damage Child B.

There is no support offered for Child B - at least there wasn’t until our Child A decided to moot with Child B which would be the least traumatic way of killing herself from Child B’s perspective - drinking bleach or jumping off the roof - that social services finally considered his needs. Briefly. But after a few visits, a 360 review covering school etc, they concluded he was safe and our parenting was responsible and grounded. But the suicide safety plan was implemented meaning Child B had to join the psych ward along with all of us regardless of their duty to protect HIS wellbeing too.

sorry, another long ranty reply…

I'm so sorry @CautiousLurker

Oh @CautiousLurker just reading that my emotions jump from rage to devastation for you and your family.
I am so sorry if my question has upset you or brought back difficult emotions.
How dare these so called allies promote and perpetuate these behaviours.

but one thing in particular that I don't understand is the claim that an autistic person can't read others' emotions. He could, definitely. But I guess there were probably complexities in how he processed this information.

I might be able to answer that, or provide one answer anyway. The thing is that you learn, and eventually over the course of your life you accumulate experiences and information, and you file it all away in a highly organised interpersonal supercomputer in your head.

I fail dismally on those tests where you're shown a context-free face and asked to say what the person is feeling, but I can do it IRL because almost every emotion or reaction that someone can display is something that you've encountered before at some point, and you can tap into a kind of "oh, this is like when..." recognition and acknowledgement of it. It sounds kind of cold, but in some ways is the opposite, because you've tuned more consciously and with more effort into someone's feelings and are very aware of the importance of doing so.

It's not true imo that autistic people don't empathise - far from it, in fact - but they have to learn how to recognise what it is they need to empathise with. That's easier with family and people you see regularly, and also as you yourself get older, just as (e.g.) voice recognition works better once a lot of data points have been accumulated.

That's how it is for me anyway. Some people are easier to read than others, just as hard-of-hearing people find some people's speech easier to decipher than others. When I was with my ex still, I sometimes needed to ask him what was going on in a given situation, as some people deliberately or unwittingly obscure their emotions.

But just to add - and I'm thinking on my feet here - that this is something that can be exploited by others who want to manipulate autistic, especially young, people. The internet is absolutely awash with memes and youtube clips etc of people "reacting" to stimuli - see how this baby panda reacts when his mother appears after a long absence, see how this 3-year-old reacts to hearing Mozart after cochlear implants etc etc. I find this stuff baffling, and so do NT people I know (mostly those of us who aren't young and have lived without 24/7 visual entertainment) but maybe the point is to corrupt the internal supercomputer of young, vulnerable autistic people by introducing a load of nonsense data? Just a wild thought. More research needed. <heart sinks at thought of looking at lots of youtube clips>

Thanks, @SophiaCohle . I'm not sure that this was the explanation in his case, though do understand it is true of many people with autism. In the course of copyediting a massive book on neurology I had access to loads of specialist videos etc and, for fun, really (DS was only about 12 [EDIT, no, he must have been much younger than that. Nine or so] at the time, undiagnosed and bumbling along not too disastrously) we went through of some of these autism-related emotion recognition resources together . He scored very highly for recognising emotions in faces (as did I), whereas his dad failed miserably! It is such a complex picture.

I don't think autism is one thing at all. It is only defined in relation to clusters of characteristics, and these are at least partly disjunctive. And we haven't identified a unique pathway that produces those. Similarly, psychosis is only defined in terms of its manifestations, and has no unique pathway creating them. I suspect there are several underlying conditions leading to each set of characteristics, and that one or more of these will turn out to be a unified explanation of both a person's autism and their psychosis.

Sorry, I know this is off-topic a bit.

No, please don’t feel you’ve upset me. It’s just this thread has brought home just how unseen and unsupported siblings have been under this frankly tyranical and blind affirmative approach to care. It is an almost institutionalised support system for narcissists. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my older child and can see she has so much to offer, but the blind pandering to her of this treatment model, and the compelled responses from us, have NOT helped her either, so the damage done is two fold, impacting two young lives. It just makes me so angry.

And as several PPs here and on other current threads have said - unless you have lived it, dealt with being in the Tavistock limbo-wait list, you have no real understanding of it. I truly do feel that the allies are at best well-meaning and naive (coming from a perspective of ‘I have trans friends’) and at worst malign enablers of very damaged young people who need professional care and support, not cheerleaders and additional manipulation by ideologues.

Sigh. My day started with a very early, panicked request to help produce a mini essay in 30mins on the agricultural revolution because AuDHD brain freeze had kicked in and it was due today. 🤦🏽‍♀️

It is an almost institutionalised support system for narcissists.

Hard agree.

There's been a lot of research into the incidence of autism in affected families but I wonder if there's been any into the incidence of NPD? There is plenty in ours, and whereas it seems to have been caused by attachment disorder issues in an earlier generation, my observation is that learned behaviour then filters down. It might account for why some individuals are more susceptible to trans ideology than others.

Probably way OT now, sorry.

Unfortunately I'm increasingly seeing narcissism going hand in hand with autism presentations. I think part of this has been unwittingly caused by the 'neurodiversity movement' which I am finding increasingly harmful to ND people- ironically because it is often being championed by the most narcissistic individuals! This makes sense because it brings a lot of narcissistic supply - admiration, money for the latest homegrown charity etc.

My own family is very ND and I keep all of us away from the ND movement. It often veers between narcissism and victimhood, between ND 'superpowers' and complete entitlement and infantilising. I'm probably explaining this very badly. In a nutshell in a bid to avoid 'masking' some people are being encouraged to do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want, then becoming very distressed that the world will not accommodate them. Trans ideology is just one expression of this and fits perfectly into the narcissistic end of autism. In real life people quickly find they are rejected by others except the 'allies' and those susceptible to narcissistic abuse but online they can find a bottomless pit of well-meaning idiots to cheer them on.

had learned on line that presenting as suicidal MIGHt get them elevated up the Tavistick wait list

This is what happens when mental health services are under-resourced:

1. Teen is miserable.
2. No one is available to help teen because of under-resourcing.
3. Teen self-diagnoses incorrectly.
4. Teen seeks advice on how to game system to get the treatment they incorrectly think they need.

And all that is before even considering the impacts on the whole family of CAMHS misdiagnosing the teen, failing to diagnose the teen with the actual condition§, and affirmation-only "treatment" of the teens self-diagnosis.

§: I could write for a long time about how CAHMS missing my autism has harmed me, but I won't on this thread.

In a nutshell in a bid to avoid 'masking' some people are being encouraged to do whatever the fuck they want whenever they want

It's true that masking, meaning attempting to act neurotypically, is genuinely exhausting, psychologically harmful, and sometimes physically painful. It's therefore reasonable to want to minimise the amount of masking you do. But there's a difference between saying that it's ok to flap your hands or wear sunglasses indoors and saying that you can do whatever you want.

"Your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins" applies here. No one is harmed if I slip my sunglasses on, but I don't have the right to turn the lights off without asking others in the room first.

Yes I really do understand how harmful masking can be having done it for decades and burning out pretty spectacularly but I do also see that it taught me how to live in society, have positive relationships, develop resilience etc. It actually limited the 'harm' that my ND did me in some ways while wrecking me in others.

I love the fist analogy! ❤️ Sums it up perfectly. Like all pendulums the ND movement has swung too far and is probably beginning to return to centre. Interestingly the trans pendulum is making the same slow reset. They really do seem very bound together.

Not being forced to mask is a massively different thing from refusal to acknowledge and respect boundaries and harms to others.

That's the stumbling block.

I am sat here in tears reading today’s posts. Thank you all so much for sharing so generously and helping me understand.

SquirrelSoShiny, keeping away from the ND movement is what we were doing, albeit unwittingly. My child, however, suffered constant bullying during childhood, they didn’t have an autism diagnosis as nobody ever suggested it and we didn’t think a label would be helpful. Consequently, they spent their whole teenage years in fight or flight when they should have been forming their identity. They then found something online which enabled them to self diagnose and ultimately land on changing gender as the solution. I can’t help but wonder if the rush to medicalisation via hormones is a desire for a quick fix.

An earlier post advised to stay away from adult gender clinics. This was my feeling too having read the Cass report but we are at a stage now where they are a young adult and will access hormones online via GenderGP, like all their trans friends, if we don’t make an appointment.

I pray that the pendulum will settle sooner rather than later. And, in the meantime, thank you OP and everyone else for showing me how important it is to keep all my children’s needs front and centre.

I am in awe, and grateful, for the wisdom on this thread. Hugs to you all. And thanks for sharing. It really helps me consider how to analyze my godson and friend.

And your own needs @Kalalily .

I have followed this thread closely because although I don't have any direct experience of trans identifying children, I am just in absolute awe at the courage and honesty of some of you posting on here. These conversations are so important and have the potential to help many families. Thank you!

I’m going to join this thread because I am in a similar situation. So far my child hasn’t wanted to tell any other family members so I am carrying this on my own. It’s been very helpful to see that so many others are in this situation. Although so sad, and makes me so angry, that there are people out there exploiting young people like this and medical professionals who really should know better totally abdicating responsibility for their patients - in my child’s case, an NHS GP who seems happy to just agree to endlessly repeat prescriptions obtained from GenderGP, who it now seems clear are basically charlatans.

@CautiousLurker exactly! When you're caught up going from crisis to crisis, when the most important thing is supporting Child A to keep them alive - unfortunately everything/ everyone else falls to the wayside.

I obviously regret some of the ways that I have parented, but we're down a path now where we're trying to maintain a positive relationship with DD1, so that includes saying only acceptable things with her. It doesn't always feel honest, but in the face of poor mental health (and how can trans not be viewed in any other way?) I know no other acceptable way to continue.

@DoreenonTill8 Does that continue to harm DD2? Probably, it certainly feels as though that harms me. But we're tied together as a family and as parents we continue to try and balance everyone's needs. I'm not always successful in this, I am struggling. If anyone has a better suggestion, I'm all ears :)

This does all make a lot of sense, but I want to add that even where they overlap, the narcissism and the autism will be two different things, and there is no intrinsic connection between them.
I think the overlap might often be one of two different things:

-- Autistic person is also narcissistic (for reasons not essentially connected with their autism), and their autism makes it harder for them to be aware of, police, monitor the boundaries between normal self-assertion and narcissistic tyranny.

--Autistic person is not also narcissistic but they are used and groomed for the gratification of other people's narcissism, and in this sense are a kind of human shield. They may adopt agendas shaped by others' narcissistic needs

My DS was intensely vulnerable to other people's agenda and may have fallen into the latter category. He was the opposite of narcissistic, very easily shaped by others' demands.

While I agree with much of what you say I'm starting to wonder if there really is more overlap than suspected before. It will be really interesting to see if focused research proves this to be the case and how much of it is attributable to social factors like the ND movement, online groups, discord servers etc. We know autistic / ND young people are often socially isolated in daily life and increasingly seek connections online. They really are ripe for grooming of all kinds including by older narcissists recruiting 'followers'.