Guardian: what is to hate the shape of your own skin

[MyAmpleSheep]

I honestly don’t know how anyone can read this and not understand it as a mental health issue. The cognitive backflips required to avoid that conclusion should be beyond anyone sane.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/08/i-am-a-trans-teenager-this-is-what-it-means-to-hate-the-shape-of-your-own-skin

Gosh, that was beautiful written and very moving - my heart goes out to that young person. And yes you're right, it's very clearly a mental health condition. I don't see how that much disgust and shame at one's own healthy body can be framed as anything else.

Dear lord. Is there any hope for the human race? Teenage angst. General suffering. Hardships. Being and feeling weird. They are all normal parts of life. Get over it!

Good God, it’s like reading my own teenage diaries (though admittedly better written). Since when did teenage angst become a subject for publication in a grown up national newspaper, rather than the problem page of Just Seventeen? I do hope he grows up and looks back on this article with a massive cringe one day.

bleeding Nora Elsie, you just feel like nearly every teenager feels! As a grown up I wonder why we’re no longer grown uping properly and explaining to Elsie that his feelings are very normal rather than rushing to affirm his confusion and angst means he’s a girl?

(as an aside I wonder who Elsie is related too to have a whole column in the guardian to wail about his feelings)

The idea that this young person will get a regime of brutal drugs and surgery and live a life of disconnect with their body is tragic. Where's the thoughtful therapy and a family / community surrounding and holding them? They need support to enable them to get involved with their family, friends ,community and society as they work through their angst about their developing body.

It was a beautifully written piece on teenage angst and the onset horror at a changing body. Statistically 1 in 5 teen boys and 3 in 5 girls in their adolescence would identify with body dismorphia and so many of them heart-breakingly resort to eating disorders and cutting as a means of dealing with those difficult emotions that it engenders.

Maybe if their genuine and powerful distress was dealt with by proper supportive dialectical behaviourial therapy to help them manage their imminent, powerful and overwhelming emotional dysregulation rather than purchasing short cuts like bras and hormones their long term health could be saved. A temporary relief to distress but also a prop to an escape from pain into a wished for fantasy and the limerence of daydreaming into a new persona.

There does need to be more than watchful waiting.

There needs to be an army of informed parents saying this is a marathon not a sprint. I recognise your feelings about your body, and an army of therapists with integrity challenging the more extreme means of causing long term damage to healthy bodies or by instilling and encouraging the fantasy they can escape into a different sex.

Maybe they need more than well-meaning but naive friends and peers whose frontal cortexes are equally undeveloped enough to recognise or conceive the long term consequences of agreeing to the fantasy and idealistically striving for an unachievable utopia that does not acknowledge the sterility, osteoporosis, the hair loss, the fragility of the psychic self to external and self criticism etc etc.

There needs to be more than being kind. Underlying that beautiful and articulate appeal to emotion must be a fascinating worldview that a decent therapist can tap into and explore. Is the hobbyist loving the detail of really getting into a niche interest a manifestation of neuro divergence? Can they explore the connection between that and their view of their body and burgeoning sexuality? Wouldn’t a good therapist walk the winding path with them showing them the divergences of the path and keeping them from the cliff edges?

Can caring parents give their kids who are itchy and emotionally so painfully aware they don’t fit say I love you? I see all of you, the bits you like and the bits you hate; and I still love the bits of you you currently loathe and feel so strongly about, you want to destroy those parts with the certitude that only young people possess that there is no grey in the world and that sometime in the future, when time passes, you may come to see things differently. Let me hold you and comfort you, even though you currently hate me, thinking I don’t see the real you, and am telling you from a place of conflict horror and fear for your future self that, this too will pass.

And if/when you reach your twenties and it has not passed we may walk that path less taken together with greater certitude. But my job as loving parent now is to hold you in care and regard but also do the difficult job of safeguarding you from the most radical treatments and surgeries until you are in a place to make a fully informed decision as a grown up adult.

Maybe we need more than the unsubstantiated free for all of the internet gender ideology cult, where those who have to justify their own paths double down and are in someways honest in saying the only way to survive this is to cut off all opposition to your all encompassing mission, including your family who love you the most. And are in some ways dishonest about the physical and mental toll of their choices.

And those who have sold the pills, hormones and surgeries who are more blatantly dishonest as they are making a buck or several thousand of them tying you into a lifetime multi-person marketing scheme.

Or maybe we need more than just the plainly predatory who need cover for their fetish and have seen the justification that distressed teenagers provide for them to act out their sexualised behaviour in public avoiding and ignoring the consequences to equally distressed women, because we do not count.

Maybe if we recognised this as body dismorphia and provided the right means that have been clinically successfully proved to address it, then we could have a generation of young people who would come out physically and mentally intact and have learnt so much that they could help other young people on that rocky path to come out safer and wiser.

Maybe that is what we all need as a responsible, caring and kind society.

Agree with previous posters re: body dysmorphia. What makes it doubly frustrating is that The Guardian has previously run several articles on body dysmorphia and how it is debilitating and how it needs to be treated with therapy like other mental health conditions - see link below. Frustrating that they can’t see the conmection (or won’t admit to it). Just to add, as a female I have never felt “euphoria” whilst baring a strip of skin or wearing a skirt🙄

www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/26/i-had-this-strong-feeling-that-my-face-was-disfigured-kitty-wallace-the-body-dysmorphic-sufferer-turned-campaigner

@woollyhatter you should consider sending your beautiful, thoughtful post to Guardian as a letter

And this is why ‘conversion therapy’ should never have been brought into the debate about Trans young people.

The process WoollyHatter lays out would be a supportive, therapeutic approach to young people with dysmorphia . But the politics has categorised this as ‘conversion’ and outlawed it as transphobic.

It’s hard to believe that drugs and surgery, with lifelong health and lifestyle impacts, are the first resort for young people with mental and emotional distress.

Doubtless some would maintain their trans identity, some always have even when it was a totally excluding life to be trans, but it seems fair to give young people a non judgmental non blaming supportive way to address their dysmorphia before resorting to body-wrecking drugs and surgery.

The ‘conversion therapy’ aimed at sexuality seems to come with a heavy dose of condemnation for homosexuality, an implication that the individual is contaminated with something that must be cast out.

Obviously this is totally cruel and inappropriate for sexuality, dysmorphia or anything else that isn’t criminal behaviour.

But emotional and psychological support for vulnerable teens, struggling with their bodies, dysmorphia, maybe ASD, emotional trauma, doesn’t have to have one single thing in common with this.

woollyhatter, your post is full of wisdom and understanding and is beautifully written.

I so feared and hated the prospect of becoming a woman that I looked into ways to end my life before puberty. It was more than suicidal 'ideation', there was planning involved, but it never escalated to an attempt.
I had no-one to talk to about my feelings, and I didn't have the words.

I suspect that if this was happening today, I'd be welcoming puberty blockers, surgery, anything and everything to make me feel 'better' about myself.

What I needed was exactly what you recommend woollyhatter.
Let me hold you and comfort you, even though you currently hate me, thinking I don’t see the real you, and am telling you from a place of conflict horror and fear for your future self that, this too will pass.

I'm crying now for my little because nobody said that to me.

But I'll take it as a win that nobody said 'Here are some PB's' either, and my parents knew or understood little of what I was going through, so couldn't be expected to say something as inspired and loving as that. Benign ignorance and neglect of my emotional and psychological problems turned out to be OK.

I never got access to the gun I knew was on a neighbour's farm. My first period arrived and I just got on with it. I continued gender-non-conforming. I grew up to be a lesbian. I am grateful it happened then and not now - I fear for the current versions of little gender-confused me.

You are a wise and eloquent woman, woollyhatter. Thank you

That's a lovely wise post @woollyhatter

I see in this article a mixture of teenage angst and dysmorphia that do inspire sympathy, but also the incipient fetish that I believe lies behind every man role playing as a woman that I have come across

The first time you showed off a bit – wore a sports bra, showed some skin – there was so much joy that it scared you. Because the one truth of you is that your skin disgusts you. But put a strip of fabric over your chest and suddenly your skin made you ecstatic.

as noted above, women and girls tend not to feel ecstasy upon donning a sports bra.

and despite how sad and out of place and occasionally ecstatic Elsie feels, none of this makes him female of course. Reality just keeps on trucking

I do wonder when I read things like this whether it would just help them all an awful lot to take an interest in and read about non-trans people's experiences of being an awkward teenager, feeling like your body is doing weird stuff you never wanted it to do, feeling like you wish you could just make it all stop, etc. People who went on to self-accept and to become non-trans. It used to be quite a common theme of TV shows, books etc when I was growing up but perhaps the depth of feelings etc wasn't overstated enough for everyone to "get" this life lesson.

The only thing these young people are surrounding themselves with is self-affirming "experience" of other people who have identified as trans, and so they're finding truth in it that suits them instead of seeing the bigger picture that pretty much everyone hates puberty.

I feel like as a society we've failed these young people massively by not teaching them that.

As for the bra thing, it's just weird. As others have said here and on other threads, women don't feel like that when they put clothes on.

Meh. Maybe I'm being hard-hearted, but all I can see are the contradictions, and the blatant conclusion that this boy is not trans, he's AGP.

"You’re fairly sure your skin has always been a problem."

When I read that, I expect mentions of things that go back all the way to childhood. Instead:

"The very earliest sign was swimming. Or clothes in general, really, but swimming was the easy one. When you swam, you always wore (and always still wear) a shirt, even though the males of your family don’t. More broadly, you refuse to ever be seen without one. You called it modesty, but now you know it as shame. Shame for your square-ish, flat, slightly hairy flesh prison."

Little boys don't have any more hair on their chest than little girls. In fact, little boys are no different in the chest than little girls. So this is not about being a little boy; it's about being a teenager already. And that's his earliest sign?? Nothing about hating his genitals at 6? Nothing about wanting to wear dresses at 8? So much for "your skin has always been a problem".

"The most obvious sign, a little later than the swimming, was video games, and your refusal to play as a male. “Girls look better!” you might have said. "

Later than the swimming, so definitely into teenage years. Nothing - nothing - about childhood.

"The first time you showed off a bit – wore a sports bra, showed some skin – there was so much joy that it scared you."

And now we get to the outright contradictions. He won't be seen without his t-shirt on, but he's ecstatic to "show some skin"? Where is the logic in there? Or is it that he's showing skin in a sexualised manner? And that overjoys him? I can well imagine that - if he's AGP.

"You stay up late with your best friend, and they help you find a name,"

I notice how he carefully doesn't mention the sex of said best friend...

" There was peace in your lack of self, in not realising why you’ve slowly, unnoticeably grown addicted to skirts and long hair and bare strips of skin."

Again with the fact that those feelings weren't always there, that they grew when he reached puberty.

"Your safety, your peace, has been torn down so slowly you didn’t even notice, and now everything hidden behind it has come rushing out. Everything you were has been torn out and you don’t know how to rebuild yourself."

That's the exact opposite of an "always been trans" experience! Every single word in there screams, "I was fine until I reached puberty."

"Terrified, because now you know what you are, and that knowledge is like an anchor with a too-short chain. Fine when you kept it up, but now you’ve let it drop, and it’s tugging you down with it. You were afloat, and now you’re drowning, and you don’t know if you’ll ever surface again."

Indeed. That's exactly how I would expect someone discovering they have a sexual fetish to feel.

This boy needs to sit down with Dr Hakeem and learn about AGP. Transitioning may make things worse so he needs to be caught before he goes too far, for his own good.

Yes I agree. Thank you.

Porn has so much to answer for, both in driving male AGP and in creating a cultural norm of so-called femininity which alienates so many girls.

Why aren't porn consumers and apologists more open to critically engaging with the subject matter?

"Statistically 1 in 5 teen boys and 3 in 5 girls in their adolescence would identify with body dismorphia...."

Do you have a source for these statistics please @woollyhatter? Thanks and much appreciated.

"The most obvious sign, a little later than the swimming, was video games, and your refusal to play as a male."

Well he can cross that off as a sign. I always play male characters in video games and my son female characters. I think my son likes the female characters because he gets frustrated by the drab choice of male clothing IRL (as does DH, who would wear bright purple everything if he could 😁)

Sorry I wasn’t being clear I meant mental health distress in teens is affecting girls and boys in those numbers, 2023 stats published on info reported in 2021. I think it has improved a bit as some of it was Covid driven but not much. Accidentally and inaccurately conflated with body dismorphia which is as diagnosed as closer to 2% of the teen population.

Though body image issues reported amongst teens are much higher. Always happy to be corrected on the numbers as MN do rely on evidence based info.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0213-yrbs.html

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/articles/body-image-report-executive-summary/body-image-childhood

UK stats here on teen relationship to body image are concerning

It is all in their mind. Doesn't mean it's not real to them, and doesn't mean it cannot cause real, physical symptoms. But because it is in the mind, the solution is also in the mind, possibly supported by medications empirically proven to help distressed or confused minds. The solution is not damage the individual's body, nor is it to force society to affirm the individual's confusion.

That is so awful - and yet apparently very fixable . Really strong similarities between those two young people's experiences - if only the 'trans'kid could be helped the same way 😢

What this also bring up for me is as a PP has side, why isn't there more publicity about how many young people of both sexes can find their body hard to accept. And that at puberty for many it can be worse.

But also, so many of these stories of "trans" children and teenages seem to come out of some almost Victorian notion of how males and females are allowed to present themselves. ie not accept as fact the straight box of gender stereotyping. Which now isn't necessarily re-inforced by families but the media world.

Sometimes when I just get so fed up with this boxing in of allowable presentation, I think we should impose a generation of Mao suits for everyone. And sensible haircuts.

Not only would this cut down of the environmental damage of fashion, but also the drain on personal finances.

There are other ways to express yourself than turning your body into a form of art work or sculpture.

Mao suits didn't work in communist China, and they had a lot of leverage to impose that we don't, so I can't see it being a success.

Anyway - yes to telling teens that it is normal to feel super uncomfortable with their body. Because -

Their body is changing massively very quickly, and therefor the brain body connection is thrown into disarray.

It's weird to have one self image when you are a small, smooth faced, small bodied person and sudden;y you are gangly or have spots and your hair changes colour and texture, you face shape, everything really. It's like an alien has replaced your image in the mirror.

Your hormones are out of whack and that makes anyone feel weird.

You are having sexual feelings that create new kinds of relationships to others, and you are starting to be seen as a sexual person by adults in the world too. This isn't all negative, it can be really nice, but it is a huge change in social role that can be frightening and overwhelming.

Those are normal things in a best case scenario for puberty, without getting into serious problems, creepy people, traumatic experiences, or anything like that.