On the certainty of the trans identifying teen - guidance for parents

[BettyBooper]

I've just read this article by ReadsomePiagetPlease! and thought it might be helpful to share for parents with trans identifying children.

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1/status/2046106359247077884

Some excerpts:

'One of the most challenging aspects for parents, teachers, and clinicians, to understand and to manage, is the absolute certainty with which many trans identifying teenagers present. It is not the tentative, exploratory uncertainty that characterises most adolescent identity questions. It is categorical, resistant to examination, and often experienced by the young person as an existential matter. To question it feels to them like a denial of their existence. To suggest alternative explanations feels like an attack. The adults around them, trying to engage carefully and honestly, frequently find that careful and honest engagement is precisely what the young person cannot tolerate.'...

...'The identity is managing an internal state that was, before its adoption, genuinely overwhelming. To threaten the identity is to threaten the regulatory system. The young person does not experience a parent raising questions about their gender identity as an intellectual challenge to be engaged with. They experience it as an attempt to return them to the unbearable state the identity rescued them from. The ferocity of the response is proportionate not to the strength of the argument being made against them but to the psychological function the identity is performing.'

Oh and this one for teachers and parents about the dangers to all children of teaching about GI in schools.

https://x.com/prof_curiosity1/status/2045390010560520341

'The effect on children who do not adopt a transgender or non-binary identity is also real and also underdiscussed. Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework describes the school as a mesosystem, one of the key environments within which children develop their understanding of the social world. When the school environment introduces a framework that treats biological sex as mutable, that requires children to accept that a peer who presents as a boy may be correctly described as a girl, and that to question this is to cause harm, it creates cognitive dissonance for children whose concrete operational understanding of the world is organised around stable physical categories. For younger children in particular, this is not an expansion of their understanding. It is a demand that they suppress the evidence of their own perception in deference to a socially enforced claim. The developmental costs of teaching children that observable reality is less reliable than asserted identity have not been studied. They deserve to be.'....

....'Developmental science does not support the introduction of gender identity frameworks to children before the cognitive, moral, and identity-forming capacities required to engage with them are in place. It does not support the use of schools as environments for the transmission of a contested identity framework to children who are, by developmental definition, in the most suggestible and identity-forming period of their lives. And it does not support the assumption that exposure to that framework is neutral for children who do not adopt its categories, because no exposure to a framework that reorganises the cognitive and social environment of development is ever neutral.

The children in those classrooms did not ask to be part of this. They deserved better than to become the unexamined subjects of an intervention that the institutions responsible for their care had not thought carefully enough about.'

The ferocity of the response is proportionate not to the strength of the argument being made against them but to the psychological function the identity is performing

How well put.

An archive link to the first article for those not on X (for some reason Nitter won't show it):

https://archive.is/CL2DC

And for the second article:

https://archive.is/tNwWg

Thank you @TwoLoonsAndASprout ! I was hoping someone would do that!

"For younger children in particular, this is not an expansion of their understanding. It is a demand that they suppress the evidence of their own perception in deference to a socially enforced claim."
That's the way I feel as an adult. It's a form of gaslighting and I experience it as a deliberate mindfuck. Don't others? Or am I missing an understanding of identity as distinguished from physical reality? We're not just told that transwomen are men who feel that they are women, we're told that they are women and so we should be happy to undress in front of them.

I think this is the best article on trans identity that I’ve read and I wish I’d had it when my child first declared their new self. One to circulate widely.

It describes acutely the difficulty of navigating this situation. Some really astute observations. The sentence about it not being ‘an expansion of their understanding’ (ie. Query theory , turn-everything-on-its-head’ so words lose their long-accepted meaning) but a suppression of the child’s ’evidence of their own perception’ perfectly describes the whole ‘Mummy who gave birth to you is, in fact, your Daddy’ scenario. And I am not talking about any scenario where an adopting Mummy/Daddy is called Mummy/Daddy either before someone jumps in with that.

The author got themselves confused in this bit:

"a framework that treats biological sex as mutable, that requires children to accept that a peer who presents as a boy may be correctly described as a girl"

What they 'present as' is irrelvant, and a child who 'presents as' a boy may indeed be correctly described as a girl - if that is what they are. The problem is describing children who are boys as girls.

I suppose the difficulty is this

'The gender identity framework, as delivered in educational settings, presents gender as a subjective inner sense that may or may not correspond to biological sex, that can be non-binary or fluid, and that is authoritative over observable physical reality. This is a formal operational concept. Children are still in the process of consolidating the most basic understanding of gender as a stable category when gender identity instruction begins in many schools. They have not yet fully grasped that a man in a dress is still a man. They are then asked to understand that a person may have an inner gender identity that makes the category itself uncertain.'

That if the child is told that the sex category is uncertain, this completely undermines that the child they are looking it is a boy.

So although I agree with you, the whole point is that that the child would not have that certainty to begin with.

It amounts to brainwashing imho.

Many thanks to @BettyBooper for this thread and to @TwoLoonsAndASprout for the archives!

Thanks for the links.

Does anyone know who "prof_curiosity1" is or aware of other articles not on X but somewhere accessible to all! Quote:

"Silenced, but still fighting. Anon, 'cos I need to eat. Gender affirmative care is gender conversion therapy. Not a 'transchild' but a TRANSED child."

"Hello all You may know me from a previous account which I had to put into abeyance for fear of losing my job again. I was investigated twice by my regulator for arguing for the safeguarding of children and women's sex based rights. I was silenced but am still here fighting."

And who or what is "Piaget"?

From https://x.com/prof_curiosity1

Really interesting articles. Thanks @BettyBooper for posting. Helps explain why so many parents might get caught out by the rapidity and intensity of the child’s new trans identity. The unbearable state being rescued from also points to underlying co-morbidities ie autism or ADHD, anxiety, feeling different etc.

They appear to be anonymous so they won’t get sacked - again.

I don’t think anyone can or should answer your question.

@IwantToRetire, I can answer the Piaget bit - he was one of the earliest (and still considered one of the foremost) researchers on child development.

I know you are right, but I was interested in other articles etc., they may have published.

But as you say to even list or mention them would identify them.

I just wanted to read more ....

Thanks - suppose now I should go and read up on them.

It's a form of gaslighting and I experience it as a deliberate mindfuck. Don't others?

I usually think of it as an form of Cartesian dualism, which many people seem to believe, e.g., that there is a soul distinct from the body. I don't believe in dualism but I can accept that others do.

I don't know, but they are followed by Naomi C, Maya F, Sarah Phillimore and many more who are well known in this area.

There's further reading at the end of the articles that could be worth a look.

It is not the tentative, exploratory uncertainty that characterises most adolescent identity questions. It is categorical, resistant to examination, and often experienced by the young person as an existential matter. To question it feels to them like a denial of their existence. To suggest alternative explanations feels like an attack. The adults around them, trying to engage carefully and honestly, frequently find that careful and honest engagement is precisely what the young person cannot tolerate.'

I haven't read the article yet but this really resonated with me.

As a teenager there were some things, like the fashion/music subculture I was part of, my favourite school subjects and my hobbies, that I felt strongly were the defining parts of who I was as a person, or more precisely of the person I wanted to be me.

I would react very strongly to any challenge or piss-taking or the suggestion these things might be a fashion or a phase or something I would grow out of, exactly because at some level I was aware they were choices I was consciously making, an aspirational person/personality I was constructing for myself.

I remember years ago reading a very moving article by Miranda Yardley, where he described the process of constantly chasing the next stage of transition in the desperate hope that this would resolve the underlying struggle, that this would be the point of ending it, and how devastating it was after surgery to have the realisation that he'd gone as far as he could go and it still hadn't helped. And now there was nothing left to chase.

Desperately sad situation to be in, and rooted in deep unhappiness and fragility.

An insightful article - thanks for sharing