Yesterday my heart was ravaged. I thought I’d risen above and detached myself from all of the hate and vitriol that people hurl around regarding transgender kids and their parents. I try to stay away from this social “discussion,” as I’ve come to realize that most people don’t really understand this issue. Deep down they are just afraid, and probably don’t truly mean what they say. It’s hard sometimes to keep this kind of perspective but I try to, for my own peace of mind.
I am estranged from most of my family and it’s a complicated story that didn’t start with my child, but recent discussions around her keep some of us from moving forward. There have been confrontations with some of my family over her out of necessity. They don’t want my child around their kids for whatever reason and sometimes these reasons are vague, but seem to come back to her gender dysphoria. I haven’t had too many angry confrontations, but all of this has been hurtful nevertheless. It’s like she has a disease that is catching. Most of the time, I haven’t wanted to dredge up a conversation or find out what they really think. I know how some of them probably think, but they don’t specifically comment on the issue where it’s in my face. I don’t know if they publicly share their opinions on their own social media page because I either no longer follow them or am not “friends” with them. Social media has amplified what used to be only the rare family holiday feud. Some people would rather have this kind of “truth” out in the open while others would rather it stay hidden. I’m not sure where I fall in that camp anymore.
Now, returning to yesterday. After hearing about the new Georgia law while dropping my kiddo off at school, I mentioned it to my husband. I was of course distressed by the news because all I could imagine were the families who had to deal with the fallout of this new reality. It personally hurts because our family could so easily be the ones in the fray. Unfortunately, my husband had known all about this because my cousin posted it on social media in support of our concerns and other family members felt called to debate the issue. I didn’t look at the post. I had been taking a break from social media, but I knew how much this behavior from my family distresses my husband. Against my better judgement, I decided to confront my sibling to ask that she stop commenting about this issue because it was hurtful and because she wasn’t personally impacted by it. This conversation quickly turned ugly. I was unable to take in a lot of what she texted me at first because reading the warped ideas makes me crazy and I didn’t think arguing was going to help me convince her of anything less. But let me say this, regardless of what you personally think about this issue, one of the most hurtful things you can do is attack a person’s parenting or their child. I need to address this publicly as I hear from so many families who are also dealing with this very painful vitriolic communication from family members while dealing with some of the most challenging decisions they will have to make in their entire lives. I’m hoping this post will raise awareness of this issue. I hope someone reading this will stop and think before they start cavalierly posting their judgemental opinions about the parents and kids who are dealing with these very difficult choices.
I am going to bring into the conversation some details that I think most people don’t think about when considering this issue. The main way that we as a culture use to decide the gender of a child is their genitalia. For the majority of people, this gender matching process works. We can talk about biological or societal constructs beyond gender matching, but at a basic level this is how it works. And from a purely biological perspective, when you dig a bit deeper you find gender can be an extremely complex web of vaguery. What really makes someone a boy vs. a girl? How strong is the feeling of gender? How does that relate to their sense of self or their sexuality? A podcast episode I found helpful on this topic is Stereolab’s Gonads. From a societal construct issue, I agree that some of the craziness around our attachment to the binary is about narrow boxes we assign to groups of people. But it’s also more complex than a social construct.
I can’t speak for everyone’s kid, but I know that my child has been telling people about the girl inside her since she was around 4 years old. This started quietly as a factual statement to her grandmother and grew over time in the way that she gravitated towards certain things and the way she needed people to understand this part of her. At first I tried to keep my child surreptitiously in her defined gender “lane”. I am the one who was more comfortable with boxes. After internally struggling with this a bit, I finally encouraged her to express herself in the way that she clearly needed to express herself. This was about her spirit more than anything else. She was going to be who she was. I could either hamper her spirit and cause some real psychological damage around repression or I could let her express herself in the way that felt natural to her. Then she started telling more and more people at her school about her female self and I kept grilling her about it. I wanted to understand it and I didn’t. She must have sensed my unease because it took her awhile and in the comfort of a therapist to tell me that she wanted to be considered a female. I’ve already spoken about my tears and struggles during this short period of time. This new reality was hard for me to accept, but I quickly rallied because she’s my kid. This has not been easy for her. It would have been a whole hell of a lot easier for her to stay in her defined gender “lane”. This is so clearly not a choice for her that it makes me incredulous when people claim so astutely otherwise.
Like my sibling who righteously tells me that if her child told her she was a boy, she’d simply tell her she wasn’t a boy but she could do anything a boy could do. She blames my child’s gender identity on several ridiculous ideas, but none more hurtful than my horrible parenting (AKA, the horrible human being that she evidently thinks I am). Among these ideas are that “She is just trying to get my attention” and “who knows what she picked up in NYC?” It’s like she has weird imaginings about what kids under 8 are actually exposed to in New York City. She uses an example of catching her kid watching a video of some girl lusting after another girl to demonstrate the evils that lurk in the culture ready to catch our kids in its snare. Clearly, she’s much more liberal in what she lets her kids stumble upon. *Obviously, there is a lot of harmful content out there for kids. I worry about this all of the time. But to point to this as a factor in her gender identity is misguided. I am probably one of the most strict parents about content and screen time out there. As far as what else she could have been exposed to in “evil” NYC, I can’t imagine what it could be. The idea that a kid could decide that they were a different gender by simply bumping into something is beyond me. My daughter was relentlessly bullied about claiming her female identity, so there was no motivating factor here. To me it comes down to accepting or suppressing. Now you tell me what is going to be more harmful to a kid in the long run?
Then there’s the discussion of gender blockers, hormones, and surgery. The question is what is more damaging to the child? What is more abusive: letting a child experience what’s already a dysphoric situation grow even more pronounced as they enter into puberty? Let them grow into more pronounced male/female features so they have a harder time transitioning when they finally become “adult” enough to make other people comfortable about their choice? I could cite study after study of the harmful effects of not affirming a child’s gender identity, but clear evidence doesn’t seem to work anymore. It’s exhausting to attempt to fight the misinformation that is being spread by those against allowing kids like her to be who they naturally are. My point is not to attempt to convince you by way of evidence. I don’t really care to convince you about anything more than a better understanding of this very complex reality. It’s hard for parents and kids to navigate this reality. Don’t you think we as parents agonize over these difficult choices? Don’t you think this keeps us up at night? Why vilify and abuse us simply because you don’t understand what we are going through? Simply because you are not faced with our specific reality?
I hope you never have to make these very difficult decisions about one of your kids, but if you do I hope you make the best possible choice for your child’s well being. You’ll know exactly what that is if you do love them like I love mine. I above all hope that your child’s spirit shines through in those small moments when you absolutely know you’ve made the right choice despite all the abuse you receive.
*Note: I don’t consider a girl demonstrating an attraction for another girl being harmful content, but she uses the world lusting so I’m assuming this is a pornographic video (?).
