ILX Parents of LGBTQ+ kids

I have a friend who's kid is going into 9th grade and is a trans boy. They are accepting and using preferred pronouns but remaining cautious and not willing to go along with hormones or surgery yet. The parents talk about NYT articles saying that in the past trans often was identified early and it was commonly trans women, but lately number of trans boys has spiked and one explanation is that when girls are going through their teens there is a certain amount of squeamishness about bodily changes and they cast about for why they are confused by their bodies and being trans is an answer that some hit upon and that they are not Truly Trans. BUT, they are not telling their son this and they are generally being supportive but not to the point of going along with hormones.

I haven't read any of these articles and have little to no experience with real life trans issues. Is there a larger number of trans boys than in the past? My gut reaction is that cis girls/women often have more societal pressure and they are often less aggressive in claiming the space they need and that seems a more likely explanation for why some girls may not have been willing to go through a transition in the past; it simply wasn't an option that they could see or were willing to go through.

there are more out trans children than before but that's almost entirely a factor of trans people being more willing to come out as children due to a significant increase in public acceptance (though that's rapidly backsliding) and awareness and visibility of trans people (especially of trans men, who were much more invisible than trans women in the public eye until relatively recently), meaning that trans people are more likely to figure things out sooner, be aware that transitioning is an option, and have the capability to pursue it. there was also very very little access to health care or even support for trans teens until the last decade or so - only the most supportive parents being well-off enough & living in the right areas could get their trans kids healthcare, and that's still not far off from being the case, it's just broader than before.

the belief that only "truly trans" people came out at a very young age is blatantly incorrect - there are plenty of trans people who didn't figure things out at a very young age and this is nothing new, though until the last decade it certainly helped access to treatment if one fit (or could appear to fit) the clinicians' very particular ideas of what a 'real' trans person's life narrative was like is (and this is still often the case just less than before) which usually included "always knew from an early age". the narrative that trans people who come out as teens are simply confused and not 'truly' trans is part of a wider reactionary backlash - there has been a lot of panic specifically about the idea that trans teens coming out is 'sudden' (because the parents didn't see it coming) and they're just confused, having a phase, etc. when in actuality it usually isn't sudden at all for the teen and they've spent a lot of time thinking about things. i know i dwelled on things for years as a teen before coming out then.

as far as 'why are there more trans boys now' goes - there aren't great stats on this in general, but historically the rates of trans children actually getting medical support were incredibly low, and for trans boys it was much lower in trans girls, while in adults in recent decades there isn't much of a discrepancy between trans men/trans women as best we know. this historical discrepancy in children appears to be largely due to femininity in boys being more pathologised than masculinity in girls (not that both aren't heavily policed) with feminine boys being a much more active focus for conversion therapists, so even as more supportive treatment became prioritised, the medical field and also wider culture were much more aware of trans women than trans men, especially as children. the increase in visibility for trans men, as part of the wider increase in trans visibility is also a likely factor - trans men were less likely to realise transitioning was even an option for them as children if they didn't even know that trans men existed. so, any increase from the very low baseline rates of trans children is going to look more dramatic for trans boys than trans girls, due to the lower base rates (though it still looks dramatic for trans girls too and there's still media panicking about it). i don't really agree with your speculation that the lower historical rate of trans boys coming out as children being due to learned gender roles and related social pressure though, and i tend to be wary of any explanation relying on socialised gender roles when trans children are not really known for their fondness for or adherence to gender roles and there is also an awful lot of societal pressure to stop any child being trans (certainly less now, but again that's backsliding rapidly). "it simply wasn't an option that they could see" does appear to be part of it though yeah (and for trans children more broadly, but especially trans boys).

the nyt has a recent history of publishing garbage on trans issues, often with reactionaries from outright pro-conversion therapy groups being framed as having legitimate concerns in order to do a ~reasonable~ 'both sides' article which ends up deliberately laundering the anti-trans hate groups while disregarding the trans people interviewed. it's fairly common more broadly in the us liberal media over the last few years.

here's a bunch of criticisms of the most recent one of those pieces

Another atrocious exercise in concern-trolling. There is no evidence that large numbers of young people are transitioning without assessment. None.
This article consistently casts reactionary backlash as legitimate debate about transition care. https://t.co/JOZi2MpBUA

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) June 15, 2022

Fascinating how nearly every article on this issue centers the experiences of parents over actual trans kids. In this case, at least one of the sources is a pretty straightforward transphobe. https://t.co/cYokESn9nW pic.twitter.com/bUj41KDn5b

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) June 15, 2022

Ho boy.

I'm going to read the Emily Bazelon trans kids article several times today, but just a note that multiple orgs and people quoted in this article don't just want to "be better" about trans-affirming care for kids.

They want to END it.

Thread to slowly emerge today. pic.twitter.com/WIy3gD3po1

— Heron Greenesmith, Esq. (@herong) June 15, 2022

rushomancy, would you have commented on the offensive shirt if one of your friends was wearing that? That was the thing I was thinking about, that we're just trying to navigate the best we can to be respectful of everyone and correct each other when we think they're being offensive or wrong.

the belief that only "truly trans" people came out at a very young age is blatantly incorrect - there are plenty of trans people who didn't figure things out at a very young age and this is nothing new

― ufo

thanks for that insight ufo! lotta stuff i didn't know in there. regarding this bit - just the other day a friend shared a 2016 article by S.J. Langer, "Trans Bodies and the Failure of Mirrors", which postulated that "early and late awareness" regarding gender incongruence might be a better model than "early and late onset". this tracks really well with my experience. women were very confusing to me, particularly since the woman i knew best, my mom, was not, uh, necessarily a traditionally feminine woman, and this, in addition to the blatantly false narratives which were pushed upon me about gender, significantly delayed my awareness of my gender incongruence.

rushomancy, would you have commented on the offensive shirt if one of your friends was wearing that? That was the thing I was thinking about, that we're just trying to navigate the best we can to be respectful of everyone and correct each other when we think they're being offensive or wrong.

― braised cod

it would depend on the context, frankly. if it was a situation like the one on sunday where i'm going to pride and i'm meeting a friend and they're wearing that t-shirt, honestly i'd be horrified, i'd be like "oh shit you need to change that shirt, i'm not gonna hang out with you if you're gonna wear that shirt, that's really offensive" and if they asked why i'd explain it to them

if it's one of my friends sharing the link to the stevie nicks song on facebook (assume for the sake of argument that i'm on facebook) and it shows up on my timeline, i'm not gonna say shit. i mean what the fuck, this is a popular song, this is a great song, am i gonna go on a one-woman crusade to make sure that nobody ever listens to this song again? like if it happens, it happens, dire straits' "money for nothing" has basically been erased from history and i'm fine with that, that's _appropriate_, and the stevie nicks song in question hasn't yet, and if somebody asks me "is that song offensive?" i'll say yes, but if nobody asks me i'll keep my mouth shut.

if somebody posts a link to the video in the #music channel of the trans discord i admin, i'll ask them to edit the link and spoiler it and add cw: anti-romani slur at the beginning, that's a space that i'm responsible for and if people are sharing content like that i want it to be put in the proper and appropriate context

on the other hand if someone posts a link to the video in the personal discord where it's me and a couple of queer fans from the old pink floyd newsgroup, i'm not gonna say shit because there's like five of us and we all know it's an offensive word, i wouldn't say it myself but there are a lot of songs that use words i wouldn't say myself (waves at Kendrick Lamar).

and i mean there's kind of a meta thing here where like you as a friend are trying to hold someone you care about responsible for using language you think is offensive and me here on the other hand, i like you, i respect you, and i'm using a lot of words to say "hey yeah i get where you're coming from but speaking as a trans person again, just _a_ trans person, not like _all trans people_, i think in this particular situation you're maybe being a little harsh".

I don't know if it's a regional difference but a lot of groups over here identify as being part of the "Gypsy, Roma and Traveller" communities (abbreviated to GRT), so I wouldn't be sure about identifying it as purely a slur? I'm pretty sus about most of the usages in things like that Stevie Nicks song where it implies some dodgy stereotyping, and I'd avoid using it myself, but it'd make me pause before telling someone off.

There are definitely contexts where you *know* someone is intending it as a slur, though, so I guess ultimately I'm just agreeing with rushomancy and saying different situations do call for different approaches.

xp

Oh god, I've totally erased Money for Nothing from my memory that I didn't even remember the slur.

I agree with you and when dealing with problematic art it's key to acknowledge how it's problematic. and wrt reading people wrong I've already made a fool of myself here this weekend.

Hi, I don't have kids, although some of our close friends have trans teens who my partner & I are also close with, so some of these discussion points have come up. And props to all the supportive parents in this thread.

This is possibly not a useful thing to talk about, but some of the posts above made me think about it. I clearly remember a period as a boy telling my parents that I wished I was a girl, although I think this was mostly about me being a sensitive only child who was unprepared to deal with gender roles and (toxic) masculinity. I'm not trans or questioning. But I do wonder how everything would have played out in today's world, if there were commonly accepted ideas and terminology around that. I'm sure I would have at least had some different conversations and thoughts around it.

I'm certainly not suggesting anyone should do anything other than listen to & support their trans kids, and I don't want to play into any reactionary ideology. But sure it will also become more common for of cis kids to go through a 'trans'/questioning phase as they figure out their identity? And there should be space for that too in a way that doesn't invalidate trans people's experience.

"I don't know if it's a regional difference but a lot of groups over here identify as being part of the "Gypsy, Roma and Traveller" communities (abbreviated to GRT), so I wouldn't be sure about identifying it as purely a slur? I'm pretty sus about most of the usages in things like that Stevie Nicks song where it implies some dodgy stereotyping, and I'd avoid using it myself, but it'd make me pause before telling someone off.

There are definitely contexts where you *know* someone is intending it as a slur, though, so I guess ultimately I'm just agreeing with rushomancy and saying different situations do call for different approaches.

― emil.y"

there definitely is a regional difference in that, in my limited experience at least, there really is just total invisibility for romani people under any description in the united states. like i think a lot of people here would be genuinely surprised to know that the stevie nicks song traded in on kind of offensive ethnic stereotypes of a marginalized subaltern group. if i had to compare, like... how much direct experience do y'all have with native americans in the uk? i mean you probably know more about native american issues anyway because everybody talks about america as if it was the only country in the fucking world, but still.

anyway, yeah, this is the larger point i was trying to make, when people who don't have certain kinds of lived experience start talking about topics or situations that seem to us, based on what we know, to be offensive to people who've had those lived experiences, it's _really easy_ to get shit wrong, even if we have good intentions about it. that's the sort of thing i try to be careful about generally but sometimes i'm not and a whole argument erupts across a series of message board threads, where, i'm gonna try to choose my words carefully, _to my knowledge none of the people involve have let the other people involved know that they are of romani heritage_. and if anyone here _is_ of romani heritage reading this, i'm so, so sorry, i don't have your lived experience but i _have_ had the experience watching of a bunch of cis people arguing over the political football of "trans rights". it feels kinda shitty to be tokenized in that way.

"Oh god, I've totally erased Money for Nothing from my memory that I didn't even remember the slur."

isn't it great? i mean not just that i hate dire straits, but isn't it so fucking great that we collectively as a society decided without some huge fucking public debate or outrage about cancel culture or even consciously _realizing_ it was going on to go from "dire straits, oh yeah, that's the band that did 'money for nothing'" to "dire straits, oh yeah, that's the band that did 'sultans of swing'"? like that never fucking happens, does it? and i guess now i'm breaking kayfabe and a bunch of people will pop out of the woodwork to explain to me in detail that well, actually, knopfler wasn't _retweeting_ homophobia, he was _quote tweeting_ homophobia, and if i really "loved music" i would have known that, but at this point? at this point it would be a refreshing change from arguing about stevie nicks, let's find some different '80s pop music to argue about.

"I agree with you and when dealing with problematic art it's key to acknowledge how it's problematic. and wrt reading people wrong I've already made a fool of myself here this weekend.

― braised cod"

i do wanna actually thank you for being like willing to, like you say, 'make a fool' of yourself, i think that... particularly for queer people, we're held to this standard where we're _not_ allowed to fuck up, _not_ allowed to make mistakes, we have to always be right, and i can't do that. i fuck up all the time, i make a fool of myself all the fucking time, and if it's not ok for me to ever be wrong i'm never going to learn anything. if someone comes in, engages in good faith, listens, to me that's how i _like_ shit to go down, that's how i try to behave at least.

Hi, I don't have kids, although some of our close friends have trans teens who my partner & I are also close with, so some of these discussion points have come up. And props to all the supportive parents in this thread.

This is possibly not a useful thing to talk about, but some of the posts above made me think about it. I clearly remember a period as a boy telling my parents that I wished I was a girl, although I think this was mostly about me being a sensitive only child who was unprepared to deal with gender roles and (toxic) masculinity. I'm not trans or questioning. But I do wonder how everything would have played out in today's world, if there were commonly accepted ideas and terminology around that. I'm sure I would have at least had some different conversations and thoughts around it.

I'm certainly not suggesting anyone should do anything other than listen to & support their trans kids, and I don't want to play into any reactionary ideology. But sure it will also become more common for of cis kids to go through a 'trans'/questioning phase as they figure out their identity? And there should be space for that too in a way that doesn't invalidate trans people's experience.

― change display name (Jordan)

do you think it would be... a bad thing if you had some different conversations or thoughts about it? like, i genuinely, i know you're treading carefully and i am too because i don't know where this is going.

but let's play this out. ok, you tell your parents you wished you were a girl, and there's a number of possible outcomes, and i don't genuinely see how any of them are bad or hurtful to me as a trans person. like, there's the outcome where you say "i wish i was a girl" and your parents listen and are supportive and talk to you about trans people and encourage you to use the name and pronouns you feel most comfortable with, to express yourself how you feel most comfortable, and people accept you for who you are, and you do that for a little while and then you change your mind, right? you say "actually, i've changed my mind, i'm not a girl at all, i'm a boy", and again, same thing. your parents are supportive and helpful and, you know, i don't speak for the trans community but i don't know _any_ trans person who would be offended at someone questioning whether they're trans and having the answer turn out to be "no". like that's awesome, that's awesome that you were able to genuinely consider that possibility, and not only that, having done that, you're more secure in your own gender, more _connected_ to your gender. it means something to you that maybe it doesn't to someone who never questioned their gender identity, just went along assuming that they were a man because of certain anatomical features they had and don't find any particular meaning in their gender identity, there's this great old piece called "the null hypotheCis" talking about this entire idea.

now, if you go through that experience and decide that actually not only are you a boy but that everybody else who's AMAB and says they want to be a girl doesn't know what they're talking about, why, you thought that and you know better, why don't they all learn from your experience instead of being seduced by the Radical Transgender Agenda, if that's what you take away from that, well, then, you're an asshole. but i don't think you're an asshole, and i sincerely doubt that this would be your takeaway from the experience.

the whole framing of what gets called "detransition" (i kind of like the phrase "retransition" personally because we _don't_ go back, we _don't_ revert to some previous state) is that it's looking at the wrong thing. look, it's a really small minority of people who do choose to identifying as trans and then choosing to no longer identify as trans, particularly once you decide to exclude people who stop identifying that way because of external prejudice, but even thing, what's important is not "ok, did you choose to stop identifying as trans", but "Do you _regret_ identifying as trans?"

And _vanishingly_ few people, even among people who detransition, even among people who detransition for reasons other than the bigotry and discrimination trans people face, _vanishingly_ few of those people regret it. You want to know how many of those people there are? Count the number of detransitioners who have their own ministries offering reparative therapy, because trust me those people are in HIGH FUCKING DEMAND, they are being actively recruited and _well_ funded as part of an organized campaign by anti-transgender bigots to erase and invalidate all of us, and those people _will_ get on the BBC, _will_ get in the Guardian, _will_ get in the New York Times, in the pages of every fucking media outlet desperate to show "both sides" because they're Teaching the Controversy. They're every bit as in demand as scientists who don't believe in anthropogenic climate change are.

Regrets are just part of life. Even Sinatra had some, even if he chose not to talk about them. Every surgery, no matter how innocuous, no matter how low the risk, some number of people will have regrets, and those regrets are measurable. I'm too lazy to look up the statistics, if I'm wrong, please tell me that, but my understanding is that you measure the regret rate among trans people? Trans-affirming treatment is a fucking _medical miracle_. If you'd worn dresses as a kid for a month as a kid and then decided it wasn't for you, would you genuinely fucking regret that? Why?

Because the other thing that can happen to a kid like that is that it _is_ someone like me. That at some point in my life I say "I don't want to dress like the boys! I want to dress like the girls!" And my parents, and my school, and my support system, say, "OK, what do you want us to call you?", and I say "Kate!" and I do that and by doing this - because there's no other way for me to realize this but by doing it - by doing this I find out that wow, actually, anatomy be damned, I _am_ a girl, that this "girl" thing _works_ for me. All of the denial, the repression, the guilt, the shame, it _never happens_, it never fucking happens. I don't wind up showing up on a Discord server someday at the age of 43 worrying, the way every single one of us worries, that I might not _really_ be trans, that my fake ass would be an insult to all the _real_ trans people out there, because nobody is expecting me to be sure about something before doing it when the only way I can be sure about it _is by actually doing it_. You know how many times I've dreamed about that world? You know how long I've had to mourn that loss, mourn those 25 fucking years of my life I will never have, mourn the girlhood, young womanhood, I will never have?

There already is space for exploring gender identities in ways that don't invalidate transness, an increasing amount of space. That's _why_ so many kids nowadays are queer, trans, gender non-conforming, not because of "radical gender ideology" or "transtrenders" or whatever the fuck bigoted bullshit the fucking Guardian and New York Times are platforming this week, but because queer kids are not being erased and bullied into nonexistence the way I was.

Being trans is not a fad. Percentage-wise, there are _much much fewer_ 45-year-olds identifying as trans than there are 15-year-olds, that's true, and cisgender 45-year-olds, the same ones who bullied me when I was a kid, the same ones who swallowed and perpetuated the same bullshit I did about my gender identity being a "fetish", well, they look at that data and interpret it one way, and my lived experience tells me that those people are _wrong_.

Jordan, you're not trans or questioning. I actively affirm you in that. I respect, in absolute terms, your right to self-determination. Wanting to be a girl when you were a little boy doesn't make you trans. You know who you are, know yourself, better than I or anybody else can possibly know you.

When I was young I didn't get to make a fair, free, and uncoerced decision about my gender identity. When I was young I was told by other people who I was based on my anatomy, based on what _they_ wanted me to be, based on the idea that these white cis male experts knew more about me than I could know about myself. Nobody my age, nobody the age of _anybody on this board_, got to make a fair, free, and uncoerced decision about their gender identity. We were all told who we were based on our anatomy. And if our anatomy was ambiguous, if we were intersex, well, it was _routine_ and _normal_ for surgeons to operate on us to make our anatomy _unambiguous_, and to never tell us, never tell our _parents_.

I think that it is worthwhile for _everybody who is alive today_ to challenge the lies we were taught. I think that we all have the right to make decisions based on _evidence_, rather than the farrago of lies and assumptions that was the standard when ... I'll say everybody here who is under 30... was young.

There is a site, and if you have trans kids you should see this site. This is a site that a lot of us, when we start questioning, we look at it, we look at what it says, and we say "Oh, shit."

https://genderdysphoria.fyi/

You want to support your trans kids? Start there. Everything you were taught was wrong.

hi! i'm apparently going hard today

oh wow i’ve never seen that website before but it’s excellent

i skipped right to the estrogenic second puberty section and learned a lot of things i’ve been wondering about but have been scared to investigate (i’m taking my coming out as a woman very slowly just bc that’s my preferred gender revelation pace, i learn something about myself and think “huh that’s interesting” for at least a year before doing anything about it)

when i’m back in the states next week i’m gonna work toward starting hrt. i know this is the wrong thread for this lol

no worries, #onethread, really hype to hear about you looking to start hrt!

one of the things i've been really leaning into lately is the importance of community for trans people, i legit feel like my transition has gone _really_ fucking well and a lot of that has been making positive community connections with other trans folks. one of the reasons i ride so hard on discord is because discord frankly _has_ been so fucking good to me, there were a couple years there starting early in transition where i literally couldn't leave the house or talk to anybody else so even though my preference was for in-person community over online community, i wound up relying a lot on online community and it was _way better_ for me than I imagined. these days i'm making a lot more in-person connections which is something that has a lot of really strong advantages, but i increasingly feel that "online" doesn't automatically equal "shitty"

this is again, ah, shit, lemme dig up the article, julia serano wrote a real nice piece about the history of the "social contagion" model of queerness and transness and the false assumptions underlying it a little bit ago:

https://www.salon.com/2022/06/17/its-time-to-rethink-born-this-way-a-phrase-thats-been-key-to-lgbtq-acceptance/

i feel like the piece stops a little short as in it doesn't really offer an alternative to "born this way" so i wrote a little response:

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/2022/06/21/beyond-born-this-way/

i think at least the first article is really important reading for any parent who's worried about, like, social pressures in regards to their kid coming out as trans

anyway, flamenco drop, if you have any questions about anything at all or just wanna talk, hmu, i promise to not have any authoritative answers and i _super super_ promise not to tell you how brave you are lol

also wanna affirm, everybody goes at the pace that's right for them, there's no wrong way to do it. a friend and i came out at about the same time and she's about to hopefully start hrt next months and i just had the one year anniversary of my bottom surgery sooooo, haha