Maybe if you’re talking about a 6 year old, I could see that being difficult for parents to know how far to go or whether the child understands the consequence of what they want.
A 16 year old post pubescent teen has told you for years that they feel female, you’d have to be an idiot to not take seriously. So I don’t feel much for the parents.
I’m not claiming there are no tendencies, what I’m saying is that every human being engages in “typically” male AND female behavior.
There are some extremely aggressive women out there who have no doubts they are women - should with tell them, no based on your behavior, you’re really a man even if you don’t feel like one in your head? There are men that engage in “communication and grouping”, are they still men?
That’s one of the problems with the whole discussion. A lot of societal gender stuff is based on behavior more than anything else (which is probably a good thing for a transsexual person trying to pass). I also think it’s why the topic makes some people so uncomfortable, it takes away some of that certainty they normally have about what’s a boy and what’s a girl.
See, this is where the entire concept loses me again. When I was a kid, what we were taught in school and on TV is that gender stereotypes are wrong - anyone can do anything they want, playing with dolls doesn’t make you a girl, wanting to play baseball doesn’t make you a boy, etc.
Now, I’m hearing that not only are gender stereotypes real and scientifically valid, they determine what gender you are more so than DNA, chromosomes, or your physical makeup. This just runs against everything I was taught and learned all my life, and it just doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not going to debate it at this point because I just don’t understand.
No, this is not what you are hearing. Some men enjoy or prefer to wear dresses and makeup but still identify happily as men. It’s not about gender stereotypes, it’s about a person’s private sense and subjective experience of their own gender.
I honestly wish the articles about the issue would STOP including quotes about how the person in question played with gender inappropriate toys as a child and crap like that. It just confuses and muddies the issue, it is about gender identity not whether someone played with dolls. Almost every article includes a quote from family like this.
When it comes to gender, I don’t think there is any such thing as an obvious lie, because there is no objective way to demonstrate what a “woman” is.
Regards,
Shodan
Hey! When boys do that, they’re called “action figures”!
Other peoples’ failures that have already happened are always so much more obvious than our own failures that haven’t happened yet. It’s so very obvious to all of us what these parents should have done, so why was it not so very obvious to them?
Parenthood is something that we are all somewhat unprepared for in some way or other. Most of us are lucky enough that the problems confronting us are sufficiently aligned with our capability to handle them, that we somehow muddle through. These parents were not.
Were they capable, in context, of actually doing the right thing?
Yes. We can go find threads where the parents of some school shooter or other should obviously have known that the right thing was to crack down real hard on their errant offspring, before this terrible thing happened. It’s always so obvious to us.
Not in dispute. Everything is science.
And yet, for any given point in time, if I were to ask you to describe actions or qualities that were “typically male/female”, you could. Today? Certain makeup patterns are seen, collectively, as female; certain activities are traditionally male-dominated. A boy would rarely, if ever, wear a dress or a tiara. As we become more and more gender-neutral, these lines become blurrier, but for the moment it’s still possible to culturally distinguish between a male and a female, especially as children and adolescents. And this is, as far as I can tell, part of the problem - if you’re convinced that boys act a certain way, and you know you’re a boy, but your parents want you acting a different way (say, as a girl), then this can lead to real issues to pile on top of the issue of “my body feels wrong”.
Because they were not proponents of science, but rather took many things on faith and based much in their lives around their religion. And that is indisputably a mistake, with a track record of unmitigated failure.
Beats me. Debi Jackson was able to see past her religious blinders (as well as her political ones).
The point I’m trying to make here is simple: I would have been prepared, because I don’t share such an intolerant and unscientific faith. The point is that in this case, the question of “boundaries”, as you put it, was one with a quantifiable scientific answer, and these parents blew it. They fucked up. And they deserve as much criticism for this failure as a parent who refuses to give their child basic medical treatment for something like eczema because their religious faith instructs them that prayer is the way to go.
And that’s totally comparable, right? :rolleyes: Not only is this not the same issue when it comes to societal norms (contrary to common stereotypes, there isn’t really any consistent “profile” for school shooters or amokläufer), but this is not a case where they can just go look it up. And even then, would more discipline have helped, or would it have led to the child becoming more repressed and angry? Your analogy sucks. There is no comparison to the harm social conservatism has done to LGBTQ youth.
I didn’t say it’s comparable. Neither did I claim it was an analogy. I said we at the SDMB seem to think we always know best about parenting decisions - but I believe we often do so from the comfortable armchair of hindsight.
I was responding specifically to this:
And for the record, I’ll say it right now loud and clear: any parent who ignores the protestations of their child that the child is of the wrong gender is a bad parent and is inviting this sort of thing. I believed this before the incident with Leelah, and I’ll continue to believe it so long as it remains evidently true.
Oops what? I cited the article; I know what’s in it. It makes my point: gender was ascertained by self-report and clothes and games. Just like I said.
Um, I got the “persistent, consistent, insistent” part, too. The child ***persistently, consistently, and insistently ***claimed to be opposite gender verbally and with toys and clothes. No duh. I already said that. Helloooo? McFly?
I never claimed it’s not real or that “this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.” I claimed that gender identity in children is defined by self-report and toys and clothes.
Thanks for helping me make my point. You’re a sport.
Well, good, of course, but do you think you are immune to all other possible errors of judgement?
The only thing that really matters here is that parental acceptance could have saved Leelah’s life, and that is likely the case for many other suicides of trans teens.
Even if you object to her desire to transition because of your perception of parental authority, it’s a bit more important to keep your kid alive than win a semantic argument in cases like this. Bullheaded parents who put their self-righteous religious and social views ahead of a child’s immediate needs are dangerous fools.
I think there were two issues going on here; the immediate biggie being a major depressive episode.
In that regard I think the parents were correct in getting treatment for the depression first as a triage type of situation. While the article did not say which drugs were being used, it sounds like there was a science-based (hopefully) MD behind that and they were trying to get the depression under control with drugs.
Having dealt with an adolescent going through a depressive event, this is not something I would wish on anyone. They are not just overwhelmingly sad, but they also become cruel in their misery. They hate everything and everybody. Nothing you say or do will be right. Everything and everyone is crap. No one cares and everyone hates me.
I can see these obvious signs of depression expressed in Leelah’s suicide note. It’s exactly what I dealt with, except that I was luckier with the outcome.
You make call after call to mental health professionals because you can see the signs and the critical mass. Getting a mental health professional is harder than it sounds. I never would have guessed that beforehand. Quite a few didn’t return our calls. Some of the public-run places wouldn’t take us because we weren’t impoverished and we had health insurance. Really?!?!
I took an emergency leave from work because this became a full time job.
I left polite, business-like, and very descriptive messages with more professionals than can be imagined. Most never called back. We found one (not religiously based) PhD who would see us that evening. After spending an hour with my child, she wanted to make an appointment for next week. To be frank, I didn’t think we had a next week unless something more than this happened. I’m sure my daughter finessed the counselor, in which case she wasn’t a very good counselor.
So somewhat clueless counselors exist everywhere.
We took her to an emergency psychiatric facility where the obviously overworked physician diagnosed her with depression, but they didn’t have room to keep her. Their advice was to get a private psychiatrist, bring her back if we couldn’t find one, or if something changed. Well, she was already “changed”, which is why we are here.
At this point my daughter absolutely hated me. She would find a phone and call and talk to her friend (imaginary or not, I don’t know) throughout everything. She would cast dagger-like looks and contemptuous snarls at me. She would say cruel things and recreate reality for fit her miserable narrative. It was all so bizarre and just plain incredible.
We were literally going through the yellow pages (remember those?) and calling psychiatrists who were within a reasonable commuting distance. Finally, one - exactly one - called us back and made an appointment for the next day.
We walked into a clean, sprawling waiting room. No one else was there. No reception desk, no staff. In a few minutes a very well-dressed doctor came out and brought us into the office. He really was an odd guy, who had his hand stuck in his waistband during the visit. Weird. Then I left so he could talk to my daughter. A short while later he brought me back in and gave us a prescription for a magic little pill at that time (it was the mid-nineties) called “prozac”.
He definitely wasn’t fooled by anything she said.
He gave us his number for emergencies and to call anytime if something gets worse. Otherwise, come back in 4 days.
Within 3 days we had my daughter back. The air pressure changed at home. Finally, we could breathe. We were lucky in that regard; she was extremely responsive to prozac. The dark cloud lifted. When we returned to the psychiatrist’s he observed the complete turnaround in her demeanor and appearance. He explained how that also impacts other people in the room - it makes them giddy too in the first week or two because, when SSRIs work initially (assuming they work in the patient), the patient is so up at first and the relief is so great that other people around them also feel “up”.
Btw, my daughter is a lesbian. Did that have something to do with the depression? I really don’t think so. They were separate events.
I had suspected she was a lesbian, but she has always been self-directed and self-possessed with the exception of the depression event. We’ve always had a respectful and playful relationship. She has never particularly cared what other people think. She is normally her own person. I admire that about her.
The depression changed that temporarily. Not only was she sad, but she was cruel, which was hurtful. I had to think beyond that, but the venom that came from her was completely out of character and not at all based in reality. I really hated her at that point in time, sad to say. When people say things like “it’s like they were possessed”, I understand what they mean.
Anyhow, I can just see the headlines if we weren’t so hypervigilant. Or lucky. A lot of this was just luck and hitting on the right things at the right time, despite the fact that it was like a Keystone Cops episode as far as getting professional help. Or, did she have just enough impulse control left to delay the almost-inevitable suicide event long enough to get treatment? I strongly suspect that she had decided to kill herself and that it was just a matter of time before she went through with it.
What if I let her go to a friend’s house because I thought it might be helpful to her, and she committed suicide because I let her out of my sight? Do I let her go to a friend’s house? She’s 17 years old and friends are very important at this stage of life. She’s miserable here and seems to feel that her friends might have something to offer. Even the normally simple things become tainted with all sorts of dark possibilities.
Even with our generally happy-go-lucky family attitude, I probably would have been gobsmacked at the time if she had announced that she was transgender. Nothing really prepares you for that. I probably would have had a startle response too. Deer in the headlights.
Being exposed to the subject a bit now, maybe it wouldn’t have been a completely off-guard moment like it could understandably be for so many, but it’s hard to say. Hindsight always affords you a luxury that you don’t have at the time.
She was always very boyish. She hated to wear dresses. The last time she wore a dress she was 8 years old and only because she was going to a wedding. She was always very physical and very athletic. She liked wearing her hair short, probably mostly because she hated having her hair washed and combed and that was always a battle. She preferred boy clothes to the traditional girl clothes. Using the criteria here, I should have had her in gender reassignment (if I had known better). But it turns out that she has never seen herself as a boy. She likes being female (except when she is menstruating, at which times many of us wish we were male); a somewhat butch female, but a female.
So how do you know what’s “right” and appropriate and what’s wrong prior to maturity and before kids have more self-awareness or even verbalize the concept? You don’t. You are probably guessing a bit either way except in all but the most blatant circumstances, if such a thing exists.
I don’t think that being gay or transgender makes you more fragile than everyone else. It’s the depression, a real biochemical brain disease, that makes you mentally fragile. Maybe the same thing (whatever it might be) that makes you gay or transgender also makes you more prone to depressive episodes. I don’t know. But you have to treat the depression first because it’s life-threatening.
I get the sense that these parents were somewhat gobsmacked. They didn’t try to beat her identity out of her, they didn’t throw her out of the house, there’s no evidence that they berated Leelah or were completely unsympathetic. Instead, they put her in counseling and she was on medications to try and get the depression under control. “Christian” counseling may or may not be a bad thing, depending on the denomination and the skill of the professional. I can’t say it would be my first choice, but I suppose it could work or at least help you to learn coping skills and how to communicate with other people, like your parents.
How many of us are perfect parents under less extreme circumstances? I look back and there were some things I could have done better. Not necessarily with this circumstance, which I thought I handled fairly well and never, ever want to go through again, but with other things and events. There are hosts of things I probably could have done better or differently.
This doesn’t sound like bad parenting to me. Maybe they weren’t clairvoyant enough, or maybe they were just clumsy and caught off guard and needed a little time to acclimate to the idea. They didn’t strike me as horrible based on the article.
It’s a tragic situation. There were flaws in execution on many sides. However, lots of adolescents and young adults unfortunately commit suicide, some for little or no apparent reason. Most are not gay nor transgendered, but all seem to be as equally righteous and determined in their suicide. It just seems like depression (or other disordered thinking) is the culprit in suicide, not any startle response by parents to something their kid announces.
You are right and I was wrong.
Yeesh. I retract any indication of sympathy for the parents.
I just read that and agree. That is not the suicide note I saw originally. The suicide note that I saw copied on another forum did not say that about the parents. Obviously, there has been a mistake somewhere. So I retract.
However, I would caution that depression can pervert reality. I shudder to think of what my daughter would have said about me (and probably did say about me) when she was in her depression. I suddenly became evil incarnate, literally out of nowhere. Once her meds kicked in, I was no longer the spawn of satan and we resumed our normally great relationship. We have that great relationship to this day. I’m so thankful for that.
Of course, but do you think they just ploughed ahead, knowing they were driving their child into suicide? It seems more likely they just didn’t appreciate how close to the edge the whole thing was - of course, that’s still a failure.
No, those are not the criteria here. At least not from those who know anything about it.
Those are the criteria.