In reading this article (below) where the parent is all in with his child’s desire to change gender I’m wondering what kind of response one should have? I think back to my own scenario where I did not go after dating girls as a teenager due to lack of confidence and a powerful aversion to getting rejected. My younger brother and sister had no such issues and dated with gusto. In college things changed 180 degrees and opportunities were readily at hand. I remember being pretty offended when I once went back home for the weekend and my mother told me my father was “relieved” I had begin dating.
This gear shifting is obviously not directly analogous to a desire to change gender, but I think it illustrates that a lot of things change, and change hugely, between ages 13-16 and 21-25 in the way we view ourselves and the physical changes happening in our bodies and even in our brain chemistry. If my teenage child told me they were gay there would be zero issues, you are what you are, but when we get to the level of considering serious and (at a given point) irreversible body modification I’m not so sure I would be ready to buy into and be supportive of gender reassignment until they were 18 or even older.
In fully buying into gender reassignment for young teenagers what is the right and responsible thing to do? Where do you draw lines in these situations?
As a parent, you quickly get accustomed to overriding all your kids’ desires because much of what they want is unrealistic, harmful, or motivated by the desire to fit in with people they admire. I need to see them show some good judgment before I let them make any irreversible life choices. If they did express this desire to me, I would like to see them try living as the opposite sex for some period of time and see how they handle it before they decide to do anything permanent.
If my teenager thinks they’re actually of the opposite sex, they are factually incorrect. My response would be to find out why they came to this factually incorrect conclusion so that I could talk them out of injuring themselves.
Haven’t we had this thread once already? Perhaps one very similar.
That said, I dunno (he said with a shrug), hasn’t happened to me yet. If it does, my hope would be that I would react in a positive, helpful, supportive manner that lends itself to helping my child figure out if this was an actuality or not and then being accepting of whatever the end results of that self examination are.
I believe that such surgery is only done for legal adults (over-18). So you wouldn’t have to worry about that.
Prior to that, transgender people would be working with a specialist, and doing things like changing to clothing appropriate to their perceived gender, adopting a new name (possibly without yet legally changing it), etc. All of those things are non-permanent, and can be changed back if need be.
Counseling, support, and hormone blockers if appropriate.
Transgender people generally know from childhood, just like all of us have known our gender since pre-school. This generally isn’t an issue that just pops up out of nowhere. I most likely would have been seeing signs of this coming for years.
As far as I know, the only physical interventions used with minors are hormone blockers to delay the irreversible effects that puberty had on your body. You don’t want to go through puberty with the wrong hormones if you can avoid it. Hormone blockers do not create long-term changes, they just buy some time.
Other than that, things have gotten A LOT better, but it’s still not an easy situation. I would want to make sure my child is not being bullied in school and do what I can to keep them safe in public, as well as ensuring they have access to mental health resources to help them cope with the pain this condition (and people’s reactions) can cause.
I’m curious (in a purely intellectual sense) how someone born with the wrong sexual organs can ‘know’ they were meant to be born male/female without having ever experienced having been male/female…if you get my drift.
Example of sorts: ‘I have always been a woman, even though I was born with male genitalia. I’ve known this since my days as a pre-schooler. I’ve since had surgery and hormonal treatment, and I now feel like a complete woman.’
Is there an objective standard by which one can measure ‘womanhood’? How do you know you feel like a woman if such a standard isn’t…um…standardized?
You can reverse the genders, same principles apply.
I totally understand that gender identity is fluid (I include myself in that description btw) but to claim one is born a female in a male body (and vice versa) seems bogus, unless one has lived as a female/male for their life BEFORE transition.
I don’t get it either. It doesn’t make sense to me, and to an extent it seems to be a reversal of the ideas I grew up believing - that anyone can be anything whether they’re a boy or a girl, and that how you act and how you dress and what you do doesn’t define who you are - and that it instead regresses to the idea that “boys” and “girls” are different types of beings who are expected to look, dress, act, and behave a certain way.
The fact that I don’t understand it doesn’t change the fact that there are people who exist that feel that way, that they’re not going to go away just because it doesn’t make sense to me, and that they ought to be able to live the way they want to as long as it’s not hurting anyone (which it isn’t).
I don’t have kids, but I hope I’d have the courage to be fully supportive, at least in action. I’d want to leave them with the impression that it’s not a big deal to me what they identify as. But I know it would be a difficult experience, especially if there were no signs of gender non-conformity/dysmorphia up to that point.
Kids do get some wacky ideas in their heads as they try to sort out their identity. But I guess I’d rather have a kid who feels comfortable doing all this “sorting out” in a structured, non-secretive way versus a kid who copes with their hidden identity crises through drug abuse, anti-social behavior, and other self-destructive paths.
Apparently it is; in the brain, where you can’t see it. Various studies have shown that particular areas of their brain resemble the gender they say they feel like, rather than what their body looks like.
Identity is literally in your head, including gender identity.
One of my daughters’ best friends is a FTM trans person. This community has been very supportive of him - he started transitioning in 8th grade. Seemed early to me, but what the heck do I know? All I know is my daughter asked questions about it*, we discussed supporting our friends, and how communication is the most important thing and it hasn’t been an issue since.
*I will say that in the 8th grade, my daughter and I ended up out for dinner, just us, and she wanted to talk. She said “Dad, what if I wanted to change gender?” I just paused, and said “well, I love you, and will always, so we would figure things out. what can you tell me?” And that’s when she brought up her friend.
I wasn’t ready to have my mind blown when she asked me, because I know my kid and really didn’t think she was having gender-identity issues. But I was sure interested in the line of questioning, and wanted to use it to confirm that I loved and supported her and then see where she was going. That’s what kids want and need: a parent’s unconditional love. If any topic starts there, it is a lot more likely to end up okay.
If I recall, at least one of our Dopers is actually going through this with his/her child - perhaps we’ll hear from someone actually dealing with this. Or not - I would completely understand not wanting to air the private business of a family member in this forum.
I’ve had a couple of close friends come out as trans, and known several other trans people. My observation is that they don’t really change. Their bodies and styling and clothing change, but they are who they are. I hear some friends bemoan the loss of a daughter, and I think that’s misguided. Your kid is still your kid.
My son is somewhat gender fluid. And he likes to wear skirts. He was never a terribly masculine child. He seems more masculine post puberty, really, despite the skirt. But what gender he identifies with us not critical to my relationship with him. That’s the tack I would recommend for parents whose children have more extreme gender differences.
Puberty blockers were originally developed for conditions like precocious puberty in order to prevent psychological problems, stunted adult height, and six year olds giving birth. They aren’t, strictly speaking, new or experimental although using them to block puberty in physically normal transgender children is a relatively new application. Near as I can tell (and I’m no expert) the biggest concern is possible increased risk of osteoporosis down the line but that is purely speculative at this point and may well be off-set by diet and weight-bearing exercise.
It used to be puberty not hitting until the mid to late teens was a fairly normal occurrence. Undergoing puberty at 18 (which is essentially what we’re looking at here) is later than the current average but not grossly abnormal. Later puberty might reduce the risks for some things, such a breast cancer but again that’s not definitively proven.
So… probably not a huge deal from a physical health and possible side effect standpoint, especially if the kid is under on-going medical supervision.
There were a lot of things my sons insisted were necessary to establishing their personal identity when they were growing up. Included in this category were tattoos, odd piercings, blue hair, not bathing, shaving the body, etc. Although they were incredibly insistent that such things were vital to their continued existence, as time went by, they went on to other things and forgot about these ‘necessities’.
Because of the volatility of teens, I would probably do just as I had done with these other things: listen politely, ask questions, then ask them to wait before taking any action until they were absolutely positive that this was what they wanted.
If they held firmly to this position, when they reached the age of majority, I would have done my best to be supportive. I won’t pretend it would have been easy for me. No parent wants to see their child take such a controversial and painful path through life. But if they were steadfast in their wish to be a different gender, I would have tried to support them. And I certainly wouldn’t have stopped loving them.
I agree; it cuts against the feminism I learned in the 70s, and seems to undermine it slightly.
However, individual choice is more important. Lots of women want to be stay-at-home moms, and, while this seems somewhat “un-feminist,” it’s their right to choose. I’d prefer that more women be employed (and in upper management!) but I’m damned if this should be some kind of requirement.
I wish sex-roles would diminish in importance, so that trans-sex issues would be far less important. But I’d also like a pony. Since we have to deal with the world as it is, trans-sex individuals are real, are here, and are in need. It costs us almost nothing to accommodate them.
To me, that’s just about the key to this kind of civil rights. What does it cost us to allow gays to marry? Nothing! What does it cost us to help transsexuals realize their personal self-image? Damn little, so close to nothing it isn’t worth counting!
(Oh, gosh, oh, gosh, we have to learn some new words, like cisgender. I actually knew people who objected to gay marriage because “it changed the dictionary definition of marriage.” Oh, yeah, there’s a damn great reason to deny someone equal access to a legal establishment!)