If you were ever truly sad as a child, every child suicide tears at your heart, in a personal way. There but for the grace of God. Every story triggers a burst of anger, awakens a residue of tweenage or teenage despair. Child time, a time when the present was more present, and the future impossibly far away, the past only a few clear bright years fading into half-forgotten family snapshots.
Critics of the “It Gets Better,” campaign point out how little consolation the future is for a kid trapped in a horrible now.
“Don’t let them bring you down,” you think. “Don’t listen. Don’t believe what they say. Be true, to yourself. Know your worth, know your value, know that you are loved, no matter what. Don’t let those people into your heart, into your soul.”
You want to raise your kid like that. If you’re a certain kind of person, you probably want your kid to be strong, politically, too. You don’t want to raise canon fodder. You don’t want to raise a yes-man, an enabler. You don’t want to raise a kid who says at Nuremburg, that he was only following orders.
As I sit with my near-hysterical thirteen year old boy, wrestling with him, verbally, trying to control my own visceral, mounting rage, trying to get him to do his algebra homework, something inside laughs. Mission accomplished!
My son doesn’t care what other people think about him! He has his friends, his peeps, his interests, his passions. School isn’t one of them. He doesn’t care about grades. They’re meaningless made up numbers. He doesn’t care about numbers. They’re boring.
In our support groups, we hear from the parents whose kids are self-censoring, in hiding. They are trying to act gender normative, but the clothes don’t fit. They’re aping normalcy, living lives of quiet desperation, with the only flashes of joy or authenticity coming in unguarded moments of gender-non conformity; a moment with a hat, makeup, a dress, a book or comic or TV show.
This has not been our problem; at least, we don’t think it has been.
We have heard, read the work of, and consulted with the professionals who have noticed that a majority of gender-non conforming kids start to conform more and more around puberty, and emerge as gay at some point afterwards. And so, as we fell into this pattern, we were prepared, and we’ve watched it all, aware that any any moment, a crisis could propel us into the world of psychiatry and hormonal intervention.
The moment never came.
And now, in that part of my brain that continuously stares into the abyss, I acknowledge that my child may eventually seek to change his body, and have a less positive outcome, because we have accepted him as he was, in broader culture where people are compelled to be male or female, and not a bit of both. We didn’t push, and so, he didn’t push back. Maybe in that struggle, the true self would have emerged more fully, demanded pronouns and blockers. Maybe.
But I have friends in the community, with kids now on hormone blockers, who know, that if history is any guide, that they are on a path towards full hormonal and surgical transition. Sure, the blockers can be removed at at any time, and a completely normative biological gender will develop, but to date, no one who has started blockers has ever done this. So these parents know, as I know, that they have passed an important milestone. And we wonder about the road not taken.
We’ve supported the child we had, the way he was, and took him at his word.
Acceptance has been easier, as it turns out, than non-acceptance. I say, to my son, you can be the person you were meant to be, and do your goddamned math homework like everyone else. And we can sit in anger and watch it not get done, together. Can he do it, though? Neuropysch consults and ADHD testing, a new normalcy to confront, another movement, neurodiversity, emerging to counter the medicalization and stigmatization of certain types of brains by other types of brains. The cold hard reality of the declining American economy, the necessity of higher-education in the Brave New World that is coming, where our kids may be able to marry as they will, but never find a job that pays a living wage.
And so, during our son’s evaluation, after the dismal homework output is sliced and diced, when we’re told of our son befriending the new kids, the lost kids, the kids in trouble, helping them, showing compassion above and beyond the ordinary, we both brush back tears, because really, we were never like that as kids. We only wish we had been.
For there is no good without a corresponding bad, no freedom without responsibility, no world where you aren’t arguing with your teenage child about something or another. So I think, we try to make sure we’re arguing about something that matters. And that the argument doesn’t get so heated, that love gets lost.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Do you know why they don’t stop to take blockers? Because the blockers stop maturation. Their brain will not develop further (which is bad). I also wonder how the parents can cope with the sterilization of their children.
Your tone is dismissive, insensitive, uninformed, and cruel, but I’ll answer the points you raise.
Blocker’s block; they buy some time, and they’re reversible. That’s good. Kids who take them generally are at risk for suicide. Some parents don’t want their kids to commit suicide. I’m glad I’m not your child.
And I can tell you how parents deal with the prospect of having a sterile child. They consider the prospect of having a dead one. I’ve never met a parent who does any of this lightly; I’ve never met a parent who doesn’t go to these extremes as a last resort.
What can be confusing is that, for our kids, and for the community, parents tend to minimize their own struggles, their own ambivalence, their own fears; they put a bright face on this thing, which is in fact, very hard. No one sterilizes a child on a whim. So when you see all the happy inclusive loving people with their trans kids, the mistake that some make is that these people were happy to do this; they leapt right in before they had to. They are guilty of encouragement, not just acceptance.
I’ve never met a parent who encouraged a trans child. Ever. Every parent tries to put on the breaks, tries to norm their kid, and fails. But that experience is minimized, under-reported, by advocacy, which tries to put the best face on this.
Being a parent isn’t for the weak. As a parent you make the life and death medical decisions for your child based on the best advice you can get from the professionals you trust. As with all such decisions, there are no absolutes. Your child may die from general anesthesia while having his wisdom teeth removed, or a hernia repaired. Does this make you a bad parent? No, it makes you an unlucky one.
To date, we have had no unlucky parents of kids on blockers; not a single child has recanted, has said he wished he wasn’t put on blockers; not a single child who has gone onto these interventions has said, years later, oh, no, you made me into the wrong gender because I liked pink or baseball caps.
So, the 100% success rate makes me wonder about people who are so skeptical of the intervention. It makes me suspect they are informed by something other than reality. Prejudice, fear, hate, for example.
What I am willing to say, is that not all trans kids will have this intervention, some kids will go through normative pubertys, inevitably, even if their parents are paying attention and the child gets good care; and that even if those children later seek reassignment, that is OK, too, that is one of the ways people are, one of the journeys we take. Some hope that we will get better screening, that we will someday really KNOW if a child is born in the wrong body, but I don’t think that is happening any time soon. Until then, we will do the best we can.
I’m sure this lucky streak cannot last; we will have unlucky parents eventually; we will end up with kids who say they made a mistake, eventually. These parents will be no more to blame than the parents of a child who dies from a one in a million vaccine reaction, or a one in ten thousand anesthesia failure from elective surgery. These future mistakes, if and when they occur, will inform the professionals, as has the negative experiences of the physically intersexed informed their treatment over time.
What I’m pretty sure is that we’re far from saving the lives of a lot of many trans people, and we sacrifice those lives on the altar of inaction, of letting ‘nature’ take its course. We don’t let nature take its course with diabetes, of course, we give insulin. Because we understand diabetes better, we have understood diabetes longer. But we’re getting there.
“Blocker’s block; they buy some time, and they’re reversible. That’s good. “
Sorry just delete my comment above.
“Blocker’s block; they buy some time, and they’re reversible. That’s good. ”
It might be indeed not good for the brain. Did you ever heard about what is called “synaptic pruning”? If not perhaps your friends know about it. Since their children are on hormone blockers I guess they must have a good knowledge about what’s going on in their childs brain during the time of blocked puberty. Or perhaps you know already about it? For me that’s one of the reasons to be a bit concerned. But of course I could be wrong. If I’m wrong perhaps you can enlighten me then? I know more people who are concerned about it as I am so you can enlighten them as well. I’m really sorry that my first comment sounded cruel to you. But to be concerned about these children isn’t a sin or is it?
Also I’m sorry for spelling errors.English isn’t my first language.
“To date, we have had no unlucky parents of kids on blockers; not a single child has recanted, has said he wished he wasn’t put on blockers; not a single child who has gone onto these interventions has said, years later”
Are there studies on the internet about it? If so can you link them please? Sadly I’ve never found anything about that. I would really like to know if these kids are healthy because I heard that cross gendered hormone therapy are dangerous for the health. If there is nothing about it on the internet and since it seems you have a really good knowledge about that topic – can you tell me if these kids are (even years later) healthy?
The treatments used for gender dysphoric kids are treatments developed for other uses in pediatric endocrinology; blockers are used to halt precocious puberty. Blockers are not used for extensive time periods; I am not sure if the use of blockers in this population is appreciably different from its use in precocious puberty, if it presents special issues. It’s important to know this, though, these treatments weren’t dreamt up by GLBSTQ advocates; they were developed to deal with other issues. Presumably their safety is largely understood for this reason.
There are dangers associated with hormone therapies. As a psychologist I know said to me as we considered this kind of treatment, ‘this is not a benign intervention.’ The real question is, is the treatment worth the risk, do we know enough about untreated gender dysphoria, its risks, to compare it with the risks of hormone therapy?
What we know is that trans people who feel trapped in the wrong body have an elevated risk of suicide, major depression, and other stress related health issues.
Treatment in children is the hard part; at what point can a child be permitted to make irreversible medical decisions? Well, the child doesn’t have the right, the parents do. Do parents generally have the right to give their kids various kinds of medical treatments, including experimental and controversial treatments? They usually do, if there is a population of professionals who go along with the treatment course.
We know parents are now withholding vaccines, Christian Scientist parents withhold care from kids, Jehovahs Witnesses refuse blood transfusions, etc. When your medical views are wildly outside the mainstream, you can get in trouble.
Treatment of childhood gender issues is a thorny issue now, as part of the profession supports hormonal interventions, and parts of the profession, generally people who don’t specialize in childhood gender, oppose it.
The lack of a single-payer health system means we have patchworks of rules and coverage created by a cacophony of voices, opinions, practices; in the Netherlands, where extensive national health standardized screening is the norm, kids who get this treatment are rare, but they all seem to appreciate it, and are happy about the interventions years later.
Hi Accepting Dad! Leslie Lagerstrom here (author of Transparenthood) I am writing to share the news that I am that I am a semi-finalist for an essay contest sponsored by the Oakland, California Children’s Hospital. The contest asked writers to submit essays about raising a child with a challenge and so I wrote about our experience raising Sam. Out of 220 entries I am one of 18 that made the first cut but now I need people to vote for my essay on Facebook in order to go on to the final round of judging. The grand prize is a consultation with a publisher from Random House and a meeting with the editor-in-chief of “O” Magazine, which would be incredible networking opportunities for me as I write that book on the same subject for parents who are in our same situation. Would you please “Like” my essay (link below) and share the link with any and all of your friends who are on FB? I am thrilled about making it this far, but even more excited about the potential positive PR surrounding transgender kids if my essay makes it to the finals.
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10151428382695023
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! It is greatly appreciated!
Leslie