December 20, 2024

Transphobia and the trans child

Letting children be trans is child abuse, the media screams. I've been through that argument before

The current media frenzy about trans children feels all too familiar to me: I got a taste of it a decade ago when my child decided to try he/him pronouns out. She didn't want to block her puberty or transition medically. She didn't even want to cut her hair or stop wearing princess dresses. She just wanted people to call her a boy and use the name she had chosen - and this alone was enough to attract the attention of children's services.

I'll freely admit that I wasn't a perfect parent, especially when it came to the conventional markers of respectability. The flat was littered with trip hazards, my child would often stumble into school around half past nine, tea was sometimes a bowl of pasta and pesto thrown together at half past seven, and in moments of extreme stress I had sworn or lashed out at her. But although all of these were bad things in the eyes of children's services, none of them drew anything like the level of concern they had for her choice of name and my choice to call her by it.

I stood accused of having "groomed her to be a boy", something I found painfully ironic given how much I was hoping this was a phase she would outgrow. I had struggled with dysphoria and the social effects of transphobia myself, and I had no desire to see her go through that. But I knew that stamping out her experimentation, far from protecting her, would teach her to distrust me, so I put her wellbeing before my feelings and let her try it for a while.

Eventually I understood that my experience of being trans was itself considered part of the "grooming". By being trans while parenting her, I was teaching her that being trans was a thing it was possible to be. I was expected to counteract this, to groom her harder than ever to be a girl, and I was failing at this all-important duty.

At one point I was told that I needed to make it clear to her that "she has a vagina: she's a little girl". How I, as a trans man, was expected to state this without her pointing out the obvious hypocrisy was never explained to me. Perhaps they expected me to detransition just to preserve my authority on this point.

The closest anyone came to explaining why it mattered was when her primary school's "head of inclusion"1 said that she was concerned my child would be bullied. When I pointed out that their inability to protect her from bullies was not something I could be held responsible for, her only answer was to clarify that she wasn't being bullied and the concern was purely hypothetical. I never got an explanation of why they needed to put pressure on my child rather than addressing the behaviour of the hypothetical bullies. The only explanation I could imagine was that they would be silently cheering the bullies on as a force to encourage conformity.

Some of the professionals I encountered were openly hostile, but others were friendly and claimed they wanted to support our family - only to nod along in meetings with the claim that failing to insist my child was a girl was a form of emotional abuse. I felt regularly as if I was trapped in a nightmare I couldn't wake up from, or perhaps the entire world had just gone mad.

The current conversation about trans youth feels like the same madness on a much larger scale. People who have always seemed friendly and politically liberal nod along to the ban on puberty blockers while the few trans people with a platform try in vain to point out the harm it will do and the lack of evidence that it's needed.

Puberty blockers were originally a compromise, a sop to the concerns of transphobes that young people might regret transitioning early and going through puberty in their affirmed gender along with their peers. "They're too young to make that decision," they insisted, so puberty blockers offered the chance to delay any decision until the children were old enough.

It turns out that the decision transphobes felt they were too young for was narrowly the decision to transition and go through a puberty they were comfortable with. Being forced by inaction to go through a puberty that made them dysphoric was entirely acceptable, because that was "natural".2

The main argument for banning puberty blockers is that most of the children who take them go on to take hormones once they reach an age when that's allowed. The most logical reason for this is that children who satisfy doctors that they're trans enough for blockers are still trans several years later, but the transphobes have their own logic in which failing to go through endogenous puberty somehow confirms an identity a child might otherwise have "grown out of". The harm of puberty blockers, just like the harm I was accused of inflicting on my child, is that of failing to stamp out transness.

Another compromise that transphobes object to is social transition. If medical transition isn't accessible, trans people can ease dysphoria somewhat by adopting names and presentations that match our affirmed gender and having people treat us as that gender. If the concern were genuinely a medical one about the risks of hormones, critics would be all in favour of social transition as an alternative, but many of them see that as similarly dangerous. What their threatening rhetoric boils down to is that allowing a young person to socially transition will give them the impression that it's OK to be trans, and that this in itself is harmful to them.

It's like being trapped in that nightmare again. A handful of transphobes openly admit that they think trans people are inherently a problem that should be driven out by some combination of forced detransition and social murder. But a far greater number claim they want to support us even as they support legislation that makes no sense unless you believe being trans is inherently bad. Nobody but trans people and our handful of allies even seems to notice the contradictions.

The resolution of my troubles with social services doesn't offer a lot of hope. They cycled through various levels of concern for several years, dragging me into meeting after meeting and putting the whole family under stress. During the Covid lockdowns3 they closed our case for what proved to be the last time. She has now aged out of the system, so that her non-binary identity is no concern of theirs. She trusts me as much as ever and has an adult understanding that I was doing my best in the face of a system loaded against us, but the pressure they put us both under has left its mark on us both.

I don't think even this equivocal resolution is an option for today's trans youth. It would be comforting to imagine that the politicians and journalists currently concerned with putting a stop to trans healthcare will eventually lose interest and move onto other causes, but all signs point to an escalation: banning medical transition for adults, for instance, or cracking down on gender conformity even in people with no desire to transition. And even if it were likely, far too many young people would be forced to go through dysphoric puberty while we wait. This isn't any kind of solution.

I am not the person to plan a fightback or to issue a rallying cry. I don't have the expertise, but more than that, my own earlier fight has knocked all the hope out of me. All I can do is point out the patterns I see. All I can do is quietly bear witness.