Get this straight
A few thoughts on gender and kids from an older queer feminist and parent.
Hello, my name is Shasta, and I’m a 52 year-old cisgender woman.
At least, I think I am.
I have several friends whose kids have announced they aren’t cisgender. By several, I mean I gave up counting when I passed a dozen who have adopted at least one element of gender identity my grandfather wouldn’t understand. Their parents dutifully contacted school officials, friends and family to update pronouns, headed to hair salons or clothes shopping, and reached out to queer friends for encouragement.
I’m queer friends.
I’m definitely no expert on modern gender identity, though. When I was coming out, we were toying with terms like genderqueer to cover folks who didn’t fit neatly into butch, femme, androgynous, or transvestite. Now a pejorative, that’s what the T in Marsha P. Johnson’s activist group STAR stood for. Language changes,and with it new understandings open up. When we can name a thing, we can imagine it.
"All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name. (Remembered line from a long- forgotten poem.)" — Hunter S. Thompson.
When I was young, we didn’t have enough ways to describe ourselves, and we squabbled over the terms we had. A stone butch once lectured me from Eugene to Portland about the parameters for identifying as any sort of butch, which I most certainly did not meet. I was so busy arguing, we almost ran out of gas.
The truth is, I was only a little butch some days, but as a lifelong tomboy I wasn’t femme either. Except, perhaps, the night I wore a little black dress and 4” spike heels to the queer bar and took home a traveling saleswoman who looked and sang like k.d. lang. I could have been genderqueer, I suppose, but it was a relatively new term that seemed to hold more urgency than I felt. My core identity has always been “Yes, and…”
A couple of my friends’ kids returned to their assigned-at-birth gender after a year or two. Anti-transgender activists have a scary term for this: detransitioning. They want you to think that transgender people are confused or mentally ill, and that detransitioning is evidence of this. They want you to think kids need to be protected from rushing into a premature transgender identity, to avoid catastrophic regret later.
It’s bullshit.
In the first place, we start imposing gender standards on infants from the moment we hear about a pregnancy. “What is it?” is such a critical piece of information that people have died in their efforts to announce the baby’s genitals in ever more creative ways. Depending on the answer, people regretfully tell you they have no baby clothes to pass along—alas, they’re all the wrong color.
Society cares a great deal about gendering children.
There is no innate justification for gender roles prior to puberty. No sex-linked differences emerge until adolescent hormones surge. Pre-pubescent girls sprint just as quickly as boys, and early differences in math skills evaporate without social reinforcement. What it is only matters so that we can indoctrinate children into assigned gender roles early, presented as an unfortunate but inherent unfairness in life. Imagine the rebellion if we raised our children with equality, then at puberty assigned half of them to a lifetime of subordination.
Those who openly seek to restore systemic sexism to its glory days don’t accept that Joe can ever be Joanne, because sexism requires that gender be irrevocable. If gender is not an innate and unchangeable assignment of value and possibility, the myth that our genitals determine our role in life collapses.
Indoctrination collapses.
Sexism is the foundation of masculine leisure and power, and inalterable gender is essential to sexism. The idea that gender is a construct threatens male dominance.
There are other ways to fight sexism, but I don’t think you can win that fight without rejecting the absurd premise that a baby’s nappy region tells you something meaningful about the life they will live. If you believe what it is matters to understanding the tiny human joining the world, then you accept sexism as valid.
You’d think feminists would rush to the forefront of gender liberation, but socialization runs deep. We’re taught that what sits between our legs is core to identity long before we form any idea of who we actually are. Even when we seek to dismantle the effects of binary gender and the sexism is supports, we rarely challenge the force-of-nature basis on which it rests. Research suggesting we unconsciously shape infants based on the gender we perceive them to be, even if we actively try not to, is extensive and incontrovertible. Even staunch feminists like me.
That’s damaging for all children, but devastating to transgender children.
The right has no such conflict. Conservative values rest on traditional gender roles, which rely fundamentally on childhood indoctrination. Transgender people challenge the underlying message of inborn roles by existing, and transgender children challenge the structures of indoctrination when they reject gender assignment, so those invested in the status quo of gender politics want you to think it’s far too dangerous a decision for a mere child to make. What if they get it wrong?
Well, what if they do?
Most of these choices carry only social consequences. I say only, but I persuaded my son not to wear sparkly barrettes on the first day of kindergarten because I feared the other kids’ reactions. He is an adult man now, and I still regret that decision. Had he worn barrettes and faced social scorn, he could have chosen not to wear barrettes the next day—or he could have asserted his personality over social conformity. Instead he learned that his feminist, queer mother, who made sure his first toy was a doll with a green dress, did not want him to wear sparkly barrettes to school.
Shame on me.
Our children deserve the freedom to play with gender regardless of their eventual identity. There are no long-term costs, except to sexist norms long overdue for disruption. If our sons want to wear dresses and barrettes, how is this more transgressive than the pants our daughters now routinely wear? If our daughters want a summer buzz cut so they can get on with catching bugs, why would we force them to sit through brushing and braids? These are the steps of indoctrination that will teach our sons to shutter their emotional life or face disdain, and our daughters that even little girls must conform to the male gaze.
Exploration is good for all our children, but it is essential for our transgender children.
The first medical choice a possibly transgender child faces is whether to take puberty blockers. There are no known long-term effects, despite unconfirmed concerns about interrupted growth, bone density or fertility. The birth control pill, which I began taking at 14, has the same unproven concerns in adolescents and adds risk of depression to the mix. Acne medication carries risks of depression and organ damage, and some require concurrent birth control due to the serious effects on any potential fetus. Both birth control pills and acne medication are widely prescribed to teens because the benefits outweigh the risks.
The suicide rate for transgender youth is more than twice as high as for other queer youth who are themselves four times as likely to attempt suicide as non-queer kids. Studies identify four primary factors that predict suicide risk: physical harm, discrimination, housing instability and “change attempts by parents.”
If your child is transgender, and you try to get them to conform to assigned gender, you are harming them. This is why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) unequivocally supports gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormonal transition when indicated. The benefits far outweigh any risks.
If you didn’t know that, you may have been bamboozled by the American College of Pediatrics (ACP). Founded in 2002 after the AAP came out in support of adoption by same-sex parents, the 200-member group has a religious basis incompatible with objective medical opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group for their extremism and deadly rhetoric. This includes promoting the discredited idea of “social contagion” to account for this generation’s increased rejection of the claustrophobically narrow status-quo definitions of gender.
The ACP would claim that kids experimenting with gender identity are evidence of “social contagion”. They think it’s a veritable plague on our children, and they are trying to legislate against parents supporting trans or trans-questioning kids. Nineteen states have passed laws banning gender-affirming actions by parents, schools, doctors and others. Five permit felony charges. Anti-abortion bills are often bundled with these laws, in a conservative smorgasbord designed solely to whip votes.
My friends are supportive parents who are willing to discover who their children are, rather than impose it. They have fortunate children who will be confident enough to come to them with whatever problems the world may present, and to be who they are, knowing their parents love and support them. Whether they are ultimately transgender, cisgender, agender, non-binary, gender-fluid or some other term I haven’t heard yet, they are supported and loved unconditionally.
Every child should be so fortunate.
Some of the kids who explore gender will ask to delay puberty. For those who go on to transition, the benefits are enormous. Puberty wreaks irreversible changes that can trigger lifelong dysphoria. There is no confirmed harm to delaying puberty should kids eventually decide not to transition. I would argue that cis-gender girls may also benefit from delaying puberty, which has been creeping earlier for decades, but that’s a separate essay. The best early research indicates that puberty blockers are a safe way to buy kids time to figure out who they are—or to convince adults. Denying them that opportunity has known, irreversible, risks.
Nobody is doing gender-affirming surgery on 14 year olds, though we do perform irreversible gender-assignment surgery on intersex infants to support conformity. Can’t have mother nature challenging the gender binary!
At 17, Emily from New Hampshire is one of the youngest patients ever to have gender-affirming surgery. To achieve that status, Emily identified as female from her earliest memories, and transitioned from puberty blockers to hormone treatments through her teen years, living as a female child for virtually her entire life, before electing surgery. She is extremely unlikely to be among the less than 1% of transgender adults who regret surgery. The regret rate for knee surgery is over 6%. One study found that 65% of people regret cosmetic surgery, many forms of which teens are eligible for.
The rate of transgender people detransitioning at some point is higher, at 13%, but 83% report social pressure, not identity, as the reason. That estimate includes people who took any steps at all then hit reverse for a while, even if they later reaffirm their transition. It’s astonishing that so few people have second thoughts when transgender people are more than four times as likely to be victims of violence as cisgender people.
This violence is stoked by the very people claiming to “protect children.” In reality, the way we protect children — all children — is by making childhood a safe time for personal exploration, and by showing our children they can trust us with their truths.
"If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things." - Confucius
Some of those children will go on to elect puberty blockers, then hormone therapy, and eventually perhaps surgery as young adults. If they have been given the freedom to explore identity growing up, they are very unlikely to be among the minuscule portion of transgender adults with regrets.
The best gift we can give all our kids is to support them as they explore sexuality and gender identity as freely as we might encourage their interest in a sport or hobby. To do that we, as parents and community members, need to set aside our own fears and biases. We need to understand that what our children are asking for is normal. Children have always tried on identities: superhero, fairy, fireman and dinosaur. For most of my life progressive parents fought to allow their children of “both” genders to try on all these roles, yet we rarely challenged the idea that those two gender assignments are intractable facts of our children’s lives, with perhaps a few rare exceptions. This hurts all our children, and it upholds a system that harms everyone, but it is specifically devastating for those who do not ultimately conform.
My name is Shasta and I am a 52 year-old woman, but sometimes I wonder: who might I have been, if I had come out into this diverse and multi-hued world our children are building? I’m so proud of them, and so excited for the future.
Queer or not, kids who feel safe and supported grow into confident adults. The right wants to enforce retrograde conformity, and they don’t care how many of our kids die. It’s up to the rest of us to create the space for all our children to feel safe and supported as they explore the world and invent new possibilities.
The kids are ok. I can’t wait to see the world they build.
Image: Patrick Myers, 7 October 2015, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve