"If your parents aren't accepting of your identity, I'm your mom now"
I’ve got a new post over at Genspect on the clash between parents and schools over whether parents have a right to know when their children take steps toward transition:
These commenters are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the youth subculture that’s grown up around transgender identity, transition, and disclosure. A lack of reporting on the ways online trans communities shape youth expectations does readers a serious disservice.
Online trans communities prime kids to expect rejection—even abuse and expulsion from the home—when they come out to their parents. These communities also encourage kids to interpret any hesitation—anything less than immediate, enthusiastic acceptance of a child’s new trans identity—as rejection.
Parents who go along with new names and pronouns but raise concerns about testosterone or surgeries are accused of being unsupportive and “saying all this mean stuff.” Users warn each other: “You have a right to be upset, they’re not accepting. They’re just trying to appease you until you get over the ‘phase’.”
Secrecy is part of the lore of youth gender transition. Secrecy divides a young person’s social world into those who know and those who don’t. Thus, secrecy binds youth to their new “glitter families” and alienates real-world connections, including parents. Secrecy raises the stakes. Going behind parents’ backs is a common topic in online trans communities, with young people swapping tips on how to bind, pack, start testosterone, or even undergo a double mastectomy while living at home without parental approval or awareness.
This is part of a larger pattern of phobia indoctrination in online trans communities, where anyone who questions gender identity or transition risks being painted as a hate figure. Loved ones who express concerns or doubts are accused of “denying the existence of trans people”—or worse. This indoctrination pushes community members to cut out loved ones who challenge or contradict a young person’s new set of beliefs about gender. Even loved ones who simply fail to follow elaborate and often bizarre protocols around ‘deadnames’ and pre-transition memories risk being shut out.
At every turn, these communities sow suspicion and dissension between parents and children. In other words: don’t talk it out, do create distance.
Don’t tell my parents.
I note that the secrecy has been a detail of "trans" activity for decades, also among adult men. I usually call it cross-sex ideation, rather than kowtow to the captured language of their indoctrination. When I found my former husband's 3 cross-dressing diaries, there was a breathlessness in his writing. He conjectured whether I noticed he was wearing his hair longer, how was he going to keep his longer fingernails without my commenting, how was he going to sneak into his workplace at night to do "the change-over." It was like he imagined himself to be a fighter in the French Resistance, and he was the right age to have seen those post WW2 movies. We trans widows had parallel experiences to these parents. I sense the self-righteousness of the misguided teachers fits into the "imaginary Resistance fighter" mode. I've been criticized by some in various venues for bringing up the parallel trans widow experiences; I think the information we can add is quite relevant.
It makes sense that these kids (let’s be honest, mostly girls) would be eager to reject their parents. An embrace of a cross-sex identity is a rejection both of the self and of the realities imposed by biology. Parents are the ones who brought us into being. If we reject our own existence and reality, then our parents are the first thing we must cut loose in order to try to be something other than what we are.