Your struggles are valid... unless you're struggling with growing up as a girl or gay (or both), in which case you're probably trans
Validity discourse is everywhere online. Whatever you struggle with—from obsessive thoughts and crippling anxiety to opening the mail, answering the phone, and your basic ‘adulting’—the Internet wants you to know: your struggles are just as valid as anybody else’s.
… unless you’re struggling with growing up female or growing up gay (or both), in which case you’re probably trans.
Until recently, clinicians understood something a hell of a lot like gender dysphoria to be a normal stage of development for two groups of adolescents: girls and kids who will grow up to be gay. Clinicians also recognized that most of these kids would naturally grow out of this distress as they accepted their developing bodies and sexual orientation.
But we seem to have forgotten this. We’ve gotten dizzy on how far we’ve progressed and that leaves a gap between our narratives about social acceptance and body positivity and the actual experience of growing up female or growing up gay.
We tell girls they can be anything they want to be (even a boy, but we’ll get back to that one…). But any girl can see for herself that our culture is much more ambivalent about women—our bodies, our speech, our sexuality, our role in society—than it claims to be. As she develops, her body seems to speak for her, communicating sexual availability. She loses control of her body and its meanings. She walks a tightrope: don’t be a prude but don’t be a slut, don’t be a ditz or a know-it-all or a doormat or a harpy… And for all our protestations about the equality of the sexes, the burdens of human reproduction couldn’t fall more unequally. There’s no use pretending otherwise. What if she feels shame when she gets her period or when men leer at her breasts? What if her body’s mysteries and potentialities disturb her, rather than empowering her? There’s so much a girl has to come to terms with on the way to becoming a woman. But if a girl longs for the freedom she enjoyed in childhood, if she resents or fears the attention she attracts, if she resorts to desperate measures to exert control over her body and the way that body is perceived, maybe she’s not a girl at all—maybe she’s really a boy. After all, it’s 2022. Haven’t we come such a long way? Who struggles with girlhood in 2022?
And if you’re gay, you’re supposed to struggle a little before you come out and then everybody celebrates and everything’s supposed to be sunshine and rainbows. When we talk about LGB+T today, we talk a lot about pride. But what if you feel shame instead? Again, we’re losing language for common experiences. If you feel shame rather than pride about same-sex attraction, there must be something wrong with you. A young person who struggles with their sexual orientation for ‘too long’ starts to raise questions: maybe you’re not gay after all—maybe you’re really trans. After all, it’s 2022. Haven’t we come such a long way? Who struggles with being gay in 2022?
If the swift uptake of gender identity tells us anything, it’s that many people still believe—deep down—that there’s a right and a wrong way to be a boy or girl. Without the belief that there’s a right and wrong way to be a boy or girl, gender identity has no substance. Is it any wonder conservatives and progressives alike converge on girls and gay kids struggling with ordinary challenges of adolescent development to say: yes, there’s something wrong with the way that you are that makes you not a girl or a boy but trans?
I have a friend who often used to say, "there's nothing more powerful than a 12-year-old girl." She meant a girl who has yet to "go through puberty," as we say in our culture. We might as well say "go through a war zone." This girl before she bleeds is Zena, she is Athena, she is free in mind and body, she is hilarious and smart and creative and fun. She embraces the physical and intellectual joy of being a young human with gusto. My friend said this about her own 12-year-old girl before that girl changed before her eyes. My friend watched her daughter's power drain away, and there seemed to be nothing she could do to stop it. The feminist slogans were hollow and useless. My friend watched her beloved daughter become insecure, moody, depressed, self-hating. She watched her daughter lose her physical confidence, all at the same time that her daughter was pulling away from her, because that is natural for a daughter to move away from the mother. This power-drain as our girls turn into women keeps happening generation after generation. Yes, puberty changes humans profoundly, in ways we still do not understand very well. But this loss of power and joy does not have to be an inevitable part of it. That is always why we fight, for the next generation.
If there's one thing I've learned in my work as a therapist, people pick up on subtle cues. If there are subtle cues that there's LESS value in being female or being lesbian or gay, people pick up on that. I've also learned that what we don't talk about speaks volumes. If there's a topic that seems taboo--like how many girls hate their bodies or are confused by their bodies or how objectified young girls are--this speaks volumes about how necessary it is to not talk about that topic.
The fact is, women had to fight for the vote and in the US, we've still never had a female president even though women have been running for president since the 1800s. Women still make less than men do for the same work, girls are disproportionately negatively impacted by child marriage (which is still legal in almost all of the US), sex trafficking, and kidnapping.
But if we talk about any of this, or about what it's like growing up female in this world, we're dismissed, ignored, or reminded of how silly, stupid, selfish or hateful we are for bringing it up. To me, that says it's really important to the culture that we don't talk about our experience.