I remember when I came out as trans to Orion Bailey at a Blazers game he'd invited me to. He was really gracious, and the entire thing was extremely low-stress, especially since I was scared out of my wits being trans in public, let alone at a sports event. Near the end he mentioned that I didn't need to go any further with my transition. I'm sure it was meant as a sort of "you're fine as you are" comment, but I remember feeling a little sad that the support was all weighted in the "stay the way you are" side, and not on the "keep going" side.
So much of cis people's opinions of trans people center around cis comfort and cis convenience. Being trans is, in a lot of people's eyes (including my own in the decades before I came out to myself) intensely transgressive. It takes a lot of effort to wrap your brain around, and even more to accept that someone else can, and should, lead their life their way without your comfort in mind. So much of my early days post-transition were spent kind of raging against people who centered their comfort level in their arguments about me and people like me.
I've finally calmed down about that, thank god. It took seven years, but I finally feel like I'm confident enough in myself that I don't really get heated about that junk anymore.
It's really tough on newly out trans people, having to answer a bunch of questions and concerns from people who need you to comfort them in some way, to reassure them that they aren't the enemy to you, or to let them know you're one of the good ones so they can exist beside you without feeling scared of some repercussions for saying something ignorant. Newly out trans people usually have nobody supporting them no-questions-asked, and everybody questioning them. Naturally they get defensive, aggressive, and use bravado and anger to push through the crowd and find their people, the people who will actually support them without questioning them.
It takes years. It is not easy. Not all of us make it.
But a damn sight more of us make it after that process begins, than before when even entertaining the thought of coming out is somehow more difficult than just killing yourself instead, either slowly through nihilistic behavior, or all at once. A lot of us don't make it to the point where we come out, because the world is making it known that they don't want the path to be easy for us.
The solutions to a lot of the "issues" here come down to consent, confidence, and timing.
1. If your child tells you they're trans, believe them. It's fucking scary for you, and 10x scarier for them. What they need most is a no-questions-asked supporter. Gotta get that attempted suicide rate down.
2. Puberty blockers are safe, and have been used for decades on kids with precocious puberty syndrome. Trust me when I say you can induce puberty at any time, but it'll be most effective if you have a blank hormonal slate to work with. The best part here is: totally reversible, and is a step forward for the kiddo, so they probably won't feel like they're totally unsupported.
3. If you get them the puberty blockers early enough, the stress about surgery at 16 or whatever goes away because they don't grow the parts of them they'll end up wanting removed.
An interesting sidebar: Puberty blockers early enough would remove the inherent physical differences between boys and girls from a sport perspective. The trick here is making the environment safe enough for kids to come out when they know, not when they feel like coming out is the only thing to keep them alive.
In an ideal world, your kid would tell you when they figured it out. That's usually pretty early, like before 12 years. That gives supportive parents (remember this is an ideal world) the opportunity to get their kid on the medicine they need: puberty blockers, then the correct hormones, then any required surgeries in tandem with the hormone therapy. All this would be easy to access and affordable, because it's an ideal world. These actions are expressions of love and support to the child, and as they go through the correct puberty at roughly the correct time, their life will be in the long run minimally affected.
Being transgender is not a choice; it cannot be morally wrong.
It isn't a malady of the mind, it is an incongruity of the body.
The reason we're in this mess, the reason transness is associated with mental illness and suicide, and with weird, half-feral aggression is because the world isn't just "not ideal"; it is actively, openly, and proudly hostile. Trans people grow up with trauma: the trauma of having to hide, or being visible and targeted, of wondering if you are legal, wondering which one among the people you're around at the cafeteria will decide to become a legend and try to kill you, of wondering if anyone in that crowd of people will stop that person, of hearing your people loudly and actively mocked and called pathetic or crazy or ugly. Trauma does bad things to people, gives them paranoia, gives them ticks and bad coping mechanisms, gives them the feeling that, if everyone thinks they're a mistake doomed to die, then why not live up to that.
And the closer to home that trauma comes from, the more intense it is. The World hating you is one thing; your sibling or parent questioning something so fundamental about you? That's honestly ten times worse to hear.
I don't have a good ending to this rant; I just wish there were more compassion for my people, especially from people I otherwise respect and like. I left this forum as an angry baby-trans, and I come back as a trans elder; I'm glad I'm back, but I wish it wasn't because of this thread.
--BC
