The Times - What parents should do when their child says: ‘I’m transgender’
Friday may 10 2024What parents should do when their child says: ‘I’m transgender’
These two guides for gender-distressed children and their parents highlight the polarity of the transgender debate — The T in LGBT+ by Jamie Raines and When Kids Say They’re Trans could not be more different
Before I wrote this review, I looked up both titles on Amazon. Jamie Raines — a 29-year-old trans man who makes YouTube videos aimed at young trans people — had a near-clean sweep of five-star ratings: “amazing”, “brilliant”, “thank you for speaking the truth”.
Meanwhile, When Kids Say They’re Trans had been deluged with negative reviews calling it “dangerous” and “bigoted”. Very strange, since the book hadn’t even been published at the time. Even stranger if you’ve read the book, which is compassionate and measured, and urges parents to accept their children’s decision to transition, if that’s what they eventually choose.
But this is the fraught, angry world of trans activism, where, in my experience, any questioning viewpoint must be crushed. Raines represents the “affirmative” camp: the idea that when a child says they are not their birth sex, they should be automatically believed and supported. Trans girls are girls, trans boys are boys, and nonbinary children are nonbinary, whatever that means in practice.
Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley — three mental health professionals who have collaborated to write When Kids Say They’re Trans — take a different approach. “We don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘trans child’,” they write. For them, gender distress is a real phenomenon but a complex one, through which a child might be expressing any number of needs related to their inner life or their relationship to their family.
This would not be a controversial approach to take in any other area of child development. It should be obvious to anyone who has been a teenager that, as Ayad et al write, “adolescents are on a rollercoaster journey of self-exploration, angst and change”. Something you are certain of at 14 or 16 may have little relationship to the person you are at 21 or 30
Yet when you apply this banal observation to the issue of gender, you will immediately be cast as a malignant transphobe in some quarters. The authors of When Kids Say They’re Trans know this, and their aim in this book is to offer an alternative toolkit for parents of gender-distressed children when most of the available resources push families towards transition.
Raines’s book shows what such parents are up against. It’s chatty, accessible — and utterly glib about what transition entails. It’s clearly aimed at a child readership: it’s interspersed with cartoons and includes frequent interjections such as “haha” when Raines attempts a joke. If Ayad et al believe there’s no such thing as a trans child, Raines appears to believe there’s no such thing as a child who says they are trans who is mistaken. The book doesn’t even consider the possibility that the young reader could be ill served by a trans identity.
Nor does it explore the implications of the fact that Raines’s partner is a woman from a conservative Muslim background whose family used “lesbian” as an insult before Raines transitioned. (Only a transphobe, apparently, would think homophobia played any part in transition.) Instead, Raines jumps directly into educating teenagers about what being trans involves.
“Top surgery” — double mastectomy of healthy tissue to achieve a flat, masculine appearance — is represented with an illustration of a crossed-out binder (the restrictive garment used to compress unwanted breasts). It’s a trivialising way to represent a major operation. Later on, Raines quotes a joke about “titties” being something you have removed like braces. “Haha” indeed.
He does give some house room to the fact that transition has complications (Raines’s own “bottom surgery” — an operation to make the clitoris appear like a micropenis — was difficult). But at no point does he suggest that any of these complications may be too high a price to pay for your gender journey.
In fact, the opposing viewpoint gets short shrift from Raines. In a “mythbusting” section, we are informed that “in all this time, there has been no evidence that trans women have been a threat to cis [ie natal] women”. This is simply false: Isla Bryson and Karen White are only the two most prominent examples of male-to-female transitioners who have committed violence against women. But reality cannot impinge on Raines’s politics.
Ayad et al are far more willing to challenge their readers. The tone is warm and generous, but parents who resist their children’s transition will not always feel comfortable reading this: there are acute insights about the way a parent can, by opposing, ultimately reinforce it. “Avoid becoming as obsessed with gender as your child,” they counsel.
Raines encourages readers to treat their identity like a “shiny new Lego set” from which they can build their “newly found self”. At the end of this process they will find their “trans joy”. Ayad et al make no such Pollyannaish promises. They offer a strong corrective to the unevidenced claim that withholding affirmation leads to suicide, but they are also clear that the future of the gender-distressed child may be complicated.
The outcome the parent hopes for — desistance or detransition — can be supported but not guaranteed. Your child may continue to struggle with their gender, as well as with all the underlying problems their gender may stand for. If a child reaches adulthood and opts for transition, parents are advised to be supportive.
Raines, on the other hand, declares that anyone not entirely accepting of transition is a “zombie” — not even really a person. Some trans activists accuse those with critical perspectives of “dehumanisation”. But only one of these books is telling people to treat themselves as a collection of interchangeable plastic bricks. That, to me, sounds far more “hateful” and “dangerous” than the thoughtful stance taken by Ayad et al.
When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents by Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano and Stella O’Malley (Swift £20 pp336). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
The T in LGBT by Jamie Raines (Vermilion £18.99 pp272). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
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