A mom from Ontario, Canada
Transcript
Hi, I’m a mom from Ontario.
My daughter is 14, but whilst she was still 13 she came to me to announce that she is transgendered and had had her list of things she wanted: male name, male pronouns, a chest binder and puberty-blocking hormones.
So this came completely out of the blue sky for me. I had no idea she was questioning her gender. A few months previous to this, she was acting a little sketchy and asking me questions like, what did I think about her? It did seem to be a little combative, but I didn’t think too much of it at the time.
So she came out to me, and then, you know, wanted me to tell my husband, her dad. So when I did do that, he told me he had seen a video about this exact topic, which was Joe Rogan’s interview with Abigail Shrier. So he was aware of this phenomenon of young teenage girls coming out as transgendered. And that was really helpful to us, to have had that sort of heads up and we were able to tap in fairly quickly, really quickly, to people working with these kids and the great work being done by Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad and Lisa Marciano. All these people whose voices we were able to access very quickly to help wrap our heads around this. And what we learned from that, which helped us a lot, was to not affirm right away.
So we didn’t take on her male name or male pronouns, and just tried to slow down her whole thought process around transitioning. And it was really combative for the first few months and extremely, extremely stressful. But what I did was to, because we couldn’t find a therapist for her right away that we trusted to be exploratory as opposed to immediately affirming, is I took a therapist for myself, who didn’t have any experience with this but understood where I was coming from and we were just on strengthening my relationship with my daughter, which was has found some really great results aside from gender, so I’m really thankful for that. And then he was able to help me find a therapist for my daughter and that has helped tremendously also.
And the other great thing that happened is our school principal understood fully where we were coming from and is taking our lead and how to deal with my daughter at school, which is that she can dress how she wants but has no male pronouns, no male name and she backed off on the binder. I was able to find her some sports bras that fit and she’s happy with those.
So overall, I’m really hopeful that I can see that this will resolve and it may take a few years and I’m hopeful for everyone for the state of society around this topic, because I think we will find our way out of it, you know, slowly and without fanfare but I think this is a finite thing for my family. And hopefully for the culture at large.
Yeah, that’s that’s been my experience so far. And it’s ongoing.