This morning, in a move reminiscent of UK media, Canada's National Post published the following story as front page news: Ontario school hid girl's transition, called CAS on parents questioning trans identity.
It's a semi-predictable article: Child explores their gender identity, parents find out and panic ... yada yada yada ... It's riddled with tropes and inferences that speak to this being yet another hit job being used to prop up anti-transgender activists. The bigger questions in my mind are "the parts of the story not being told" here.
Let's dig in and explore just how fucked up this story really is, shall we?
The Tropes
Social Media Can Make You Trans
The article starts off with this, talking about the "impressionable child's experience with TikTok". The short answer here is "Nope" - social contagion is NOT A THING in the formation of gender identity (Bauer, Lawson, & Metzger, 2022). Does that mean that some youth who see the idea won't decide "try it on for size" for a period of time? Nope - in fact that's probably quite predictable. It's not like exploration of different ways of being is unusual in adolescence. Plenty of young people make forays into different identities as they navigate their emerging adult identity.
At the time, the child was apparently in Grade 5 - so somewhere around 11 years old - which is fairly close to the age that one would expect such exploration to start happening. The child describes exploring the ideas around different sexual orientations, and eventually questioning their gender identity. This is not unusual in any way. In fact a fairly common conversation in the days before the Internet and TikTok was often "what do you think it would be like to be a <girl | boy>?". Such conversations were, of course, purely speculative - except for that very tiny minority who were actually transgender. They didn't make one trans, but for trans people they were often revealing of experiences of realizing that others really aren't experiencing the same thing - "oh - you don't feel anything like I do, do you?".
As it turns out, after a couple of years, the child decided to detransition. To me, this is not a big problem (but we'll come back to this topic).
Schools Are Keeping Secrets!
Then the article goes on to how a teacher "kept secrets from the parents".
This comes down to the issue of privacy rights. I know a lot of parents are going to have the opinion that everything to do with their child at school should be communicated to them. But that isn't how rights work in Canada. Children also have rights, although those are limited by a variety of mechanisms ranging from laws to convention. Privacy is one of those rights, and a child has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
As Tobin (2023) points out, a rights-oriented approach changes a lot of the suppositions around a child's status in law. The question of the child's ability to assert and exercise those rights now has to be considered.
Now, the fact that this youth was starting to question things like their sexual orientation tells me that they are at the very least able to ask some fairly complex questions of themselves. Frankly, most parents would be utterly shocked at when their kids start exploring their sexual identity.
The issue of whether the teacher was "keeping secrets from the parents" or "respecting the student's privacy" here is one of perspective. This is not the way the article portrays it, of course. The article goes on to talk about how "horrible" it was for the parents because they didn't know.
Your adolescent child didn't tell you something that was going on in their world? Colour me shocked. You're going to tell me that you told your parents everything you did or thought about doing as a youth? Seriously? Especially in our society, questions and issues around gender and sexuality have major taboos, and kids pick up on this easily.
The parental perspective is "I should know everything that is going on with my child at all times". Sure, to a point I can understand this. But, by respecting the child's privacy rights, the school was creating an environment where the child could arrive at a place where they could make a decision about disclosing to their family. The issues of safety around disclosure are a complex topic that I discuss a bit more here: You Got Played, Girl.
At its core, disclosure of gender or sexual identity is fraught with landmines for youth, and given that not all parents are supportive, I lean heavily towards the position that the child is the expert here - they know the family better than any teacher, therapist, or doctor ever will.
The idea that schools should, or must, tell parents when their child discloses anything to do with feeling transgender is rooted in the idea that being transgender is somehow a "bad thing" that needs to be addressed. It is not. It is not necessarily "just a phase", nor is it in the same category as the child getting caught shoplifting or engaging in vandalism.
OMG - Puberty is Confusing
This is a pernicious claim because it really takes away the agency of the individual. Do all adolescents fully understand what they are experiencing as puberty begins? No. That's why we need comprehensive sex education before adolescence - and yes, that has to include sexual orientation and gender identity topics.
But, the idea that puberty is "confusing" is used to imply that an adolescent is somehow unable to understand or make decisions about themselves. Agency matters here. You have a youth who is exploring their identity, and frankly we don't know where that is going to end up. The only person who can make that decision is the adolescent. Not their parents, and not any of the other adults around them.
If they try a different gender identity on for size socially, I don't see where any harm is done by that.
Suicide Risk and Self Harm
While contentious in some circles, every major study on transgender people and their well being that I have seen reveals a shockingly high rate of suicidal ideation - many times that of the general population.
I am not particularly a fan of the way this suicide risk is used in common discourse. To me, it's a call for further examination of why so many in the transgender population end up experiencing these feelings, not a weapon to be used to "take oneself hostage" with in order to be able to access treatment.
While there isn't a huge amount of supporting information that explores this topic in more detail, I would suspect that it is little different than the elevated suicide risk that we saw within the sexual minorities communities prior to decriminalizing sexual identities. The most recent edition of the US Transgender Survey shows in shocking detail just how much hostility transgender people are subjected to (James, Herman, Durst, & Heng-Lehtinen, 2024). In other words, the problem is not that trans people are suicidal, but that they become suicidal when they start to become aware of the wall of societal hostility that they face.
The Untold Story
One of the very real questions in these stories is "what is not being said". In other words, what are the subjects not telling the writers? We start to get some clues when we see in the article references to calls being made to Children's Aid Society in Ontario, arising out of conflict in the family home over the child's gender identity.
I'm not going to speculate on the details of what was going on here, but in broad terms, if you are sending messages to your child that their identity is "wrong", "sinful", "invalid" or whatever - in other words if you are treating being transgender as a matter of discipline rather than simply being where your child is at today, then you're probably getting it wrong. As a parent, you're the adult in the room - it's your job to help your child reach adulthood. You don't get to dictate how that happens.
Here's the thing - your child needs your love. Not your anger, not your discomfort with their identity. Just because YOU have discomfort with your child's gender or sexual identity doesn't mean that you get to demand your child not be who they say they are.
IF the child backs away from transition on their own, that's fine. But it should not be 'just to make you happy'.
When I see a story like this one in the National Post filled with apparent conflict followed by the child "detransitioning", the first thought that goes through my mind is "oh yes, and what are the odds that the child has decided to wait until they are out from under the parents' thumb before they transition again?".
*I have no specific knowledge in this case, but such stories aren't uncommon in the transgender community. Just because someone "detransitions" because of external pressures doesn't mean that they won't decide later to transition. This isn't a "one way road" - there are many possible outcomes and we always ensure the best possible outcomes by not dictating to others.
References
Bauer, G. R., Lawson, M. L., & Metzger, D. L. (2022). Do Clinical Data from Transgender Adolescents Support the Phenomenon of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”? The Journal of Pediatrics, 243, 224-227.e2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2021.11.020
James, S.E., Herman, J.L., Durso, L.E., & Heng-Lehtinen, R. (2024). Early Insights: A Report of the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey. National Center for Transgender Equality, Washington, DC.
Tobin, J. (2023). Law and Children’s Decision Making: What Is the Rights Approach?, 2023 12-4 Laws | An Open Access Journal from MDPI, 2023 CanLIIDocs 2071, <https://canlii.ca/t/7n6fx>, retrieved on 2024-09-03
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