Coming Out as Trans Isn’t a Teenage Fad

Coming Out as Trans Isn’t a Teenage Fad: Conservatives are inventing a “syndrome” to undermine young people’s transitions.

Published in: The New York Times. January 8, 2019. Author: Jenny Boylan.

“At the end of the long weekend when my daughter came out as transgender, she headed back to her car with her girlfriend. I watched them from my apartment window as they packed up. My child looked up, and waved.”

“Then she drove off.”

“I closed the window. Tears rushed to my eyes. She’s saying goodbye, I thought. I’ll never see her again.”

“This, of course, turned out to be malarkey.”

“In the months to come I’d see her lots of times, and each time she seemed happier, and more herself.”

“… The term [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] originated a few years ago on three blogs with a history of promoting anti-trans propaganda. There has been only one study on it, in the journal PLOS One. But the study isn’t about the children in question; it’s about their parents, who were recruited for the study by ads placed in the conservative blogs that had invented the concept of R.O.G.D. in the first place.”

“A child’s transition can indeed seem heartbreaking for parents at first. I understand that because I am a parent who, in experiencing it, felt as if my heart was breaking. And we, trans people, need to understand that too. It was heartbreaking for my own mother, even though she told me love would prevail, and it was heartbreaking for me, in spite of — or because of — the fact that I am trans myself.”

“What was my problem, you ask? Above all, I did not want my child’s life to be hard, in the way that my own life has been hard.”

“But if you want your children’s life to be hard, the quickest way to that end is to tell them that their deepest sense of self is nothing but a fad, and that you know them better than they know themselves.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/opinion/trans-teen-transition.html