Our child socially transitioned at school – now, we’re too scared to challenge her
A few days ago, as the Cass Review was finally exposing the scandal of teenage transitioning, I found my voice and tweeted about my daughter Anna*, who has identified as a trans boy for the last three years. To my amazement, the tweet went viral and I received many public and private messages of support from parents facing the same dilemma with their trans children.
Anna has a different name to me and didn’t know about the tweet, although she has seen it now. Up to this point, she has not had to directly confront the way her father and I feel about her social transitioning. When we have raised the issue with her, she has said that she’s “not comfortable talking about it to us” – and has given us the impression she thinks we are transphobic. Many households with trans children are ruled by the “No Debate” stance promoted by Stonewall in its heyday of lobbying for trans rights.
So an uneasy accommodation exists in our house where we do not openly challenge Anna’s identity as a trans boy. She tolerates us and her grandmother using her birth name and she/her pronouns, but everywhere else among her friends and at school she is known by the name Zak and he/him. Many of her classmates are also trans and using new names – which often change with no notice – and he/him, they/them or even ze/zey pronouns. This makes for some farcical situations when she tells us about her friends – and we have to ask her to translate so we know who she is talking about. Anna also considers herself bisexual; she has had a series of girlfriends, but rejects the lesbian label as she has had the odd boyfriend. Her girlfriends are all trans boys (though in several cases their names only changed after starting to date Anna).
At school meetings, we talk about Anna while her teachers religiously refer to her as Zak.
When I ask them how they keep up with the ever-changing names of their pupils, I get wry smiles; they are not allowed to say more and we all know that if they don’t go along with the belief that pupils can change gender and sex at will, they are liable to be sacked.
‘I was desperate to see her less anxious’
How did we get here? It began four or five years ago, when our daughter began using the name Zak among her friends. At first, we saw it as a nickname – my husband had invented his own nickname as a teenager and we have nicknames for our older children – so we didn’t think much of it. Then Anna asked if she could be known officially as Zak at school, in registers and on reports. We said no. A little while later, she was being badly bullied at school and asked about the name change again. She said she thought it would help stop the bullying – I’m not sure if she called it transphobic bullying, but I think that’s how she perceived it as she felt she was being targeted because teachers called her Anna instead of Zak.
In a meeting with her guidance teacher, we were told that the school thought changing her name officially at school would stem some of the bullying, so I felt I had no option but to agree. My husband disagreed but I persuaded him because I was desperate to see my daughter less anxious and depressed.
Little did we realise that what seemed like a harmless adjustment meant we had jumped aboard the gender ideology bandwagon. Soon our daughter was literally draping herself in the trans flag, taking it to school in her rucksack as some kind of talisman and going to the teacher-led LGBTQI+ club at school. The bullying situation more or less resolved itself once teachers intervened more strongly and the ringleader – who was herself trans – left the school. Anna also joined a drama group (entirely funded by the Scottish Government) where the facilitators led regular discussions of transphobia. Nearly all of our daughter’s friends were trans or at least “non-binary”, and while we were bemused, we were grateful she had a social group and was happier. Like so many parents, we regarded her “trans identity” as a game she played with friends: a phase she would grow out of.
It was only when the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was going through the Scottish Parliament that we began to read more widely and the penny dropped. By then it was too late; she was 15, and we couldn’t excommunicate her friends or ban her from social media. Even switching schools would have been no solution, since every secondary and even primary school in the country was immersed in trans ideology. Scottish Government guidance instructs schools to socially transition pupils without their parents’ knowledge if they believe telling parents might expose the pupil to harm. We knew of a number of schools – state and private – where children had been socially transitioned while their parents were left in the dark. We realised that the seeds of trans ideology had been sown in Anna’s mind long before by social media apps such as TikTok and YouTube, especially during the lockdowns when social isolation meant that she had clung to her phone more than ever. The consequences of now isolating Anna from her friends or the internet would have been extremely damaging for her mental health and her relationship with us. As with many teenagers, her peer group was by far the most important thing to her.
Naturally we did try to challenge her, pointing out for example that it was a biological impossibility for people to change sex. Anna countered that she wasn’t changing sex but gender, the assumption being that gender trumped sex as a meaningful category. She insisted she felt like a boy, but couldn’t explain what that meant in practice beyond saying she didn’t feel like a girl. I pointed out that neither her father nor I had felt we fitted our sex when growing up; I had been a tomboy like Anna, and her father was bullied as a teenager for having long hair and told he was gay or insufficiently masculine. We explained that there were many different ways of being a girl or a boy, and not being a girly-girl doesn’t make one a boy. But it was all to no avail. Once I commented that Anna didn’t look anything like a boy, and that no one could honestly perceive her as such; she became extremely upset, insisting that all her friends and teachers believed she was a boy.
Our constant fear has been that if we challenged Anna too fiercely, she would want to prove she really was trans by medically transitioning. That fear has only grown since she turned 16 and legally has the power to do so without our consent; she has already talked about moving out now she’s old enough. On the other hand, as far as we know, none of her trans social circle has yet gone down the medical route and, perhaps because of her autism, she herself is currently very squeamish about medical procedures and drugs. Yet one day a breast binder turned up in the wash; it had been given to Anna by her girlfriend. Her father told her in no uncertain terms that breast binders were harmful – which was news to Anna.
So we trundle on, variously infuriated that we have to live with Anna’s denial of reality, frightened by where it could lead and worried about her welfare. We understand her embrace of a trans identity as a way of belonging to a tribe that gives her a sense of self, much like the mods, rockers, punks, goths and emos of previous generations. But the trans cult is much more dangerous than such past teen fashions. Its very fashionability is bound up with a widespread social contagion, as eating disorders and cutting were when my older daughter was a teenager and to which girls are peculiarly susceptible. Needless to say we’re also acutely aware of how vastly over-represented autistic girls and lesbians are among those who identify as trans.
I also see Anna’s identity as a defence against the intensely pornographic culture that teenagers face online and at school. Teenage girls and boys desperately need a feminist analysis of the porn culture underlying the gender stereotypes upon which trans ideology rests. Following the Cass Review, I believe schools must turn away from trans ideology and teach instead that there are many different ways of being a boy or a girl.
*All names have been changed.
