The pressures are most often coming top down.
In the course of writing this book I had the chance to travel the country and interview many trans and nonbinary children and teenagers and I was constantly amazed and often stunned by the kindness they demonstrate and exhibit towards a world which so frequently treats them very badly. They simply see themselves as trying to be the best that they can be and trying to be true to their innermost feelings. They often readily forgive the world for treating them so badly.
Again, in teacher speak, they are trying to live up to their potential.
I’m someone who transitioned late through a formal, medicalised and often punishing process demarcated by stages of negative and positive interventions. This process only began after spending many unhappy years hiding the truth of my gender misalignment because I wanted and needed to please the world around me that was constructed upon a binary patriarchal thinking. It’s taken me years to live up to my true potential.
I sometimes wonder if the word ‘transgender’ applied to a five-year-old who is determined to be themselves, whatever the cost, makes any sense in the way it does perhaps applied to me? They are merely expressing their gender, or expressing their sometimes tentative, sometimes bold, enquiries and exploration into gender. After speaking with many young trans children and teens I wonder if the word ‘transgender’ applied to them isn’t a tad misleading as they are just being as they need to be. For them there is often no transitional process as I perceived and lived it, but often a joyful, playful journey from the get-go towards their authentic core. They leave a starting point with a determination to be themselves from as close to day one as possible.
If supported and simply allowed to be themselves, their journey feels natural and ordinary. ‘It’s just normal,’ many of them said to me.
It’s often the ‘grown up’ intervention that creates the environment for depression, darkness, sometimes suicidal ideation and perhaps even attempts. When the loaded label ‘transgender’ is applied to a five-year-old who is just being true to themselves I’m not sure that the label works to create any positive framework. One parent told me that her daughter didn’t really know or understand the word ‘transgender’ until she was ten, when it felt important, politically, that she understand the context for the discrimination that might come her way. The word ‘transgender’ as a conduit for discrimination.
I like the terms ‘gender boss’ or ‘gender explorer’. That isn’t to say that these young people don’t have to engage with a process (sometimes medical, often therapeutic), but if the starting point is joyous and determined, then the process is entirely different from the one we more closely associate with the label ‘trans/transgender’, which is applied to those of us who transitioned later in life.
From the outside these young people may appear to be products of patriarchal and socialised patterns of gender expression: ‘I felt like a boy’, ‘I wanted to climb trees’, or the classic ‘I like pink’. But look a little closer and you will see the marvel of a human, a tiny human, grappling with and bossing gender from the outset, saying, ‘No, you’ll do what I need you to do. Forget all those people around me telling me I’m wrong, telling me I should be this way or that. I want to be happy, not sad, and I want to express myself the way that feels right for me.’
Sometimes they come out quite brilliantly and succinctly by sending an email which announces their gender intent. Sometimes it’s via a carefully planned letter. Sometimes it’s conveyed through tears and sometimes with anger. But the one thing that is clear to me from my gender travels with this brilliant group of children and young people is that at the same time that they are thinking about what they need to do to be their authentic selves they are also thinking and caring deeply about how to protect those around them that they love – their families, carers and friends.
In their letters they often include a list of go-to places for information (there is also a list of Resources at the end of this book). Can you believe the kindness and generosity inherent in that act? Can you imagine being eight, ten or thirteen years old and writing the most important words in your young life, yet thinking as much about the people around you as about your own inner turmoil?
These children’s souls have silenced me.
They should be silencing any naysayers.
Look closely at them and their lives and you’ll see such an incredible capacity for kindness, strength and bravery, as well as a rock-solid commitment to be the best that they can be. In that simple, often slight act of picking up or putting down a toy, you will see an epic change happening in society, one that has the capacity to benefit everyone. One that allows everyone the opportunity, the space and the freedom to make this thing that we call gender work for us all. The change is a ripple that can’t be held back. It’s pure change-energy that is already covering much ground. Ripples with the power of tsunamis.
We live in a patriarchal world in which stereotypes – pink, blue, dolls, tanks and toys – are still so rigidly fixed that they dominate not only our high days and holidays but also the humdrum of our everyday existence: school uniforms, career expectations, colours, clothes and body adornment. These gender explorers can only select the items that line their walls, their shelves, their toy boxes and the world they move around in – shops, schools and their homes. They cannot create a new world of gender parity in gender materiality until we let them. Trust me, in fifty or a hundred years’ time, gender expectations, stereotypes and fixed gender positions will be utterly unrecognisable if only we support these children to be themselves. They will loosen the insidious grip of gender harm that holds tight around all of us. Often fluid and unfixed, their young understanding of gender creates spaces that never existed before. They are a new phenomenon.
If we support these gender explorers, they will reshape our environment to allow for far greater freedom and fluidity. They, along with others, will eventually do away with the meanings that we grew up with, meanings that absolutely and punishingly boxed us into different lines and categories. Our architecture is already changing: school buildings, changing rooms, more spaces are rightly becoming gender neutral. Clothing is no longer something that needs to be divided neatly along gendered lines, and that doesn’t mean shapeless grey hoodies are gender neutral!
Young gender bosses and explorers are silently changing the very landscapes we move through, be that buildings, ideas, language or economic values. Nothing can remain the same if we support them and allow them to flourish.
Until we live in a world which isn’t divided by gender, we cannot blame these children for adopting ‘our’ gender signifiers to express their gendered truths. We mustn’t get caught up in debates about how these children are really just butch girls or feminine boys and how they are destroying the queer landscape. Quite the opposite, they are stretching the queer and non-queer landscapes to include many more people. We may laugh at the endless Facebook profile options, but we hated being boxed into the two rigid categories of male and female. Those two categories extinguished so many of our gendered identities.
Some trans adults, but especially these younger gender bosses, are widening the suffocating narrowness of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
When I first to tried to truly express my gender at eight years old, I was told I was not fit for purpose, that I was not capable of knowing my own mind. Back then there were no words to describe people like me – not in everyday use anyway.
I thought I was the only one like me on the planet who felt one way inside but looked another on the outside. It must be a terrifying feeling to find yourself living with this in the contemporary contentious and adversarial battleground around gender and trans lives.
To feel that your innermost self is entirely different from the way the world sees you is terrifying.
Back when I was a young person, the world kept us feeling like we were few and far between by treating us very badly, almost extinguishing us by turning us into a rare