Transgender has become such a hotly debated topic. It has become very emotive with people strongly aligned on either side of the debate, considering the other side uninformed, if not worse - bigoted and inflexible.
However, this is a topic that needs to be approached with curiosity and logic rather than indignant emotion, if we are to help our children. This is written for parents out there who are confused about the whole issue and want to do the right thing by their children.
Children who are autistic ( often without recognizing it) can find puberty very difficult. Girls especially find it 'icky' and upsetting. Their body is changing and change is hard to deal with. Unpleasant things like menstrual periods are happening. Suddenly peers are becoming interested in the opposite sex or within the same sex in more romantic ways than the autistic brain is ready for.
Along with these difficulties, there is the problem of sensory difficulties. Girls clothes are often revealing and tight and uncomfortable. While boys clothes tend to be more generously proportioned and comfortable. Autistic children take a long time to get comfortable with sexuality.
These aspects are confusing for the autistic brain. They are entering into a time of great change - a new school, increasing social demands, a major transition, the removal of the comfortable safety boundaries of parents dropping them to school and picking them up and them being in one classroom and knowing what is expected etc. When children start finding life difficult and do not know how to fit into new friendship groups and start feeling bad about themselves, they also have increasing access to the internet and this world of transgender where a simple explanation for their difficulties is offered to them - they are born in the wrong body. If they change their body, it will explain all their difficulties and make those difficulties go away. They find a community that is willing to accept them and include them, in a world where social relationships are difficult. Hence they begin to believe that they must be transgender. They are encouraged in this belief by their peers, by the online community, by the mental health professionals and by school. If they did have any doubts or any curiosity about whether this is real, it is quickly suppressed by the overwhelming support that this belief brings. It also brings a sense of heroic resistance, where they are misunderstood and fighting for a truth, in which they perceive they are alone. Which teenager does not revel in this sense of rebelliousness and this sense of being misunderstood? Hence the rise in this transgender trend.
There is a very small percentage of the population where disorders of sexual differentiation exist. These are children born with enzyme deficiencies or receptor defects etc. where they may be an undervirilized male, an overvirilized female or have both testes and ovaries or a combination. This is rare. Some of these children may only become aware of difficulties as they enter puberty and the normal secondary sexual characteristics of their gender do not progress. These are children who are not born into healthy bodies and need interventions to live a normal, healthy life and I exclude them from the discussion above. To re-iterate, these are rare and should show up on medical tests.
In conclusion, identifying as transgender is not real. It can harm children if parents and other professionals validate this. A lot of children will outgrow this phase if they are not placed on the bandwagon to transition. When we normalize transgender, we stop exploring the difficulties these children face in terms of anxiety, social difficulties, depression, executive functioning difficulties and deny them the help they need as a simple explanation of their difficulties is accepted, that they are born in the wrong body.
Link to other articles about this: https://www.transgendertrend.com/autism-gender-identity-autistic-minds/
