You’re right that teenagers tend to do the exact opposite of what their parents advise, and that trying to force a change will backfire. Also, I try very hard to respect and validate her FEELINGS about gender (while raising questions about what to DO about those feelings).  It’s a hard balance to strike, as any parent will tell you. But I don’t believe the best alternative is to simply support everything she says or does when, in my heart of hearts, I disagree. I’ll also say that having been a very rebellious and opinionated adolescent myself, I wish my parents had actually asserted themselves MORE when I made some very unhealthy choices. And yeah, I hated them then, but as hard as this might be to hear—now I know they were right about certain things. Even when they weren’t, I get it, now that I have a kid myself, that they were just trying to help me the best way they knew how. Not that there aren’t horrible parents in the world. I was lucky to be loved by flawed but essentially decent human beings. 

I have adult friends who I envied as teens because their parents were “cool” and went along with all their drug use. To a person, they’ve all been in rehab or worse. I know, I know—having gender dysphoria is not the same as using drugs, but we are in the middle of a huge, uncontrolled experiment being perpetrated on kids (from toddler to teen) with powerful, dangerous hormones and surgery being pushed as the one and only solution. If medical transition wasn’t being promoted the way it is now, I wouldn’t even be on Tumblr.