pizzaback-deactivated20201011 asked:

What would you do if one of your children were trans? kick them out of your home? send them to conversion therapy? deny their identity until they hate themselves for it? I'm always curious to know how radfem mothers would handle an actual trans person entering their lives.

slaybia-majora-deactivated20160 answered:

My children wouldn’t feel the need to “identify” as anything other than themselves because they understand that how they look and what they wear doesn’t change anything. They are smart enough to know that sex can’t be changed and that nothing is “feminine” or “masculine”.  

dbrvnk:

I can totally see what you are saying with this. At the same time though… it does seem like you are seriously underestimating the influence of the outside world on children. Kids can and do develop certain identities/disorders regardless of how their parents raise them—whether that’s an eating disorder or a gender identity disorder—and it really doesn’t help much to tell a child with an obsessive hatred of/dissociation from their own body that that body is perfect the way it is, any more than it would help an anorexic.

What I’m saying is… accept that we live in a society that hates gender nonconformance, a society where kids become trans. Your parenting can try to prevent that, but you’ve got no guarantee of succeeding. Certainly go after adults and authority figures who try to pressure kids into transitioning (doctors etc) but like… if a child wants to transition and is feeling suicidal or wants to hurt themselves because of it, it really does not help to say ‘oh just do feminine/masculine things, don’t mutilate your beautiful body!’, that’s like telling a person with depression ‘but you have it so good! look at all the wonderful things you have!’. It makes matters worse and entrenches the need to transition even more firmly in the kid.

I’m not a parent so I can’t offer any actual advice, but I think it’s important for gender-critical parents to move away from the idea that ‘in an ideal world, no one would ever have to transition!’. First of all that’s not necessarily true, second of all, we don’t live in that world. Support people with sex/gender dysphoria, support people who transition, support people who detransition (this is important! detransitioning is not a horrible fate of doom)—reserve your criticism and negativity for the industries that create them, the ‘allies’ pushing dubious theory, and ofc the late transitioning rich white male fetishists who are even making this a whole thing in the first place

I mean I don’t intend any offense or anything and I have no idea what your situation is irl, maybe this isn’t even relevant to you lol. But it is one place I think there’s kind of a ‘generation gap’ of understanding and maybe that’s why this post is causing so many arguments? I don’t even know I can delete this if it’s stupid

You raise some interesting points here. There is such a delicate balance with teenagers, who tend to discount their parents’ advice and opinions about just about everything. And at this stage of life, it’s easy to want to act NOW, future consequences be damned.

It’s hard to “support” transition itself if you really feel (as I do) that it would be harmful. What I can do is understand why a person would want to transition, and point to alternatives. I just wish “gender” therapists and trans activists showed more interest in those alternatives.

And yeah: the people driving this runaway train are “the ‘allies’ pushing dubious theory, and ofc the late transitioning rich white male fetishists who are even making this a whole thing in the first place.”