Adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity searching
Jesse Singal starts his piece in the Atlantic with Claire, age 14.
During the course of the evening I spent with Claire and her mother, Heather—these aren’t their real names—theater, guitar, and track tryouts all came up. We also discussed the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t certain she was a girl.
Sixth grade had been difficult for her. She’d struggled to make friends and experienced both anxiety and depression. “I didn’t have any self-confidence at all,” she told me. “I thought there was something wrong with me.” Claire, who was 12 at the time, also felt uncomfortable in her body in a way she couldn’t quite describe. She acknowledged that part of it had to do with puberty, but she felt it was more than the usual preteen woes. “At first, I started eating less,” she said, “but that didn’t really help.”
The thing is, though, how much did she, how much could she know about the usual preteen woes? Not that much, because of being twelve. When you’re twelve you don’t really understand that your experiences and feelings and woes are generic…at least I didn’t, and now that I’m not twelve I no longer think I’m Unique and Special, including uniquely dorky or wrong or weird or any of that.
Around this time, Claire started watching YouTube videos made by transgender young people. She was particularly fascinated by MilesChronicles, the channel of Miles McKenna, a charismatic 22-year-old. His 1 million subscribers have followed along as he came out as a trans boy, went on testosterone, got a double mastectomy, and transformed into a happy, healthy young man. Claire had discovered the videos by accident, or rather by algorithm: They’d showed up in her “recommended” stream. They gave a name to Claire’s discomfort. She began to wonder whether she was transgender, meaning her internal gender identity didn’t match the sex she had been assigned at birth. “Maybe the reason I’m uncomfortable with my body is I’m supposed to be a guy,” she thought at the time.
Except that there’s no such thing as one’s “internal gender identity.” That’s a made-up label, and it sows a lot of confusion.
So Claire thought she should transition.
Claire initially kept her feelings from her parents, researching steps she could take toward transitioning that wouldn’t require medical interventions, or her parents’ approval. She looked into ways to make her voice sound deeper and into binders to hide her breasts. But one day in August 2016, Mike asked her why she’d seemed so sad lately. She explained to him that she thought she was a boy. This began what Heather recalls as a complicated time in her and her husband’s relationship with their daughter. They told Claire that they loved and supported her; they thanked her for telling them what she was feeling. But they stopped short of encouraging her to transition. “We let her completely explore this on her own,” Heather told me.
As Claire passed into her teen years, she continued to struggle with mental-health problems. Her parents found her a therapist, and while that therapist worked on Claire’s depression and anxiety—she was waking up several times a night to make sure her alarm clock was set correctly—she didn’t feel qualified to help her patient with gender dysphoria. The therapist referred the family to some nearby gender-identity clinics that offered transition services for young people.
Claire’s parents were wary of starting that process. Heather, who has a doctorate in pharmacology, had begun researching youth gender dysphoria for herself. She hoped to better understand why Claire was feeling this way and what she and Mike could do to help. Heather concluded that Claire met the clinical criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. Among other indications, her daughter clearly didn’t feel like a girl, clearly wanted a boy’s body, and was deeply distressed by these feelings. But Heather questioned whether these criteria, or much of the information she found online, told the whole story. “Psychologists know that adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity searching, and this isn’t even acknowledged,” she told me.
That. That’s all-important. Of course adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity searching, along with incomplete development (that prefrontal cortex that takes its own sweet time to mature, leading to a lot of car crashes and unintended pregnancies), so it’s a time for caution about irrevocable or difficult-to-revoke body modifications. Teenagers feel weird in all sorts of ways, and the feelings are not necessarily permanent.
Heather said most of the resources she found for parents of a gender-dysphoric child told her that if her daughter said she was trans, she was trans. If her daughter said she needed hormones, Heather’s responsibility was to help her get on hormones. The most important thing she could do was affirm her daughter, which Heather and Mike interpreted as meaning they should agree with her declarations that she was transgender. Even if they weren’t so certain.
What if that’s bad terrible stupid advice, hey? What makes people so confident that that’s true? Because of highly dogmatic trans activists on Twitter? Maybe they’re not actually the best people to consult.
Claire’s parents stalled, to Claire’s frustration.
Claire humored her parents, even as her frustration with them mounted. Eventually, though, something shifted. In a journal entry Claire wrote last November, she traced her realization that she wasn’t a boy to one key moment. Looking in the mirror at a time when she was trying to present in a very male way—at “my baggy, uncomfortable clothes; my damaged, short hair; and my depressed-looking face”—she found that “it didn’t make me feel any better. I was still miserable, and I still hated myself.” From there, her distress gradually began to lift. “It was kind of sudden when I thought: You know, maybe this isn’t the right answer—maybe it’s something else,” Claire told me. “But it took a while to actually set in that yes, I was definitely a girl.”
Claire believes that her feeling that she was a boy stemmed from rigid views of gender roles that she had internalized. “I think I really had it set in stone what a guy was supposed to be like and what a girl was supposed to be like. I thought that if you didn’t follow the stereotypes of a girl, you were a guy, and if you didn’t follow the stereotypes of a guy, you were a girl.” She hadn’t seen herself in the other girls in her middle-school class, who were breaking into cliques and growing more gossipy. As she got a bit older, she found girls who shared her interests, and started to feel at home in her body.
In other words, It Gets Better. Kids who feel dorky and weird at 12 are likely to find their people at 15. Things can shake out.
Heather thinks that if she and Mike had heeded the information they found online, Claire would have started a physical transition and regretted it later. These days, Claire is a generally happy teenager whose mental-health issues have improved markedly. She still admires people, like Miles McKenna, who benefited from transitioning. But she’s come to realize that’s just not who she happens to be.
Should we feel sad that she missed out on the chance to be trans? I don’t think so.
Aged only 14, yet she outstrips many of the shouters in understanding.
Excellent article. Thank you.
Do I hear the massed intake of breath as the trans-police prepare to unleash their venom upon the Atlantic?
How do people avoid even considering this point?
I had a lot of gender problems myself as a teen. My parents had rigid ideas of what a person should be based on their external genitalia. So I endured endless years of Home Ec when I would rather have been in Chemistry and Physics. I wore pink as a little girl when I preferred green. I washed dishes after dinner while my brothers watched Star Trek or played cribbage with Dad…or got to do fun things like going out and helping with the tractor. My mother was very firm in her conviction that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was too “mannish”. Not in my mannerisms, mind you, because I was never what she termed a “tom boy”. In my interests. I didn’t want a hope chest. I didn’t want a bridal registry. I didn’t want a boyfriend. I wanted books and magazines and science and politics and philosophy. She made it very plain, very clear, that I was wrong, I was messed up, I was seriously broken. I wasn’t fully a girl, oh no, not possibly. But she never suspected I might be a boy, because in her worldview boys were boys and girls were girls, and had nothing in common. For that, I am eternally grateful.
She also hated the idea of psychotherapy. To have one of her children in therapy would be more horror, more disgrace than she could handle. So I never had therapy for my depression until I was 25, married, and rapidly dropping weight from the most recent manifestation of a lifelong battle with anorexia, to that time untreated. So there were no therapists to ask “are you sure you aren’t really a boy?”
The day came when I finally realized what I was…I think I was about 14…and the truth hit me like a flash of light. It had nothing to do with whether I was a girl or a boy. It turns out, I was a feminist. A female who had her own interests and talents in spite of what society and my parents said. A female who was female and didn’t want to be male for some reason, but just wanted to be allowed to be female in my own way. The battle for ERA was raging, and I had many battles with my parents over the desirability of this particular constitutional amendment. They won on the national level; I won on the personal level by identifying for myself why I was not happy in the roles established for me, and why I didn’t want to wear pink (because I liked green better!) or take Home Ec (because Chemistry, Biology, and Physics are more interesting to me) or marry the first boy who asked me (actually, I did do that, but it was many years later, and a mistake).
That recognition did not solve my depression. It did not make my eating disorder go away. It did not give me control over my own life (frankly, I’m not in favor of 14 year olds having full control over their own life, but that view is not what I thought at 14). I was still an abused, unhappy, scared child who needed some serious help, but when I finally did get help 11 years later, it was the kind of help I needed, not the kind that would assume that my desire to do “boy” activities meant I was a boy inside.
What if the internet had been available when I was going through all this? What if I had been given YouTube videos to teach me the way to live, rather than sorting it out by working through the worst aspects of puberty and eventually discovering through a long, extensive, and still evolving process who I was, separate from my “gender identity” and separate from my “assigned at birth” and separate from my “parents think I am this”? What if I had been a member of the generation who thinks that vloggers hold more answers than experts, or that experts should tell me what I want to hear? Or, worse, that experts should get their information from vloggers and 4 year olds who happen not to like pink and people with baseball bats wrapped with barb wire?
I finally achieved a solution to my depression, my anorexia, and my other worries at the age of 35, and learned how to smile. I went back to school for the Biology degree I’d never dared dream of. I explored my own sexuality without fear or shame. And today, I am more content than most of my peers, and I appreciate that. I still suffer frequent flare ups of depression, but I no longer jump to easy, obvious answers and instead look at my world and myself and see if I can sort it out…if not, I ride it out. It Gets Better. And when my therapist one day asked me, when I explained I felt like some grotesque female-male mutant, “do you want to become a man?”, I had the courage, the knowledge, the insight, and the support behind me to say “no, I just want to be the woman I want to be”. And he had the good sense, the training, and the insight to support and respect that, and understand that I knew what the hell I was talking about. He never urged me to transition, to change my name or my “gender identity”, or to be anything other than the woman I wanted to be.
Thanks to all these things, I am today the woman I want to be, rather than a depressed, unhappy woman who can’t see her way to get out of bed in the morning, or a depressed, unhappy man who found out that my problem wasn’t solved by transitioning into a different body.
If my experience could be of some help to youth and teens who are suffering similar problems, I would gladly offer my assistance. But it seems that people don’t want to hear my story now, because it does not fit with the story they have incorporated into their worldview, and insist (loudly and violently) that everyone else should incorporate into not only their own worldviews, but into public policy and health care.
[…] a comment by iknklast on Adolescence is fraught with uncertainty and identity […]
Almost everything the parents did I think was good, except I cringed a bit that they took away her ability to search the internet. I get why they did, that they wanted an honest examination of her feelings without the constant inflow of material pushing her in one direction, but that seems like a big restriction, and I bet trans advocates will pounce on that.
Meghan Murphy reports on the article and the reaction to it. Well put. She notes that Singal went out of his way to use “acceptable” language, and he didn’t talk to anyone who questioned the concept of gender identity itself, and yet he still got attacked.
Apparently there had been more gender critical content in the article, but it was pulled before publication.
https://twitter.com/Jennifer_star/status/1009270068218232832?s=09
PZ has spewed bile on this article. He dismisses all of Singal’s arguments, considering him a loathsome bigot.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/06/21/as-a-dog-returns-to-his-vomit-so-a-fool-repeats-his-folly/
Usually I skip anything he writes about trans because he has so completely drunk the Kool-Aid. I couldn’t make it through this, either.
Of course he has. It repeats the formulas or it gets the hose.