So, these bills about trans kids are freaking me out. Basically, Arkansas has already made, and Alabama and other states want to make, it illegal for doctors to provide trans-related medical care (blockers, HRT, surgery) to trans kids under 18, and in the case of Alabama, even up to the age of 21 and making it mandatory for teachers to out their trans students to parents.
This came in the year I started having delayed CPTSD symptoms about my shitty trans adolescence, which was shitty precisely because of this stuff. This essentially mandates exactly what I had happen to me.
I came out at school at 14, in 2005. I had known I was trans since 12 or 13, thanks to the internet and a tiny local trans and NB community. I lived at school as a boy, covered it up when I went home. Three years into this, I was outed by a teacher and came home to my mother and sister at the dinner table, looking enraged.
They subjected me to a barrage of questioning (”How long have you been lying to everyone about this? Why are you forcing everyone at school to go along with your delusions?”), criticism and shaming (”You can’t possibly think you’re really a boy! You know what it says on your birth certificate!”) and dire predictions about my future (”You’ll mutilate yourself! You know no real gay man would ever love you.”) They called the school to tell them to stop respecting my insanity, told me I might have been kicked out for doing this with less lenient parents, demanded to go through my things for trans items. I did almost nothing the whole time but cry silently. I think once I said I was serious, that something hadn’t felt right for a long time.
The berating at the dinner table continued, daily, when I got home. School was already godawful. I wasn’t able to use any gendered bathroom on campus without violence or threats of violence. My principal refused to create a gender-neutral bathroom. My classmates (and some teachers) ridiculed my body and my masculinity. Some refused to even touch me in dance or theater classes. Coming home every day from that, I got a dressing-down about how pathetic I was, how disgusting I would make myself. My sister’s boyfriend, on one occasion, cornered me in the living room, grabbed his crotch, and said, “You know, [deadname], you’ll never be a man because you don’t have one of these.”
On top of the humiliation and terror all this produced, I remember being so resentful that my teacher had exposed me to this. I hadn’t come out at home because I didn’t trust them. I had known something like this would happen. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it would be this bad.
Even though I’d been planning to get surgery and hormones since I was 13 and was horrified by the ongoing results of puberty, I knew medical transition just wasn’t going to be available to me. My doctor was kind, but blockers were not a thing almost any doctor was comfortable doing at that time, given how it looked, and my family had vowed they would do everything possible to prevent me from transitioning, legally or medically. So I had to just watch as my body warped, and warped, knowing full well I would need reconstructive surgery to fix something I could have prevented entirely.
After about a month of the “punish my kid into being cis” sessions, I went to school, and about halfway through, a classmate who had previously seemed respectful let slip something that showed he was just humoring me, that he really did think I was a girl. I left halfway through the day and tried to overdose in a park. Late at night, I went home and snuck inside, disappointed that it hadn’t worked. As I was incredibly sick, I was found out and taken to the hospital. “I can’t believe you did this. I have work tomorrow.” (Spoiler alert: the psych ward did not respect me either.)
This shit, whether I was having full-on flashbacks to it like now or not, stayed with me. I never felt like I would be adequate as a partner for a cis gay man. My first relationship after high school, I stuck around through an unwanted open relationship and five years of domestic violence because I felt like I was trash, essentially, and that I couldn’t complain if he wanted to fuck a cis guy and not me. I hated myself, I remained chronically suicidal. I felt that my life had been nothing but years of torture and that it would probably continue to be so. I felt like I sprang up, full-grown at 18, when I finally snuck off to get HRT and change my legal docs, and that my childhood was basically a black hole that belonged to someone else. Those years were just...gone.
And worst of all, I knew it was needless. I was knowledgeable enough about myself, and brave enough, to come out at what back then was an unimaginably young age. I did so much of the work, and it was wasted, just like my body was.
When I think about trans kids these days, I have mixed feelings. Some part of me is jealous, or I guess, not even jealous--just sad, that I was born when I was. In the early 00s, there wasn’t half as much information out there. There weren’t medical guidelines for treating transgender kids. There wasn’t even value, for the average progressive, in virtue-signaling about respecting trans people. If I were a teenager now, I would have already identified myself as trans by age 10. My family would be compelled by current social norms to tone it down a little. A doctor would have the APA- and WHO-backed ammo to push to get the treatment I needed. I wouldn’t have flushed my school years down the drain. I wouldn’t have even needed surgery.
The only thing that pulls me out of these miserable CPTSD tailspins is knowing that kids now DO have the chance to not experience the same body horror nightmare, the same pointless waste of an adolescence, that I did. They can (sometimes) get puberty blockers. They can (sometimes) play sports as the gender they actually are (I was not allowed this). They can (sometimes) experience adolescence, at the very least, in a body and role that makes any sense to them at all. And if they can’t safely come out at home they can (sometimes) come out just at school.
And here we have a bunch of adults trying to roll that back. Against all medical research. Without even a fake moral justification, in the case of mandating forced outing.
All the arguments I’ve heard for these are “think of the kids” arguments. The bills are christened “for the protection of vulnerable children,” “save adolescents from experimentation act,” etc. But I’ve seen conservatives faced with the data on kids deciding to discontinue puberty blockers, and the data on transition and social support decreasing suicide and general abject fucking misery. They say that they’re concerned about the kids who do go off blockers.
The one kid in 999 who goes off and has no lasting health issues, who immediately resumes puberty when they go off?
Yup. They would rather scores of trans kids go through exactly what I did, try to fucking kill themselves, than one cis kid have to, at most, take vitamin D for a little bit. They’d rather the vast majority of the people affected have their bodies marred by the wrong puberty and have to deal with that for the rest of their lives.
It’s absolutely fucking disgusting. Coupled with the fuss about trans kids in sports, which medical transition would significantly weaken any argument about, the impression I honestly get (about anyone who’s faced with the actual science about this) is that they don’t want us to be okay. They do not want trans kids to be indistinguishable from cis kids because it creeps them out and it interferes with preventing us from engaging with life as what we are. If a trans girl is physically almost identical to a cis girl, what justification is there for ridiculing and segregating us? If trans people are well-adjusted and not suicidal, how can anyone say there’s anything wrong with being trans other than that they simply don’t like the idea of us?
