Do you think about your youth often? I sometimes do. I remember playing superheroes in my best friend’s yard where I would always take on the role of a female. I remember sneaking into my parent’s room to try on my mother’s clothes. I remember that I had a lot of female friends and how awful it felt as our bodies started to change. I remember when I realized that I would not grow up to be like them. I loved my stuffed animals and cute things. I was a transgender child but I didn’t have the terminology for it, society didn’t really have a great term for it either in the eighties. It took the invention of the internet for me to really understand who I was. By that time I was in college, and I was terrified.
I say this because I also wonder what my life would have been like if a trained phycologist or a pastor or a teacher had told me that the feelings I was trying so hard to push away were normal. What could have happened had I been told there was a way for me to live a life as that authentic little girl I wanted to be? Instead, I spent much of my life playing a role, trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Sure I could make it work for a time but it never fit right. I am paying the price for that delay every day.
For a few years, the trans community was doing all right. There was resistance from the conservative right but transgender lives were finally breaking through into the light. we had positive role models and visibility. Record numbers of children were getting the help they needed, not because they were tricked but because like me, they needed someone to tell them that they were not abnormal.
Today there is an all-out attack on the lives of transgender children in every state across this nation. More than 70 bills have been introduced in nearly every state banning children from sports, bathrooms, and from even receiving life-saving care that would help them live life authentically. Many of these bills will not pass but some will which is causing a wave of panic of distress to sweep over our community. The facts are these, trans children are who they say they are and should be given the space and time to figure out the path they want to go down. Children are not given surgeries for this, and their puberty-blocking medication is reversible as well as life-saving. To block these procedures is much like telling a diabetic that their insulin is blocked for sale. It is cruel and abhorrently monstrous.
I am often told that we should “think of the children” whenever I bring up positive trans representation in our schools and media. “Think of the children” has been used as a cudgel and a shield for so long that I think we have forgotten to actually consider the transgender children we are actively hurting with these policies. Think of the child forced to go through a puberty she never wanted, a prisoner in her own body. Instead of breasts, she develops hair all over her body. She grows taller and stronger than her female friends and her voice drops. In a few years, her hair starts to fall out. What is she to do? The feelings she tries to keep bottled up won’t go away. She grows angrier and angrier and slips into a spiral of depression. One day that child will think of ending her own life, the only way out of a situation she can’t stand.
There is no horror movie worse than the experience a trans child goes through when their body starts its slow, inevitable march towards puberty. I remember it still. and almost thirty years later it still brings me to tears. No one should be forced to go through that. Especially when we have a solution. Transition, even just my social transition at the start of this journey, was enough to significantly reduce the amount of stress in my life. Transition was the path to freedom for me, and for a great many others. Today I have another painfully torturous electrolysis session a procedure I might never have needed if I had access to puberty blockers when I was young. So, yes, I think we should think of the children. Think of the trans child that is currently at risk because of the harmful and dangerous policies being suggested in our state legislatures. Think of the trans children and protect them as you would any other child on this planet.