Exploring Puberty Blockers
Another step on my kid's journey to themselves.
Throughout my kid’s exploration of their gender, whenever the topic of gender-affirming care came up, the first question most people asked was some iteration of: “What happens if they change their mind.”
Unless you speak and act in a way that suggests you are transphobic, I always assume your intentions are genuine. The question itself doesn’t necessarily bother me—I understand the concern on a very basic level.
When Ben and I were first starting to talk puberty blockers with his care team, I chatted with his principal to update her on what was going on. As someone at the head of an environment my kid was spending a good part of his day in, I wanted her to understand.
During that conversation, she looked at me and asked: "How can kids know this young?" The context here, to be clear, wasn't hostility or disbelief, more wonder and honest curiosity.
I skipped answering her directly and instead moved to my more general fears, fears that are probably rooted in grieving a potential, not because I don't believe my kid or question what they need. "The big one for me is fertility," I said. "That's a lot for a kid their age to process." When considering next steps, steps that aren't decided yet, Ben didn't hesitate in their acceptance that one road meant biological children would not be possible. "I can always adopt," he said.
"I have one adopted and one biological child," his principal offered. "I never felt like having a biological child was important, even as a little kid."
I nodded.
"I think kids can know that pretty early," she added.
What struck me as interesting is that she was openly curious about my kid's ability to truly understand his own experience of gender but definitively positive about his feelings toward biological children.
What this conversation drove home to me is that we're always more willing to accept what mirrors our own experience.
Still, my kid's understanding of their own gender is as innate and natural as any cisgender person's. Just as you don't wake up every morning questioning who you are, neither does he, even when his understanding may be more fluid than your own. Age has absolutely nothing to do with this certainty.
He is who he is, through and through and through.
Learn more about how puberty blockers are prescribed to trans kids.
The lesson (or at least one of the lessons) is that it's very easy to look at trans kids and think they can't possibly know what they know about themselves, that their feelings will almost certainly change or they're confused or ... on and on and on.
I can tell you, though, that of every single person I've ever met in my life, my kid, these kids, know themselves best, are truer and more honest about who they are than anybody on this planet.
So, believe them.
Challenge yourself to step outside your own experience, your own doubt, your questions, your own sense of how things should work or be and ... just ... believe them.