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Identity II: who identifies what?

  • Posted on September 13, 2015 at 3:02 pm

Just as I was about to get deeply philosophical and go through my list from last blog from the beginning, up popped a reminder about gender identity; legal gender identity. Ashley Reed set up a petition to the UK Parliament: ‘Allow transgender people to self-define their legal gender’. Within a few days the signatories numbered over 30,000, so a response was required. The Ministry of Justice posted their statement at 1 am on a Saturday morning. I hope it meant ‘please could you post our agreed statement before you go home, don’t worry about the overtime’, rather than: ‘could you do the usual before you go to bed?’. If 100,000 people sign before 22 January 2016, the petition goes on the list for possible debate.

Please do read the government response, because several phrases are very telling, revealing significant misunderstanding of what it is to be transgender. Obtaining legal recognition of one’s gender is, for example, ‘entirely a personal decision’ (like it does’t matter to have a correct legal status); gender is ‘acquired’ (like everyone chooses a lifestyle); ‘non-binary gender is not recognised in UK law’ (like it does not exist); and whilst there are ‘important legal and social consequences’ in one’s legal gender’, for non-binary people’s absence of a legal gender identity: ‘We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment’. It isn’t just out of touch, it is ignorant.

Our UK Ministry of Justice is exhibiting real lack of justice towards everyone who does not conform to a highly restrictive and fallacious definition of gender. The distress caused to intersex, transsexual, non-binary and any other non-conforming person is highly significant. It causes untold social harm, violence, mental illness, and suicide. It perpetuates a culture of false normality that has no basis in how things really are. The sole reason for having to assign a lifetime legal binary gender status to everyone, is so that discrimination can be made, so that people can be treated, not appropriately, but differently by definition.

The river

Which does bring me back to where I was. Things are things and are separable, by naming them, by giving them status. The more we break things down, the more we break them up. The less we break things down, the greater the integrity. Think. A river is an entity. It is a rivulet, or a stream, or a torrent, or an estuary. It is an inlet or an outlet, it is a place of safety and or of danger. It is also water, rocks, banks, weed, an ecosystem. It is minerals, hydrogen, oxygen, carbohydrates, it is flow, it is swirl, ripple, wave and wash. It is atoms, molecules and bonds, it is subatomic particles, it is quantum interaction, it is 100 per cent complex electromagnetic energy. We see it, hear it, smell it, are washed away by it. It is a river. And all those itemised aspects? They are nouns, not adjectives. Where does any one begin and another end? And yet we distinguish by naming, by giving identities to aspects that are, essentially, indivisible.

Are the identifications in the lists important? Of course. To the sailor, estuary and safety matter. To the environmental scientist the waterborne contents matter. To the hiker the size and flow are important. To the painter, the light matters. But the breakdown labels do not contain the river or constrain it. If I were to say that as a sailor, ‘clear blue water’ was irrelevant, and that ‘tidal / non-tidal’ was the only label that mattered, and that every river, entering open water or not, had to be legally registered that way, you would say it was OK in a nautical legal register, but that as an identity it was only one of many.

Identification has value to the identifier, but it doesn’t change the nature of anything. It separates out the relevance to one kind of observer, but it does not divide the world in itself. Identification is a convenience only. For a fish, a whirlpool in the river has no boundary; it is not a thing but a place where the indivisible river tends to move in a different pattern of flow. Naming the whirlpool does not make it extractable, even though there is value in describing the observation. Does the whirlpool have an identity? Only when it matters to an observer; otherwise no. When is the river a stream? Only when it matters; and language confers the meaning. We are tangled in semantics as quickly as in river-weed. Your meaning and mine may not be the same; the sailor, the walker, the environmental scientist, the fish, do not have to agree, but none has the right to say the others are wrong. What would the river say?

Legal status

This is a science teacher. You are a migrant. She is a refugee. One person, but labels that convey three significances and confer rigid opinions. That person and I are two equally real, indistinguishably human, beings.

Being human is not a legal status.

Being a refugee is.

Being a woman is.

Being of non-binary gender is not.

Who creates a legal status and why? Legal status is a form of identity that exerts authority of one human being over another. Two equally real, indistinguishably human, beings. One has the right to confer identity and give legal status, the other may not identify themselves. The first grants rights and privileges under their own authority, and in a democracy we assume this authority to be beneficial to society as a whole. In terms of behaviours this makes sense. A ‘harbour’ or ‘estuary’ on a chart means you won’t ground your ship and endanger others. Granting asylum is a good thing in a way that welcoming unrestrained economic migration may not. In all cases a judgement about distinguishing one thing from another is made. But when it comes to society, the better and more useful distinctions are around doing rather than being. You are a builder, please fix my house. You are a horticulturist, I want to check before you install my new shower. More importantly, you are a registered surgeon, you are a qualified electrician, you are an articled lawyer. These have a status that is important, because if you are not a registered surgeon, I do not want you near me with a knife! I cannot be a surgeon because in my heart of hearts I simply know that I am one. Being a surgeon is actually a doing thing, a practise.

I am human, not by someone’s authority but because it is what I am. There is a wide range of characteristics to accept this self-knowledge, but not just one. And tracing my ancestry will finally lead back to a parent whose human label you will begin to question more precisely. But there will not be just one thing by which you would grant a posthumous birth certificate as human, or not. Thankfully we don’t have to make these decisions.

I am a woman, not by someone’s authority but because it is what I am. There is a wide range of characteristics to accept this self-knowledge, but not just one. I have been granted a birth certificate that states I was born a girl, not because I am a woman, but because in my society there is a legal difference between a female human being and male one. They are not treated equally. To be myself, I do not need to belong to one or either camp, but I do not want to be called something I am not. I look at men who are clearly men and know I am not one of those. I look at women who are clearly women and I do not feel this. I look at ambiguous people and it simply does not matter how they self-identify.

A friend, or several, of mine is neither male nor female. Perhaps through ambiguous physiology, perhaps because of a complete lack of sense of gender-belonging as male or female. They are every bit themselves as I am myself, but my society says that they cannot be neither. Their own identity, though equally human, is not what they are allowed to be. Legally it is obligatory to confer one thing or another onto them, otherwise they cannot be treated in a sufficiently discriminatory way – for the good of society, as our Ministry of Justice would have it.

A whirlpool turns, but you cannot define its boundary other than very approximately; it is part of the river.

Male? Female? Neither? You cannot define the boundaries other than approximately; we are all human.

So identities of any kind are made in order to create controlled communication. Don’t sail here, don’t swim there, grant this kind privileges, give those something different. Fair enough if it’s about behaviour (tidal, danger, qualifications, criminal), but not if it’s about being.

I am not a woman by permission or certification.

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Identity and I-dentity

  • Posted on August 31, 2015 at 8:05 pm

Show me your ID.

It is hugely important these days to have your ID. Maybe you look younger than you are and you can’t be served alcohol. Perhaps you can’t get into a building without it. Or you are stopped for any reason and someone in authority demands your ID. It isn’t just your passport anymore, it instead has become something more important than your word, or your name. You have become an entity, you have become a thing. A thing that has more substance than you, where it matters. Without it you are not what you say. You have become a singularity that cannot exist, nor cease to exist, separately from your ID.

It was Descartes who declared: ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum). This is the Western philosophy of individualism, by which we are separated, even isolated from each other in the ultimate loneliness of the spirit creature answerable only to some god. Most world religions are based around the individual as one accountable to a deity for every action or inaction. We sense that loneliness in facing life and in facing death, and this feeling is exacerbated by beliefs about good acts deserving future reward and bad acts deserving future punishment. Accountability amongst ourselves and agreeing rules in one thing, but the urge to have absolute rules and absolute authority to decide what is good and what is bad brings more guilt than it brings inner peace. And yet, surely, we all have a sense of self long before we are troubled by whether we have a sense of a deity or supreme invisible being, let alone one that is concerned with our daily thoughts and doings.

I am interested in this sense of self, and whether or how it relates to a sense of identity, and then whether this sense has meaning in our personal philosophy (and most of us at least adopt some convenient philosophy to get us by in life, even if we don’t bother to develop and grow one for ourselves). In recent years I have been confronted by many different ideas about gender identity: what it is, whether it is essential (unchanging) or fluid, innate or socialised. And gender identity is but one aspect of how we feel about ourselves, and perhaps not even the most important. Nevertheless, our bodies substantiate some sense of identity, because our bodies move around freely and separately from other bodies (if we can simply agree to the exceptions, you understand what I mean). So it is reasonable to describe ourselves as individuals. Consequently, we create narratives, files and records that identify these distinctive lives. Only now we can wrap each up in a code for easy access, and thus our identities have become externalised and mechanised. Even our DNA, and possibly our entire genome, can be attached as a file to this code, giving a more permanent and definitive identity than we have ever had before. Is the individual still a person, or an entity, a thing? And who creates identity: the ‘administration’, or the individual – and who has precedence?

It sounds like I rub roughly against this aspect of society and against religion? Well, I do. I can see how they develop and why; everything seems quite reasonable – except for the outcome. Ultimately, I think religion has done us more harm as a species with ‘civilisation’ at its heart, than it has done us good. It has created absolute systems out of nothing, that differ and disagree, and thus as absolutes cause lasting conflicts. Further, our philosophies have been developed out of religion as much as from anything else. To survive religious authorities, the past great philosophers have in the main had to frame their thoughts within accepted religious dictat. Descartes, not least, spent much time and effort in proving the existence of (a) god. How can a philosophical development have meaning when it is constrained by prior beliefs that maintain an independent absolute authority? Scientific method (itself a philosophy) struggles to this day against fundamentalist (or simply conservative) religious belief, as if the latter was as reasoned and reasonable. We must be free to observe, and remain open to consideration of from where our interpretations derive, if we are to be enquiring and intelligent creatures. We also can only observe with limited senses and scope, and must always keep that in mind. We do not, and cannot, see the whole, when the whole is not in ‘sight’ and ‘sight’ is our only, limited, sense.

For this reason, I want to think aloud in this blog about what identity is, and what it means to say ‘I’.

Aspects I would like to cover include:

  • the identity (separability) of anything, including subatomic particles, or even electromagnetic vibration, since that is the nature, the sole content, of everything we express as ‘existing’.
  • the identity of a living cell, its possible evolution, stem cells, regeneration, and why identity and DNA seem so important.
  • the concept of identity within mosaicism and chimerism, and why this may matter to any of us, and phenomena such as personality changes following transplant, and concepts such as the fluid genome.
  • so far as I can begin to understand it, the idea of implicate and explicate order, as descriptions of how things are (David Bohm).
  • how separate anything is when we do not name anything, and thus, whether it is we who create this individualistic identity by which we increasingly live.

These are big ideas, and all I can do is poke a stick at them and see what stirs. But given the importance of ‘identity’ in the history of this blog, I think it’s worth a go over coming weeks.

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No single story

  • Posted on August 16, 2015 at 12:23 pm

One year ago I wrote a piece about meeting a glamour photographer whilst still in the hospital where my clinical transition was completed. It was one of those strange things that life turns up from time to time, reminding you of the connectedness of all things. I have often written about my sense of greater belonging in the world, or rather belonging among all things, so I shouldn’t be surprised any more. But these completing meetings that reattach parts of life are good. Two years ago I returned to my teenage haunts in Derbyshire, deliberately to reconnect old and new. But still there are moments where I have cause to remember and reconnect my past without having to deny it, but rather be grateful for greater understanding. Without the past my story is incomplete, and sometimes now I have to be careful not to erase parts of it to avoid awkward questions. I have children: where are they? How was childbirth for you? You played with Meccano? Sorry – a boy’s grammar school? And do I say my son lives with my ex, or with his mother? And so on. I have a past, not just a present. There was no single point of separation from it.

This week I Facebook-friended a very familiar face, that of Caroline Cossey. It was a huge surprise for several reasons. Firstly that we are of very similar age, secondly that we (for all her fame) find ourselves on a level in this social space, and understand many shared experiences. Most of all, that for all the differences in our life stories, we have something, in the end, very much in common. I remember her modelling name of Tula. I had the Mayfair and Playboy issues (quite coincidentally, because I really didn’t buy that many!) that featured her (glamour, not porn in those days). I had a ‘respectable’ book too, of glamour photos that featured her. And I remember the front cover exposure of this incredibly beautiful woman who ‘used to be man’. At the time I simply stared in disbelief, and could not connect it with any possibility for myself. A wish; no more. I simply didn’t really understand how it could be possible, and saw it only as a choice. Caroline represented something unattainable, part of another world. Only twenty years later did I see the TV interviews she did, after being outed by the media. She was a victim, she was also a heroine, and I am here now in part due to all she went through and fought for.

Today, finally, I downloaded her book to my Kindle. 1992: My Story. Her story. History. Not my story, but many places where the stitches are familiar. The familiarity all starts with a very early childhood sense of not belonging. Of the world being a confusing place with nowhere to go, and of feeling there is no-one you can explain this to, no-one who will understand and make it all make sense.

That’s it. Not belonging. Something really not right about the way people tell you you should be, or feel, or behave, or dress, or play, or simply be …

Now imagine telling that story to people. They will tell you how they don’t feel they belong either: maybe they don’t play sports too well, or are very mediocre at music, bad at drawing, middle to bottom of the class academically, or simply introvert and never had many friends or anyone they felt understood them. So what is it, in the stories we tell as trans people, that is different? Yes, stories, because they are in many ways similar and many more ways individual. Telling the story, nevertheless is critical to accessing routes to change. Not all routes involve treatment. Not everyone wants hormones, let alone surgery. Many of us find some comfort in there being a diagnosis, by whatever name (but dislike the names anyway), because it is confirming to know that you aren’t alone. But what everyone must do, whose gender is not what others tell them it is, is tell their own story. I often wondered how easy it would be to learn the narrative that gets you through a gender clinic. I also know many who have been honest about being gender queer and who seek part-treatments, and who have found it very difficult to obtain it.

I walked around the playground in my first year of school, with a girl. I remember Jane Pringle very clearly as someone I trusted, as all the other boys competed on the climbing frame and shouted together. I felt she was someone like me, and that the boys were not. But that didn’t make me trans.

I talked in my first year of transition with people who hated their bodies, some who either could not look at themselves in a mirror, or feel comfortable to even touch their genitals. This was not my story. My sense of being in the wrong body was that I hated my impulses. I hated that if I put a dress on it didn’t make me look like a girl, even if it felt good inside. I looked at photos taken by Joanie Allum and I liked that a woman was glamourising women. I looked at pictures of Tula and found her dignified and beautiful. But I wasn’t spending my days hating my penis. As my life began expanding with the growing up of children, I learned to express myself in drawing, painting, writing and music. A lesbian friend reminded me that I could be desirable and made me feel more alive, after which I walked in sunlit woods at lunchtime from work, and imagined how wonderful it would be to be wearing a dress every summer day.

I really wished I could feel comfortable and find myself, but the more I tried to introduce the feminine desires I felt, the more I found resistance in my marriage. I was the only one who wanted this, and if I was going to do that, I was going to have to do it alone. And if I was going to do it at all completely, I was going to have to tell the story of my Gender Dysphoria. I was going to have to admit to some kind of disorder, a significant impairment, a medical diagnosis. I felt that I was having to reduce myself rather than grow more complete, drop any idea of my social status, of my achievements, almost to the point of being labelled as a freak. I was going to have to enter a bureaucratic sequence that ended in much of my documented history being sequestered away for my own protection. I was going to have to go through therapy, counselling, psychiatric assessment and examination, judgement and evaluation by people who knew nothing about me other than the story I would tell.

For many of us, there is some pressure to get the story ‘right’. People ask this on Facebook: I’m going to the gender clinic next week, what should I say to ‘get through’? Sometimes it feels that my individual story is not enough to convince the gatekeepers who are just looking for the right identity pass card. We should all be able to be honest enough and to tell many stories.

And the story we tell those closest to us? The one story, the classic story of being ‘born in the wrong body’? This can make us into liars and deceivers (Why didn’t you tell me?) rather than confused and unable to know. And if it isn’t the wrong body, why are you making such a big deal out of it? In 1992 Caroline Cossey described it as being ‘born between two sexes’. This is not the same as intersex conditions, which are (perhaps) more easily described through physical examination. Differences in physiological sexual development do not make life easier (it can be harder), and there is some evidence that many transsexual people may also have physiological determinants of their sense of gender, but which a clinician cannot prod and say ‘ah, yes’ to. For all of us, something biological happened in our initial development, for which there was no erratum in any Your New Baby manual.

And so we end up trying to tell our own stories, to people who would like it to be one simple story. We risk being disbelieved, being told that we simply don’t understand ourselves, or the way things are. Society doesn’t want us to have stories that don’t fit the way things are supposed to be. Either we are confused and keep silent and anonymous, or speak our stories and everyone else gets confused. There has to be a better way.

I don’t have gender dysphoria. I used to, in the sense that I described my non-belonging in the world, my self-understanding and my need to change, as being perceived as male whilst feeling more naturally female. The changes I made put it all right, so whatever you call the diagnosis, my gender, as I now show and live and express it, is correct. Had those changes not required clinical intervention, I may never have included the label in my story. But my own complete story is one of development, from confused little boy all the way through to happy woman.

My story, your story, Caroline’s story, every famous trans woman and pioneer’s story, and every anonymous trans man and woman’s story, is singular. But what we are all saying is that no-one can write or narrate our stories for us, let alone make it all the same story.

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Happy anniversary

  • Posted on July 18, 2015 at 7:07 pm

My partner went to bed at about 3am this morning. She did’t wake me, because my phone was switched off and her messages from Germany only popped up this morning. Before leaving this week, she had left me a beautiful pair of earrings and a card, with a keyring inscribed ‘you are loved’, tucked secretly in the back of a drawer.

Rather than write a long and philosophical blog this week, I just want to celebrate my first anniversary, of perhaps the most significant day in my life so far.

This day last year I woke to no breakfast, only the promise of an enema. Oh; and surgery. I waited longer than expected, and for a while sat writing my thoughts in my notebook. I never copied them out, but here they are:

This is a bit unexpected. I awoke so peaceful and calm. It is not that the coming hours are matter-of-fact. But there is something of a watershed here. A grand leaving behind of a whole side of life, about which, yes, there is some relief, but mostly just that it’s true. It’s a strange thing to see and touch part of yourself that has been important and know that soon it will be gone. Mainly, though, I’m full of wonder that how I shall soon be is a fulfilment of my deepest self-image. Are you familiar with Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance? That there is an energetic space that our bodies fill? Without claiming this as ‘fact’, I have an intuitive empathy with this, and a strong feeling that this is how I shall feel – a better, truer fit with my energetic self. Will that innate sense of body, experienced in meditation, come finally to rest in me? Over coming weeks I shall get to know a new reality, but already I know it will be right.

I was right, and now, one year to the day I am in an unexpected place. The surgery was as perfect as could be, my healing was quick and unproblematic, the high heat of summer turned to autumn and I finally let go a number of final strands of my past. These were mental ones; ones that helped me in decluttering my flat this year. They were cutting loose my grief, even cutting free my acceptance of loneliness. I started going out to do things that would reattach me to a progressive world; I started to look for the future me.

And it was in a ‘Future You’ workshop series that I quite unexpectedly met my partner. Of all the things that happened this last year, this is the one that has changed life the most. No-one has been so accepting of all my realities, and that in itself is tremendously grounding. To be loved, and to love, I find the most validating experiences anyone can have.

A number of trans women have commented (or advised) that the few years after surgery are ones of ongoing self-realisation. Certainly, they are unencumbered by other people’s decisions, clinical treatment, uncertainty about the next appointment and a constant sense of waiting, kicking your heels. And I think I must agree. Had I not wanted the treatment, then it would not have been a watershed, but once you are committed to seeing it through, it feels like nothing else matters. I no longer had the obsession this day last year, so the time since has been one of free self-development.

Speaking only for myself, I do not feel in a trans space any more. I know I still need to explain sometimes to people why I may seem a bit different, but I don’t feel ‘trans’ or queer in myself. I wouldn’t mind if I did, but I just don’t. The body I enjoy now looks OK, it feels OK, and better than that, sharing it with my partner has never been other than completely natural and complete. Even writing my blog on trans matters can feel like an old story. I write still, to encourage, and to observe even this.

If this is your journey, and you are still travelling, it may seem long; just trust that you will get there, and that it’s good. If you know someone who is trans, and going through the hormone and /or surgery route, try to celebrate with them that this is the most authenticating experience they will ever have. If you are trans but not inclined to have every or any clinical intervention, then be happy and fulfilled. It’s just that I did need it, and it for me it’s the best thing I could ever have done.

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Tell me about your childhood

  • Posted on July 5, 2015 at 2:41 pm

I’ve said here before, that the only task of every psychiatrist I saw throughout my transition, was to make sure that I had no underlying psychiatric or mental disorder. Detecting gender dysphoria (or whatever we choose to call it) is a pretty difficult thing for someone who has never experienced it, but like any doctor or medical person, of course all you can go with is signs and symptoms, and diagnostic data. Unlike a bone, there is no x-ray or scan that will reveal gender identity. Chromosome tests have little if anything to do with gender; it is a felt thing. It is a known thing. And yes, it is a bit peculiar.

I am almost one year through my post-surgical transition now, and I am honest about where I am. The old gender identity feels very far away, my body has been altered, not as in restoration, but as in best-possible adjustment. Six months experience of sex, after the first five months of self-acquaintance, and I know where the imperfections lie. I am completely satisfied though, knowing that I have the best outcome I could expect. From the experience of trans men, I know I had it surgically easier, a compensation for entering my fifth year of weekly facial electrolysis. Having said that, I still have this deep awareness of how my body would feel had I been born with female genitalia. It is a bit different (not a lot), and it is uncanny. Something is there in my head like the few wires in a standard car electrical wiring loom unconnected because they were designed for the extra features I didn’t buy.

Yes; for me it is that strong and intuitive. I know what it would have been like to have the extra foglamps and dashboard gizmos.

My car could have extras. There are wires and fuses going nowhere, and I don’t have forward foglamps. It only matters in severe fog; they aren’t a requirement. But I know …

No-one can go for surgical transition expecting total perfection. Satisfaction, oh yes. But the full upgrade? So it is, that I feel most of us will always live with knowing we had a development problem pre-birth. We learn to celebrate what we have, do what we can, and live purposefully. I have never been happier.

But I do know that had I faced the total truth as a teenager, it would have been a harder thing to contemplate, for all kinds of reasons. You can ask a mature adult about their lives and investigate with them all their major influences. You can probably get to the root of things and recognise genuine gender dysphoria, with a sense of real responsibility being taken. For younger people, there is so much Internet information and dialogue going on, that you have to find the person through the learned language, once they have spent real time online. There, you can learn how to be, as much as learn how you are. The Internet saved me, in the sense that I recognised myself. Also, I knew I had a lot to lose if I got it wrong. But I did find my own narrative back to the age of five, in memories that only made sense with the new information.

My childhood was uninformed, it was vanilla, because I was not really permitted to know, think or discuss anything about sex or gender. When I tell you about my childhood, it is pure experience, and the interpretation is by the mature me. I don’t have to claim to have preferred dolls to diggers as toys, and I don’t have to pretend I dressed as a princess. I can tell you what it felt like not to expect a female puberty. I can tell you what it felt like to lose the colourfulness of being very small, as I was dressed as a plain boy for school, when my sister had budgerigars all over her dress, or even when my little school friend had a simple pink gingham dress. I did not need to exaggerate anything to ensure the diagnosis I wanted.

The earnest, very young, child who expresses an uninformed conviction about their gender not matching their body, has to be listened to. Parents may not like it, or be scared by it. But what is a very young child really telling you? Surely, they are telling you something. Later, when a child expresses identity conflict, it may be more difficult, since they can be over-informed as well as under-informed. But still, they are telling you something that is important to them, and as a parent, the best care you can offer is to listen. Yes, recognise that they may be easily influenced, but don’t impose your rationality on them too easily.

I guess it is easier to tell someone about your childhood later in life. I acknowledge that we alter our memories, but the ones that really stick are the ones with most significance. The significance may not be obvious, but it will be there. Why do I remember certain smells so well that I can recall them and the places where they were, so long after? I can’t tell you why; only that I can, and that something made me remember these windows on my childhood better than others. Asking a pubescent child about their earlier childhood feelings may not be so easy to interpret. There will be more of the memories, and less maturity with which to reflect rather than simply remember. But still, they do have the capacity to tell you their life story so far, as they understand it.

Children also must be allowed to make mistakes, and you know as a parent the best you can do is always be there to support and guide. You can’t prevent all the mistakes, and it isn’t your job to do so. Above all, don’t push your child in a direction that simply avoids what you find awkward or embarrassing. When it comes to genuine gender dysphoria expressed by a child, parents don’t usually know what to do. In many cases the parents will not agree. It may be ‘just a phase’ or it may not. One parent or both may feel scared of losing a daughter or son, or personally losing face in their own social circle. The truth is, you all need to find out.

Adult people in gender transition currently are required to live for two years in their preferred gender expression before invasive treatment can take place. It’s very frustrating if you have known all your life. But I know people who have switched about a number of times, either for lack of courage or conviction that this is what they really need to do. For children, the most that will be done is to delay puberty, in order to give the opportunity to really find out how to proceed. But you do have to be honest and open, and be prepared to decide one way or another.

If someone does not have strong gender dysphoria, it’s OK to be gender fluid, non-binary or androgynous. It is OK to be neither or both, however confusing some people may find it. What is not OK, is to impose your view of gender on someone who is struggling to find their identity. It is not your choice or decision. As a parent, the most loving and supportive thing you can do is to listen, be properly informed yourself, and swim alongside your child. You may swallow water, but you won’t drown; but they might if you don’t even jump in. No minority group, and no young persons’ group, has so high a suicide and attempted suicide rate as transgender youth.

There is support available, more so now than ever before. If you need advice or help for your child, please look up and contact Mermaids.

The reason I wrote this today is because I was talking to such a parent about such a child, where the situation is not altogether clear as yet, and where the other parent is dogmatically and assertively opposed to contemplating properly hearing the child. The youngster may or may not have gender dysphoria, but that is the pool they are swimming in right now.

I can think about my childhood, and I can tell my adult story of transition. But I can’t help diagnose anyone else. What I do know is that our childhoods matter for the rest of our lives, and we owe it to youngsters to let them live theirs freely, with all the exploration and mistakes it involves. I didn’t explore much, and I did make mistakes. In the end, I lived too long suppressing my gender with a lot of internalised fear and anger. A decision like gender transition is not easy (especially if you are young) if you are facing a life with one or two permanently disconnected wires just so your headlights work well.

So tell me about your childhood, and I will tell you why it simply matters that you can.

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