On April 7, 2021, the UC San Francisco Child and Adolescent Gender Center offered a Zoom “training” entitled “Fertility Issues for Transgender and Nonbinary Youth.” Advertised widely on Facebook, the session was led by well-known gender therapist Diane Ehrensaft and a colleague, and was attended by over 100 people via Zoom. A recording of the session was provided to 4thWaveNow by an attendee. This article will draw on a few excerpts from the session, available for viewing here and here.
There’s a lot to unpack in the nearly two-hour long session, and we hope to address it more fully in future writings. For now, this piece will focus on one key theme explored in the session:
Future reproduction is pretty much foreclosed as a possibility for children who have been puberty-blocked and who subsequently continue on (as nearly all do) to cross sex hormones, but the “benefits outweigh risks” to move the child from, as Ehrensaft puts it, “gender dysphoria to gender euphoria.”
The fertility-wrecking aspect of the blockers>cross-sex hormones regimen isn’t new ground for those of us who’ve been closely following the accelerating trajectory of pediatric transition in the last few years. Indeed, gender clinicians themselves have known and talked about it for years. The issue is that biological reproduction depends on full maturation of gametes (sperm and ova), and gamete maturation depends upon a person completing their natal puberty.
But what may be new to our readers is that Ehrensaft–a developmental psychologist by training– herself recognizes a concern that child-transition skeptics have repeatedly pointed out: tweens and young teens undergoing these treatments are not developmentally mature enough to comprehend the full magnitude of irreversible sterilization. (Interestingly, she also discussed this three years ago at the 2018 WPATH conference in Buenos Aires.)
Although Ehrensaft (as you might guess) continues to recommend these treatments, in her Zoom presentation, she explains in detail that clinicians, parents, and other adults involved in the child’s care shouldn’t overburden a child with “TMI” –too much information—too many details– about the momentous decision to undergo interventions that result in permanent chemical sterilization.
Now is as good a time as any to dispense (again) with a typical reaction expressed when anyone talks about fertility and trans kids. Many trans activists routinely pooh-pooh the idea that people should be concerned about the loss of future fertility in medically-transitioned children. “You just think women should be baby machines! Not everyone wants to have babies!” Again we state (as we have previously): The issue is not whether a child should ever want “genetically related” (to use Ehrensaft’s term) offspring when they reach adulthood. It is that it is a human right to make the decision to reproduce–or not–when one has reached adulthood. Stated more plainly: Sterilizing children is a human rights violation. Until quite recently, these statements would not have been considered remotely controversial—but here we are.
Before delving further into yesterday’s Zoom session, let’s briefly review some of Ehrensaft’s previous remarks on the sterilization of trans kids.
Regular readers and followers of the 4thWaveNow Twitter account will be aware of Ehrensaft’s now-infamous presentation at a 2016 conference in Santa Cruz, CA, perhaps best known for the segment on barrettes and onesies. Less well known perhaps is her opinion, expressed in the same venue, that parents who might want to protect their children’s foundational human right to decide (yea or nay) about reproduction as adults (as opposed to middle school-age) are wrongly interfering with their children’s “dreams” and only balk because of a selfish desire for “genetically related” grandchildren.
“We have to work with parents on—these aren’t your dreams, we have to focus on your child’s dreams, and what they want.”
It appears Ehrensaft has not changed her views much on this in the last 5 years. In the April 7th 2021 Zoom session, Ehrensaft again appeared to relegate any worries or ethical concerns about sterilizing an 11- or 12-year-old child to nothing more than a self-centered parental desire for grandchildren. Note that in the slide reproduced here, the 11-year-old “assigned female at birth” identifies as “genderqueer.” 
Back in 2016, Ehrensaft waxed enthusiastic that many of the puberty-blocked trans kids she has worked with are mature beyond their years, capable of choosing adoption over biological offspring, just as a thoughtful adult might do after careful deliberation. (Interestingly, Ehrensaft seems to have moderated her opinion on this somewhat. In last week’s session, she cautioned clinicians that such pronouncements could possibly be “almost a reflexive response” from some young clients who just want to obtain blockers or hormones, an “overblown altruism”.)
But Ehrensaft’s key point back in 2016 was that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are directly analogous to fertility-robbing chemotherapy treatments for children with terminal cancer, since both are “life saving” and urgently required interventions. The message is powerful (whether accurate or not) and more than enough to chasten any loving parent: Denying your middle schooler blockers and hormones is tantamount to letting a child with terminal cancer die for lack of treatment.
We have, of course, heard the life-saving claim many times before: that dysphoric tweens require these treatments for survival, despite risks to not only their future fertility, but also potentially to their sexual function. There is no historical evidence for this claim (in fact, child and youth suicide rates have increased since the advent of pediatric medical transition).
(A thorough examination of the flaws in the “suicide or transition” orthodoxy would require another 3000-word article, but for those interested, see here, here, and here for some more reading on the subject.)
Now let’s take a closer look at Ehrensaft’s April 7th Zoom presentation.
You may have heard that puberty blockers are supposed to “buy time” for the dysphoric child to decide whether to proceed further with medical intervention. Indeed, that was the original intent when puberty blockers were first prescribed to gender dysphoric children in the Netherlands. But there’s a reason why the original Amsterdam clinician-researchers were (and still are) cautious about recommending social transition for younger children: Their goal was to prevent those children who might outgrow their gender dysphoria from embarking on lifelong, unnecessary medicalization; to avoid concretizing what is for some a transient gender confusion. The Dutch engaged in lengthy evaluation and recommended blockers for a carefully assessed cohort of their young patients. Even then, the blockers were meant to buy time.
But Ehrensaft and other “affirmative” clinicians have turned the more cautious “watchful waiting” approach on its head in the last decade or so. No longer is a child encouraged to leave the question open as to whether they will become lifelong medical patients; now they are “affirmed,” often as young as toddlerhood; and at the first sign of puberty, in Ehrensaft’s words, they urgently desire blockers to
“ward off an unwanted puberty that they’ve been thinking and worrying about for years…These kids who have socially transitioned many years prior, they don’t NEED more time to explore their gender. They’ve known from an early age what their authentic gender was…they’ve been living their affirmed gender for many years by the time they reach puberty.”
For these children, blockers (and the cross-sex hormones which nearly inevitably follow provide “continuity of care in gender affirmation and discontinuity in potential capacity to ever create progeny with their own genetic material.”
So common is social transition (in the US at least), Ehrensaft reported on April 7th, that US researchers have found upwards of 90% of kids requesting pubertal blockade have already socially transitioned. The full ramifications of this increase in social transition (encouraged by affirmative therapists like Ehrensaft) have never been explored in a controlled study. It’s interesting that affirmative clinicians readily follow the Dutch protocol for the use of puberty blockers, while utterly dismissing their cautions about early social transitions.
So if children “affirmed” (and therefore socially transitioned) since early childhood are now justifiably candidates for blockers and then cross hormones, what is the responsibility of clinicians and parents in consenting to these interventions, given that (in her words) “blocking puberty takes away options for fertility for most?”
Ehrensaft acknowledges that a child at Tanner stage 2 (that is, the earliest sign of puberty— “as early as 8 or 9 years old”) is not emotionally or psychologically equipped to understand sex or reproduction, beyond much more than a simple, concrete description of sperm + egg. What’s more, she says, asking a child to consider the mechanics of sex and reproduction at this age may actually be psychologically harmful!
“Fertility considerations about blockers followed by hormones brings on the storm before the lull is over”… So we now have a child who could be as young as 8, 9 who has to think about sex, babies, and future roles rather than games and game playing, which is where we situate development at this period…it’s a developmental stretch and it can create emotional stress.”
She calls this “the disruption”– the “developmental disarray” which could result from informing a child still interested in games and make-believe (and though she doesn’t say it, at an age when some may still believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny):
“So we’re needing to acquire the child’s assent for medical interventions and that requires asking a child prematurely to take on sex and drugs but no rock and roll.”
So what to do if you don’t want to stress out the child with TMI when they are at the “just the facts” stage of development — when you “may get a lot of squirminess about sex or around sex”? Do you talk about how the jaunty boy sperm meets the cute girl ovum (like the slide picture shows) but stay silent on the icky stuff about sex? After all, they’re not ready (and may even be disgusted by) the “rock and roll” older adolescents become intensely interested in with full-on puberty and sexual maturation.
Pretty much, says Ehrensaft. Instead of “giving them more information than they need or can handle,”adults should limit themselves to simplistic explanations about reproduction but not sex.
The question arises: If a child as young as 8 or 9 years old “can’t handle” information about sex, how can they handle deciding whether they are OK with losing the right to reproduce (or not) as an adult, when given “just the facts”?
Ehrensaft buttresses her points by highlighting the developmental framework popularized by the late Erik Erikson (one of the 20th century’s most respected developmental psychologists), which rests on the notion that successful and healthy maturation and adult identity consolidation occurs in stages. She notes that children being asked to decide about their future fertility are “two or three” stages behind the age when they would be better equipped to comprehend the gravity of that choice.
It’s not surprising she would be familiar with the giants in that field; though best known as a gender therapist, Ehrensaft, as mentioned previously, is a PhD developmental psychologist. (It’s much less widely known that in the 1990s, she also had some involvement, as a psychotherapist, in the widely-discredited “satanic ritual abuse” preschool controversy.)
But very unlike Erikson, Ehrensaft’s analyses & recommendations always stem from an untestable confirmation bias: that “gender identity” is a native, fundamental property of the human brain, present from birth (as she said in that 2016 talk, babies “probably know their gender as early as the beginning of the second year of life…they probably know even earlier but they’re really pre-pre verbal”). In contrast, Erikson’s work made no mention of innate gender. Rather, he emphasized identity development as a long process, involving an essential “crisis” that is often not resolved until one’s 20s. In fact, Erikson posited that a person might not attain healthy adult psychological integration if they did not experience an identity crisis. Another question arises: Could gender dysphoria, for at least some children and adolescents, be something that needs to be struggled with for successful resolution and maturation, instead of ameliorated (short-circuited?) as Ehrensaft and other affirmative clinicians now do via social transition and hormone blockers?
After warning her audience not to burden tweens with TMI, she rather abruptly notes that
“Those of us who provide this care have been accused of sterilizing children. And what I would say is, we are not sterilizing everybody—[quickly revises] anybody.”
Yet this is precisely what Ehrensaft has told her audience affirming clinicians are doing, just with different words (e.g., “they won’t be able to have a genetically related child”): These treatments WILL permanently take the choice to reproduce away from a child who has been puberty-blocked and then moves to cross-sex hormones. A dictionary definition for that is sterilization.
Not missing a beat, she continues:
“I would encourage us to hold this in mind: That when people—when adults—confront medical infertility it is a very very difficult road and there are certainly and people may go through some really hard times but there’s not a high suicidality rate for infertile people facing medical infertility. But we do know there are alarmingly high rates of self harm and suicidality and suicidal thoughts among both adults and youth who experience extreme gender dysphoria. And I will say that one of the things I’ve read recently while reading a research study it struck me one youth talking about fertility preservation. I have to decide between saving myself and holding the option of someday having a child…to me it’s a choice between that potential child and my life.”
What research study? Who conducted it? And why would children believe (or be encouraged to believe) they must make a “Sophie’s Choice” between their own lives and that of potential future offspring?
“But as we communicate the fertility information to youth, hold in mind, not many people become suicidal about medical infertility, but many do about gender dysphoria.”
Where are the references for this statement? Where are the studies comparing the “not many” infertile adults who never become suicidal, with adults who were sterilized at the dawn of puberty? Where is the NIH-funded research looking at how chemically sterilized trans kids subsequently feel at 20, 35, 40 and later (much later for males) about having their reproductive choices foreclosed when they were 10 or 12 years old?
To her credit, Ehrensaft does acknowledge there are real ethical issues to ponder here. She even poses the same question many pediatric transition skeptics regularly do:
“Is a child really able to foresee into the future and foreshorten fertility … And how can a child two or three stages behind Erikson’s stage 7 anticipate what they will feel two or three stages later?”
She provides no answer to her own question; in fact, she simply poses more questions, and says it’s “for us to start [emphasis added] finding out. And we are.”
How can this not be seen as an admission that the entire “affirmative” pediatric-transition enterprise is, in fact, an experiment–with unknown future consequences?
Ehrensaft wraps up this part of the Zoom session with an anecdote she says she heard from another gender clinician, Scott Leibowitz, MD:
“I want to mention one intervention I learned from Scott Leibowitz. Which is, in making these decisions with youth about fertility and their future fertility, once they’ve made the decision, he invites them to write a letter to themselves at age 30, and write their present-age self to their 30-year-old self explaining to them what process they went through to make the decision they did that may have implications for future fertility at age 30 or 25.:
What does Ehrensaft (and Leibowitz, assuming she has represented his views accurately) think this letter-writing exercise will accomplish “after [the child has already] made the decision” that they will never reproduce? Is this meant to serve as an apology of sorts to the regretful adult? That 30-year-old future self, with a 30-year-old brain and all its more nuanced and experience-tempered understanding of the world, its fully developed frontal lobes, will see this letter by his or her child-self and feel — what? Does any 30-year-old look upon the writings or thoughts of their 12-year-old self and see wisdom? They will likely “forgive” their 12-year-old self, but …
Ehrensaft presents this anecdote as if it’s some kind of a solution to the question she posed: How can a child at an early stage of emotional, psychological, and intellectual development make a decision several years before they are equipped to fully comprehend it?
To sum up the 4thWaveNow reaction to the main message imparted in this Zoom “training”: Ehrensaft’s use of (accurate) developmental psychology to justify the impossibility of obtaining informed consent from minors, with only the emotional blackmail of suicidality as a rationale, is nothing short of mind-blowing.
But maybe this is all much ado about nothing. After all, as Ehrensaft’s colleague Jen Hastings, MD told her Zoom audience, maybe none of this will matter in a future when reproductive tech and genetic engineering liberate us from our biological constraints:
“Gametes may soon be irrelevant.”
The complete April 7, 2021 Zoom training can be viewed (in two parts) here and here.
This is abhorrent. Why are we allowing this to happen? I’ll read about the satanic abuse controversy later…
This woman obviously never worked with infertile adults. I myself felt suicidal over infertility, and I just happen to be a lesbian with Pcos.
Why has no one made an ethics complaint to the APA about Ehrensaft? I’m a clinical psychologist and would gladly spearhead such an effort on behalf of 4thWaveNow.
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Seconding the comment above. The pain of living with infertility is deep. I never felt so alone in my life the years undergoing fertility treatments. I fell to my knees sobbing. It’s a pain that can break you if you let it. Thankfully I found a support group (Resolve). The women I met there became my sisters. The adults in gender clinics, and the selfish activists who act like sterilizing children isn’t a loss, are reprehensible. There will be future lawsuits once many of these kids pushed intro transitioning grow up and realize the full extent of their loss.
Children don’t have the emotional, intellectual, mental, or physical maturity to make decisions about their sex life and/or possible reproductive life in their future. They don’t know of what they’re doing; that what will happen to them by the hands of full grown greedy adults is life altering, irreversible and painful body modification and lifelong sickening drug/hormone taking. Children, teens… change their minds very rapidly. Puberty, adolescence is a time for growth and development of the human being. Not something to be avoided.
How do I know? Because I was a “gender dysphoric” child (“Tomboy”) who grew out of this – and ended up dating boys/men, eventually getting married and having a child. A child I wanted and love very very much. I am so glad I didn’t have access to transitioning medical services as a child.
Don’t even get me started on the interruption of normal sexual development.
Of course these poor kids get the idea of suicide from their so-called online friends, doctors and/or therapists. It’s planted like a seed in their young, impressionable, vulnerable to suggestion minds.
I can’t even continue…
Is the concept of maladaptive coping just completely verboten? What if these kids claimed they need to cut off their hands or blind themselves to “feel” right? These “experts” going to affirm that right? “Feeling” like a male or female means nothing. When these people figure out it used to be common for boys to wear dresses when clothing was limited, I wonder what they’ll do.
Ehrensaft’s Satanic panic lies should have cost her medical license.
There are a few issues that need to be clarified. The first is that there are five recognised types of Gender Dysphoria. This is not a one size fits all. It’s important to understand the differences in order to approach the issue humanely. These are, Childhood Onset (homosexual), Adolescent onset/ROGD (usually Autogynephilia in males), Adult onset (Autogynephilia in males) Autohomoeroticism and psychosis-induced. The last two are more rare.
These all have different aetiologies and are further complicated by the Male/Female split.
The next issue is sex hormones. These are no respecter of PC culture. Oestrogen is fairly mild in its effects but Testosterone is brutal. It is literally a poison to a female body. It provokes changes like hirsuteness, mpb, deepened voice, development of masculine bony features etc, and potentially (though not always) renders the subject infertile. None of these are reversible. Thus, extreme caution should be taken with females.
I have long stated my belief that no hormonal or surgical intervention should be available to girls under 18. Zero. Just no.
The same problem, the brutality of Testosterone, also applies to males in the Childhood onset and Adolescent Autogynephile groups. Particularly for the former, their aim, if they persist, is to pass easily as women. We also know that the overwhelming majority of these boys are attracted to men. In particular they are attracted to conventional masculine men, not gay ones. (Note: the Western concept of ‘gay’ is restricted to the West and has only existed since about 1970. Everywhere else, homosexual males are highly feminised and they partner conventionally masculine men. They refuse to partner other homosexual males.)
For these individuals, natural paternity is not a desire. They might become adoptive mothers under the right circumstances but they never desire to be fathers. Making these individuals wait until they are in their late teens is cruel and unnecessary. Even Zucker does not advise it. The argument presented re adult choice is simply null here.
The argument has devolved, unfortunately, to a nasty little dogma: it is better to be a gay man than a woman. Why? ‘To avoid a lifetime of surgery and hormones’. Quite apart from the obvious misogyny, this is baseless. In most of the world, trans women do not undergo surgery. It is only in the West that the obsession with Genital Reconstruction Surgery exists and is promoted (it’s lucrative). So strike the obsession and the surgery argument fails.
Hormone therapy for trans women devolves to Testosterone blocking and supplemental estrogen at a level similar to that provided to post menopausal women; and the issue of T can be dealt with, in adult life, by orchiectomy, similar to what you probably do to your household pets. This requires no follow up surgery.
That leaves our Adolescent Onset group of males. This is actually far less well understood than the Adult form. Until recently, many did not think this form existed but it does. If you’re the parent of a young male like this, then caution is advisable and I should say no surgery. I see plenty of this type here and desistance, around 35, does occur. In the West they’re often confused with the Childhood or Homosexual group (in males) but their history is different
Your categorization does not address the trans lesbian, men who wish to be women but still want to have sex with women. And Trans gay men, women who wish to live as men but want to still have sex with men.
Yup. He’s a guy. Duh.
I checked out his website and, just as I’d expected, he’s a “chicks with dicks” enthusiast who disapproves of regular homosexual relationships between male-presenting men. He’s basically just recycling ideas in queer theory and trans activism to allow himself indulge his love for girldick while dismissing ordinary homosexuality as a Western perversion. This also explains his omission of TiFs and “transbians” from his categorization of dysphoria. They’re just not personally interesting.
The autogynephiles(AGPs)/transvestic fetishists are the male, heterosexual, cross-dresser sexual fetishists, some of whom claim to be lesbian–it is insulting and absurd. These AGPs are the drivers of the ‘trans’ agenda.
Also, the fact that the Dutch were being so careful to screen out the hetero girls only high-lighted their misogyny and homophobia in ‘transing the gay away’ regarding the lesbian/same-sex attracted girls and that is reprehensible–shame on those despicable, morally bankrupt so-called medical researchers. ‘Transitioning’ is ‘gay conversion therapy’ and ‘sex-lobotomizing’ by ‘gender’ and should be outlawed. Medicine falls for false nostrums and fads all of the time–remember the lobotomy scandal? But indoctrination and greed causes reason, prudence, and integrity to fly out the window.
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Excellent article! The last paragraph, though, is bone chilling. I’m looking forward to reading more of your analysis of this training session. Great work!
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The links to transhumanist movements and international commercial surrogacy industries (which some would call human trafficking) are becoming more overt as these “activists” gain power. I fear their real long term agenda is even more sinister than the sterilizing of kids.
Hi. I’m relieved to find this site. Is there any way to communicate with professionals and other parents regarding this subject? Any help or guidance would be deeply appreciated.
Seeking same. Unfortunately no updates since April. Is the site defunct?
Seems like it’s been a while since this blog was updated. This topic is more relevant than ever and unbiased parenting guidance is lacking. I hope posts continue to update.
Hi Liz, I am wondering the same thing as we grapple with this issue in our family. If you would like to connect, please feel free to reach out.
So, let me get this straight. Ehrensaft & company–supposedly professionals who understand and appreciate child cognitive and physical development and development across the lifespan–are asserting that prepubescent children are capable of fully processing and understanding what they’re surrendering (i.e., fertility, or the ability to have genetically related offspring). And yet children lack, at least in intensity and in any meaningful way, those physical and psychological drives that motivate us as humans to have offspring. A letter from a child to its adult self would be meaningless in this context. What a cruel joke. This is not to say that everyone who bears a child did so with intention and wisdom or that adoption isn’t an equally rich and meaningful way to care for life brought into this world. But procreation is a fundamental drive in every species on this planet, and humans, by and large, despite all their hubris, are no exception.
One way we do differ from every other species on this planet is how long we undertake child rearing. Humans are truly exceptional here in that, generally speaking, we tend to keep children under our wing for over a decade, generally until they have passed puberty. That length of time corresponds to a very real physical and cognitive development that takes far longer in humans than it does in other species. It takes us a long time to learn the intricacies of language, culture, and even the ability to regulate emotions. We owe our “intelligence” (one wonders) to this exceptionally long period of child development. We come into the world with a large head that our bodies grow into, and the reason for that is because we need A LOT of brain mass and neurons to absorb the complex human world around us. We absorb and absorb until we trim away what we don’t need on a neuronal level. To arrest that development before puberty robs the person of the ability to make a choice with a brain that will have a different set of cognitive skills than it had when it was 8 years old. The frontal lobe, involved in long-term planning, emotional regulation, etc., isn’t fully matured until beyond puberty.
How lucky previous generations were to express gender fluidity in a healthy, safe way. And they did. It’s nothing new. But now we have Big Money influencing culture in such a way that it almost feels like a game of “chicken.” Now it’s not enough to explore naturally–it must be medicalized and capitalized upon. They keep turning up the dial and see who dares to speak out–and not just parents, but young people, too. People like Ehrensaft have Big Pharma on their side, and Big Pharma and their stakeholders have the media (film, TV, major news networks, magazines, the most-visited culture/social media websites), the American Psychological Association (APA), and major institutions of public health (because their PhDs and MDs play musical chairs between private and public interest positions, not to mention Big Pharma is often a major donor of the institution itself). Trust me, these people are smart, and they’ve been in the driver’s seat of culture itself for well over a decade. And what they’re asking us to believe now is incongruent with well-established science. But do you dare question your peers, who have suddenly gotten so much positive reinforcement and social reward for being nonbinary or trans or whatever? Do you dare question the psychiatrist who is being brainwashed and incentivized to all but call you an abusive parent if you say you don’t want your child to go through an irreversible medical procedure? Do you dare question yourself? Do you dare side with your truth though it might cost you social rewards? I have the deepest respect for everyone here who did.
why this is happening, is because most parents today treat their phone like an additional child, in addition to the regular tv/ media stream that modern kids have to compete with. The kid and parent both seem ready to admit they both wish they had never been born… Vapid parents worshipping celebrities, playing video games, wallowing in pro sports and social media are the only way all of this could become dominant in a decade. Even the farm boys I know are on their phones and laptops constantly now. If you want your kids to have every chance they deserve, dump the tech, just like you don’t leave a firearm unlocked around kids. People who balk at this know they’re sabotaging their kids but do it anyway out of sadism, stupidity, and laziness. The world is not responsible to solve stupid people’s problems, the world is actually required to leave stupid people to deal with their own problems. I really don’t care about these stupid people and their stupid kids, there are much more disadvantaged people that are not demanding anything.
I have no idea where else to post this, and hope somebody else sees my story and can offer some support.
I’m going to uni in the fall, and am the older sibling to a tween suffering from classical ROGD. I’m very concerned for them (pronouns neautral for privacy only). Over the past ~18mths, they have completely changed and it breaks my heart. They went from being the light of our household, friendly and funny and supportive, to utterly self-absorbed, violent, agressive and overbearing. They idenified initally as bisexual at around eleven (exactly two months after getting thier first phone), which- being a lesbian myself- I supported wholeheartedly. Within a week they wanted to ‘come out’ to our parents; I had been openly gay for prehaps ten years by that point, but had never told our parents as I wanted to wait for the right time and until I was 100% secure in my identity. They threw a ginormous fit and screamed at us all- for what I can’t remember- and I was tramatically outed in the process after years of privete, careful growth and exploration of my identity. I was back at square one, insecure and anxious at any mention of my sexuality, after years of overcoming the issues that made me find it so difficult. Within three months, they relabelled themselves as ‘asexual’. When I gently asked if labels were healthy at this stage of exploring and questioning, as moving from bi to ace within a few months seemed a large shift, I was again exposed to a hail of abuse. They became more withdrawn and hostile, at one point I remember being called homophobic and toxic after being questioned- I mention, by my eleven year old sibling- about transmen. I said that dispite being romantically involved with a transman in the past (who never medically transitioned and desisted after a few years) I still considered myself a lesbian. I became uncomfortable and scared in my own home, always on edge and managing everything I said. As I write, I’m terrifed to post for fear they’ll find it. I’ve gone from being in a warm home I’ve always felt safe in to being desperate to start uni to get some space and rest from the constant management of my identity and self. They went on to identify as non-binary, which I stayed out of entirely apart from half-heartedly suggesting agansit binders as they are still so young- more of the same accusations of homophobia (?) and so forth. After four or five name changes they are now a ‘gay man’ and self-identify with any number of mental illnesses, carefully carrying out exaggerated sterotypical behaviours of these illnesses whenever they see fit (and dumping them when convinient or forgotten). They are more feminine then ever, loudly commenting on male celebrities constantly, dressing in a hyper-fem style, and naturally picking up every phrase off Drag Race. They scream and scream, then go silent for days, are overly nice and loving for a day or two, and it starts again. I went from being closeted to being terrified to mention anything remotely related to gayness- I feel physically tense, my heart thumps, I shake whenever something comes up that could trigger an incorrect response and therefore outrage. I’m all out of care about the situation; teachers let them choose what lessons to attend based on the peers in each given class and thier degree of ‘affirmation’, parents do whatever they’re told, and thier friendship group of seven to ten genderfluid/trans AFABs, all suffering the same mood swings, intense internet use, exaggerated and streotypical acts of mental illness that are inconsistant, regular name/label changes, and all hyper-fem and attracted to men, are an echo-chamber. Whatever happened to our LGBT+ community? Guess I’ll find out at uni. Hell, if it’s the same there, at least there’s beer!
The slogan goes: transwomen are women, transmen are men and non binary people are valid. Which I think simply shows that the people who cooked all this stuff up don’t really even know themselves what they’re talking about They can’t say what ‘non-binary’ is; just that it is ‘valid’. Your little sister is obviously hopelessly confused by it all, (who isn’t??) and of course rage and mood problems are common pubertal phenomena but in attaching it to gender fluidity she’s developed a strategy for avoiding confrontation with it as an element of her developing self, and instead can see herself as the symptom bearer in a dysfunctional family. But why would someone claiming to be ‘non-binary’ find it necessary to bind her breasts or even in the extreme case have them amputated? It can only be because the non-binary epithet is the closest one can get to being sexless, which is surely a wished for default to fall back on when the trauma of having to deal with having a sex, being desired and having desires all seems too dangerous and messy. Breasts are wrongly hyped as sex organs simply because they are easily eroticized, and therefore she wants to distance herself because she isn’t ready and probably has had a bellyful of sex and gender from at least age 7, and hasn’t had a chance to discover that an identity doesn’t have to proclaim or center any clear gender or sexual orientation to be a real identity. one can be proud of.
It sounds as if you need a good long heart to heart with Mum and Dad seeing as you’ve been ‘outed’ anyway, and they’ve probably known all along, so there’s not so much to lose but potentially a huge amount to gain. Your little sister needs you all both to support and to set limits. That’s how she’ll grow,
If her breasts are developing that would be sign she is not secretly on puberty blockers, but you may have to bear that risk in mind for the future. As with the risk that she can unwittingly come into contact with predators in these various chat circles like Reddit. If she could see that you are strong, free and assured in your own sexuality, without the need to hang it on some projected and complex identity that can only be shared in a half occult group setting, that would go a long way to set her at ease about her own personal future. She needs to be able to look up to you. And you need to get the strength to be that role model from your parents.