LogFAQs > #968423763

When Mae Sallean was a teenager, her body and mind began to slip away from each other. Her body and face began to sprout thick hair, her voice dropped, and she felt dissociated from her physical form. Something had gone wrong, and she could not reconcile the person she was with the person the world perceived her as. The disconnect left her profoundly depressed and deeply lonely.

Mae knew, somewhere deep down, that she needed to be a girl. She lacked the language for it. In Maes heavily religious Texas community, the existence of queer people was barely acknowledged, and trans people, she says, were only seen in pornography and on Maury. But she knew, all the same.

When Mae was 15, her mother discovered a secret box full of womens clothing that Mae wore when no one else was at home. Though very Christian, Maes mother didnt freak out. She wanted to help. So she found a Christian counselor for Mae. The counselor, who had no formal training, tried to convince Mae that being trans was one of the worst things she could be and that if she didnt change her ways, she would go to hell.

He framed it on the same level as pedophilia, Mae says. That was the number one thing that stuck from those meetings until I started transitioning: I am on the same level as a pedophile.

The conversation about trans kids right now is fundamentally broken. Because it is led, by and large, by cis people, it focuses on the potential regret children and adolescents might have after transitioning, and ignores the social, physical, emotional, and psychological costs of not transitioning. It ignores the reams of studies that underline the need to support trans kids. It ignores the lived experiences of many trans people, who despair that they were kept from transitioning as youths.

Until this year, this conversation about trans kids had mostly been carried out in the media, with publications from the New York Times to the Atlantic to the Los Angeles Times publishing stories that suggested medical practitioners arent doing enough to vet potential transitioners under the age of 18.
Lawmakers were listening, and the 2022 legislative session introduced a new spate of bills aimed at stopping children from accessing trans-affirming health care, among plenty of other anti-trans legislation, especially against an incredibly small number of trans kids playing sports in school. In all, 34 states have considered anti-trans legislation in some form.
Steps taken by the state of Texas to prosecute providing health care to trans kids as child abuse mark the most extreme end of this push. Entered as supporting evidence for Texass measure? A recent piece on trans kids from the New York Times.
But those stories werent about passing legislation, at least on their face; they were typically aimed at a presumed audience of parents. The Atlantic emblazoned on a 2018 cover the words: Your child says [hes] trans. [He] wants hormones and surgery. [Hes] 13. Only it didnt use the right pronouns to refer to the real trans boy who served as its model.
Parents have been receiving an onslaught of messages about what could go wrong if their child was to transition; theyve rarely been asked to consider what could go wrong if they werent able to. We are running, in real time, an experiment on what happens when you dont accept trans kids.
For Maes part, she struggled gamely through her teen years and early 20s, trying as hard as she could not to be trans. But her relationship with her mother, the only other person in Maes circle of family and friends who knew Maes secret, deteriorated. Mae remembers occasionally wishing her mother would die, as she was the only other person who knew of Maes trans identity. Today, they have a relationship, but they cant get back what they lost.
While it is easy to view the conversation about trans youth on a statewide or even national scale, its important not to forget that it is also a very intimate conversation, one had in individual houses across the country. For trans children, the stakes of those conversations whether held in statehouses or in living rooms are literally life and death.

Life in a transphobic society is hard for trans people; therefore, I hope my loved one is not trans might be a train of thought that makes perfect sense to parents like Maes mother. It also treats transness as something fungible, akin to an aesthetic preference or a changing fashion.

The risks inherent in treating a childs trans identity as a temporary fancy can be considerable. Most obviously, keeping a teenager from transitioning before puberty can make a teens mind and body seem as though they are traveling away from each other at light speed.

I felt alienated from everyone around me, and I was constantly terrified of people finding out that I wasnt who they thought I was, says Nat Hunter, who first came out as a teen in 2013, then was prevented from transitioning by their parents.