Peers Can’t Make People Trans
Transgender Transitions: reflections from the other side
You can’t hate someone whose story you know
-Margaret J. Wheatley
I am a Transgender woman.
I completed my legal transition in August of 2021, and my medical transition in May of 2022. I am completely, physically, and legally, a woman. The old man is dead.
This is a reflection on claims that peer pressure is leading to an increase in the number of youth identifying as Gender Questioning or Trans.
No human being can encourage another person to question their sexual orientation or gender identity unless the seed is already inside waiting for the right growing conditions to germinate.
I’ve read many of the “nuclear holocaust” articles speculating on why more youth are identifying as transgender, or more really questioning if they could perhaps be trans or somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of being totally male or female.
It’s all bunch of bull!
Side note before going any further — full transparency — I am a full fledged, dues paying, post-graduate degree member of The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). So I have a bias that I’m going to share through the remainder of this article.
As a child I knew I was different. I didn’t understand why I was treated as boy instead of as a girl. It was a confusion or conundrum I never understood until the story of Renee Richards broke. Only then, as I came to understand that I wasn’t alone feeling like I was living in the wrong body with the wrong social standards imposed on me.
The story of Renee Richards didn’t make me trans. It simply gave me a name for the feelings I was struggling with. I was already trans. I just didn’t have a word or a name for it.
So now I have a name for the feeling and gained the ability to communicate what is inside me. That was all that Renee gave me. She didn’t put any pressure on me. Truthfully, we’ve never met or communicated in any way with each other.
On a different note but related to pressure to become trans:
I do wonder if the transgender condition can be hereditary. My hypothesis comes from the writings of Jennifer Finney Boylan and Amanda Jette Xnox, and my personal experience of a grandchild who identifies as non-binary
In chapter 7 of Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jenny lays out how she first met her daughter Zaira, whom she had previously known as her son Zach. I won’t spoil the story, but Jenny goes into an incredibly vivid and vulnerable story of her internal turmoil. I strongly suggest you read it. My point is that this a story of a father and son who ultimately become mother and daughter.
In her book Love Lives Here, Amanda Jette Knox writes her story of thriving in a transgender family. Her middle child, after a lifetime of struggling with school and society in general, wrote a last desperate note to her parents declaring she was a girl.
Then later, in Chapter 14, Dissolution, her husband came out as a transgender woman.
In my own experience, I have a grandchild I would classify as Questioning Non-Binary. A few years ago they definitely thought they were FTM and had chosen a preferred name. I simply give them the space, respect, and time to figure out for themselves how they need to live their life.
Possibly hereditary? Don’t know. However, given these three examples, I have to ask the question.
Finally, a 2013 article, Hormone Treatment During Pregnancy and Gender Variance in Later Life, asks if Diethylstilbestrol(DES), a now rarely used if not outright banned synthetic estrogen developed in the late 1930s, could be a cause of transgenderism. At one time, DES was used in increasing dosage as pregnancy progressed under the assumption that it prevented miscarriages.
My point is this:
Maybe, in a small number of situations, peer pressure could initially cause some to QUESTION if perhaps they could be trans. Proper counseling, which is still a WPATH requirement, should clarify and answer that question.
The truth is, we don’t know why the body can develop differently than the heart and mind. We just know in a small percentage of the population, it does. The question of why someone identifies as gender non-conforming is far less important than the question of what to do to help these people happily live their lives.
