I walked down Karangahape Road to meet an old friend for dinner the other night. For those unfamiliar with the so-called “K Road”, it’s a vibrant, bustling, noisy street in the heart of Auckland, a hub of diversity and colour. When I was a kid, it was the strip club street, with enormous billboards featuring bare-breasted women and high heels leaving little to the imagination and prostitutes on every corner after dark. It’s not quite so overt these days, but K Road is still a hang-out for those who eschew the mainstream. I’ve always loved it, so I was happy to be back there again.
As I wandered, I marvelled at the hubbub of life around me. I was the odd one out – a 50-something old woman in pretty mundane attire, save for the pink shoes. I felt like my ordinariness made me stand out – but of course, it didn’t; no one gave a toss about me, which was just as it should have been.
Chatter and laughter punctuated the bassline thrum of traffic, creating the backing track for a very metropolitan show. I passed a group dressed in black with deathly pale faces and long dark locks. Goth is still a thing; that’s good to know. An old bloke with a guitar and a dog sat on a tatty rug, strumming quietly and chatting to his mate, a skinny bloke in ripped jeans and leather jacket, a joint hanging out the side of his mouth. As I passed, they gave me a friendly smile, and the sickly-sweet smell hung in the humid evening air.
The diversity on display grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. A young person with long hair and stubble, wearing a tartan skirt, Doc Martens, and a t-shirt proclaiming “You Do You”, walked past me. I couldn’t have agreed more. Two women with nose rings stood beside me holding hands when we stopped at the traffic lights. Three teens with shaved heads, camo pants and combat boots looked at me like I had recently landed from another planet. I grinned inwardly, enjoying their distaste for my conformity.
As I crossed the road on the pride flag crossing, my very own, very non-conforming teen, Sam, was in front of my mind. She’d had a big few months, both liberating and restricting, the former self-imposed, that latter most definitely not. It had been hard, and it was still hard. But every day, she got out of bed and faced the world bravely, authentically, and with hope.
You see, six months ago, Samuel became Samantha. We still call her Sam, but “he” has become “she”. It’s been a tremendous change for Sam, but alongside the good stuff, the realities of ignorance, prejudice and transphobia have also hit her world. Not from all corners – far from it in fact, from those who truly know and love her she has experienced unconditional support. But not so from the wider community – those more peripheral in her life have come crashing in and occupied far more space than they are welcome to.
Through these experiences, Sam has taught me more things. Some were lessons I didn’t want to learn, but all were necessary. I’ll do my best to share them with you.
Gender dysphoria is brutal.
It was a Monday evening in late September. A chill hung in the darkening Spring sky. I was tired, it had been a busy day, there’d been a few wins but mostly the battles were still being fought. I’d rushed away from work earlier than ideal as I needed to collect Sam from school at five, after her musical theatre group practice. Sam’s happy place is singing, dancing and performing for a crowd – and she’s good at it. On the stage, she can be anyone she wants; the unacknowledged cloak of pretence she wears in real life is replaced by a fully sanctioned one. Art imitates life in more ways than we realise.
But this evening, something was different. Her characteristic sparkle was nowhere to be seen, and a grey cloud enveloped her as she got in the car.
I’ve used she/her here, but Sam was he/him at the time. Pronouns are tricky. Now that I’ve switched for Sam, returning to old, incorrect ways feels traitorous. But I’ll change to he/him for clarity and fidelity now, just for the retelling.
As soon as Sam got in the car, it was clear that something was wrong. I tried to jolly him along as we drove the short distance home but was met with a teenage wall of silence. I’m sure many of you have experienced that particular joy. But something was different this time. A black hole of despair filled the void between us.
When we got home, he disappeared into his room immediately, the door slamming before I could even get into the house. This is always a difficult moment when parenting teens. Do you tiptoe past, ignoring the flakes of paint that have fallen onto the carpet, literally and figuratively leaving them to their own devices? Sometimes. But not that night; I knew I needed to do something more.
“Buddy?” I knocked gently. No answer.
“Buddy? Would you like a cup of tea?”
Tea is important in our house. We drink a lot of it, often at strange times. Like 5:30 in the evening.
Still no answer. Hmmmm.
I tried again, and this time, with a degree of trepidation, I popped my head around the door.
“Hey Sammy, would you….”
The sentence remained unfinished. He was curled up in a ball on the floor between the bed and the wall, sobbing silently. I sat down beside him, awkwardly squeezing into the space. He flinched away from me. My heart broke into a thousand pieces.
Slowly, slowly, that evening, it all tumbled out. None of it was new. It had been percolating for months, along with his burgeoning maleness, leaving him confused, distressed and disgusted with his body. How could he look like this on the outside and feel so different on the inside? Worst of all were the changes to his voice. My beautiful child with his perfect pitch soprano could no longer sing the songs he loved. Gender dysphoria was killing him. And I don’t say that lightly.
He hadn’t wanted to tell me he was struggling. He thought he had this whole gender thing sorted. And he knew I was facing plenty of demons of my own at the time, so he was trying to protect me and deal with it himself. But that evening, over several hours, it became abundantly clear to me just how much he was suffering.
He didn’t fit in anywhere – to the boys, he was the weird, girly, gay kid, and to the girls, he was the boy that they didn’t quite know what to do with. No one could put him in a box, least of all Sam himself. He didn’t feel like he had any friends, and there was no one he wanted to invite to his upcoming birthday party.
He wished with all his heart that he’d been born a girl. He hated himself and his body, which had always been wrong but was now distressing him every single time he looked in the mirror or opened his mouth to speak or sing.
He wished he was dead.
We sat for hours, Sam and I, talking and crying together, sharing the burden of unfairness that he had, until now, borne on his own. We didn’t solve any of the problems, but we devised a plan. We knew what to do now. We just had to make it happen.
Fortunately, I’m a paediatrician, and even more fortunately, one of my best friends provides the gender-affirming care in our region. I contacted her the next day, and we discussed the options and the timeframe. I was aware that Mother Nature was not on our side anymore – she had delayed Sam’s pubertal onset for quite some time, but now it was progressing at pace. I can’t bring myself to consider how things would have turned out had we not had the ability to make things happen quickly. Most young people in Sam’s situation don’t. If there is anything I am grateful for in this sad, sorry tale, it is that we could access help so fast.
So, lesson #1 is this: Gender dysphoria is real, it’s brutal, and left unrecognised or ignored, it can have very serious consequences.
While Sam is a trial of one, and different transgender young people will have different stories, their struggles with mental health issues bear striking similarities. We have to look out for gender diverse young people – be they our patients, our children, or simply kids we know- as it’s hard for them to understand what’s happening to them and even harder for them to access the help they so desperately need.
Puberty blockers save lives – let’s leave them alone.
If you haven’t read the section above, do that now.
If you have, I hope it’s not too hard for you to see the connection here. Puberty blockers really do save the lives of gender diverse young people.
Sam is living proof. When I talked to her about puberty blockers that September evening, she was curious and thoughtful and wanted to understand the whys and the why nots. I didn’t have all the answers for her then, but over the ensuing days, we found out more, and by the time it came to making a decision, there was no decision to make.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past couple of years, you will have heard some impassioned, at times vitriolic, discussion about the pros and cons of puberty blockers as part of gender-affirming care. The nay-sayers love to talk about the potential long-term effects on bone health, growth potential, fertility, and even cognition, as well as the purported medicalisation of gender diversity, which, they say, is better managed with social and psychological support. Others feel that young people questioning their gender identity are being pressured to start puberty blockers, a course of action which they might not fully understand, or that puberty blockers are being prescribed to any young person who wants them by clinicians lacking appropriate training and expertise.
Some of the more ardently opposed have even gone so far as to write letters to clinicians providing gender-affirming care, warning them that they are putting themselves at risk of legal proceedings should they persist. I remain completely baffled as to why they should care. There is no robust evidence to support any of their claims of the risk of harm – in fact, puberty blockers have been used for decades for kids with precocious puberty. So, why do they feel the need to express such firmly held and fundamentally flawed views about an issue which does not affect them?
Somehow, as a society, we’ve got ourselves into a pickle about puberty blockers for absolutely no good reason. Maybe it’s the global shift to increasingly conservative political agendas? Maybe it’s the need to have a group to browbeat and harass? Maybe it’s simply ignorance?
The grossly overblown concerns about puberty blockers are only going to serve to achieve one thing – worse outcomes for a group of vulnerable young people who are already at high risk of serious mental health problems. And let’s not beat around the bush here – gender diverse young people will die if further restrictions are placed on the prescription of puberty blockers.
It’s already incredibly difficult to access gender-affirming care in New Zealand and Australia, and it’s even harder if you live in a smaller centre or don’t have the support of your parents or caregivers (or a mother who’s a Paediatrician). Let’s not make it any harder; the road is already rocky enough.
So, lesson #2 is this: Puberty blockers save lives for young people experiencing gender dysphoria, and they are a crucial part of gender-affirming care. The risks of restricting access to them far outweigh the risks of any potential side effects.
Ignorance breeds fear, and fear breeds panic.
I was a child of the Eighties. It was a good time to be a kid in New Zealand – summer holidays at the beach, meat and three veg for dinner, and quarter-acre sections to kick a ball around in. But it was a complex time, too. The Springbok tour divided the nation, with people on either side of the argument equally righteous in defence of their stance. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior one cold July morning in 1985 brought geopolitical tensions crashing into our living rooms if we weren’t already terrified by the prospect of nuclear war. And then there was this little thing called AIDS.
When AIDS started to emerge in the 1980s, media reporting was fettered by ignorance about the disease and how it was spread. There was a clear link to homosexual men, though, which led to widespread stigmatisation of gay people as “high risk”. We know now just how ignorant we were, that there was so much more to the spread of HIV and development of AIDS, but back then it was the “gay disease” and as a result, gay people were ostracised and blamed.
Ignorance led to fear, and fear led to moral panic. For many years, discrimination against gay people was blatant in political domains, healthcare settings and the wider community. Tom Hanks’ brilliant movie “Philadelphia” clearly portrays the effects of homophobia which resulted from the AIDS epidemic.
So now, forty years later, it’s the turn of transgender people. Having had a few years of tentative acceptance and increased visibility, society’s tolerance for trans people has changed. Why? Trans people haven’t changed; they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s just that more people are starting to notice them, and with that, the chance for ignorant and discriminatory discourse to enter the public arena increases.
As the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s showed us, ignorance breeds fear. Back then, it was homophobia. Now it’s transphobia. And it doesn’t take long for that head of steam to build up into an explosion of moral panic, galvanising groups of “concerned citizens” to write letters threatening clinicians who provide gender-affirming care, to preach on the evils of puberty blockers, and spread outright lies and disinformation suggesting that young people are being coerced into gender diversity.
Clearly, these are ridiculous claims – any clear-thinking person who wasted five minutes of their life listening to the hateful invective of people like Posie Parker can see that their views are based on ignorance and fear, and their words are designed to whip up a storm of moral panic. Shockingly, it works very, very well.
Human beings are not good at learning lessons from the past. We know, but we forget, or pretend we don’t know, because sometimes people need someone to blame. I’ve seen the effect this shift in society’s thinking has on Sam – from the reactions of kids around her to the policies her school has set. And it’s so unnecessary.
So, lesson #3 is this: Rebel against ignorance. Let curiosity about gender diversity drive you to knowledge and truth, and be bold enough to share what you have learned so that society can learn, too. If we don’t fight ignorance, we can’t fight fear, and the ensuing panic will be inevitable.
Young people are influenced by the messages we give them.
Sam finally started going to school in the girls’ uniform in November last year. It took a while to get things organised—emails and meetings with the Deans, assignment to a new “mentor group” given that these, for reasons I don’t understand, are gender-based, changing her name and pronouns on the school records, and the bank account-breaking purchase of the relevant attire.
I did it all happily, with hope in my heart for my precious child, and I marvelled endlessly at her determination and courage. She pre-empted the uniform switch, turning up to her Year 9 end-of-year social in a gorgeous flowery dress and green high heels. She looked stunning, but I worried incessantly about her for those few hours. As it turned out, she had a blast – the boys completely ignored her, and the girls swarmed around her like a shiny new toy. It seemed there was almost a perverse delight for them in claiming that Sam was “my friend”.
The honeymoon phase lasted until the end of the school year, and she surfed on a wave of joy in her newly adopted gender identity over the summer holidays. Then, the new school year started.
The wheels began to come off in the first week of term. Kids started to be mean. There were whispers and giggles behind hands, coupled with sidelong glances. Some of the girls who had been keen for her attention last year turned their backs. Someone decided it would be helpful to tell her that there’d been loud conversation amongst a particular group about Sam being still a boy and that they didn’t want her coming to “their” girls’ school camp.
One day she was standing in line with a friend waiting for lunch when the two kids behind her started sniffing loudly and laughing, before exclaiming “Poo, I smell rainbow!” Another day, when she was waiting for me to collect her at 6 pm after production practice, three boys on bikes started circling her, then one of them shouted “Do you have a penis?”
Just recently, she was reliably informed that the current insult circulating for her is “Sammy the Tranny”. Thankfully, she’s decided it’s hilarious because it doesn’t rhyme. She said to me, “Surely they could have come up with something better than that, Mum!” But it troubles me greatly that she’s become so hardened to this bullying and abuse.
It’s not all the kids at school – she does have some supportive and trustworthy friends, thank goodness. Most of the rest don’t care, and some don’t even know. After all, she looks more girly than most of the girls. But for the few ring leaders and perpetrators, where does this come from? Kids can be cruel, and the easiest target is the person who stands out. But I suspect there’s more to it.
I’ve said many times that young people have this sorted—for them, gender diversity is a non-issue; it’s adults who struggle to overcome long-held prejudices. I still believe this is true. But kids do absorb the unspoken messages grown-ups give them, and if that message says, “Watch out for this person,” they will take note.
Take Sam’s Year 10 school camp. Sam goes to a co-educational school, but camp is conducted in two groups—one for the boys and one for the girls. Sam is a girl, so she should go to the girls’ camp. The school has agreed to this, but with one important caveat. She can’t sleep in the bunk rooms with the other kids. Instead, she has to sleep in a room on her own.
Wow. As a parent, that makes my hair stand on end, but I hope that you, as a logical human being trying to understand, will read that and go “Hang on, why….?” The school tell us it’s so they can “keep the other kids safe”. The only implication that can be taken from that is that the school considers Sam a risk to the other students. Or perhaps the school doesn’t think that, but they’re worried that some parents will. Regardless of whether it comes from school or home, the message being beamed out to the other kids is that Sam is a danger to them, someone to be feared. And we know what fear breeds. So that’s what the kids do.
So, lesson #4 is this: We need to think about the messages our decisions, policies, and even dinner table conversations are giving to young people about gender diversity. Most kids these days are very accepting of gender diversity; the Gen Z and Alphas have this under control, and they set the standard for the generations to come. But adult-based prejudice seeps into their minds. Let’s try not to let that happen.
“Keeping kids safe” is not a thing.
So, let’s explore this “keeping kids safe” issue a bit more. We’ll start with an important question, using Sam as an example, to help get the cogs turning.
What harm are we concerned Sam will do to the other girls if she sleeps in the bunkroom on school camp?
Do we think she will get her jollies peering at them while they get changed? Do we believe that she is still a boy and has gone through this elaborate charade of claiming she’s a girl to get access to the girls’ bunkroom? Or do we think she’s a sexual pervert, at any moment readying herself to pounce on some unsuspecting child and abuse them?
Maybe you do think these things. If so, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I can evidence this in several ways.
First, Sam, like many other kids her age, is inordinately shy, especially when it comes to taking her kit off. She would never change in front of her peers and would run a mile to ensure she wasn’t anywhere near anyone else who is changing.
Second, Sam is puberty-blocked. This means she has no circulating sex hormones to speak of, and certainly no interest in looking at the bodies of any other kids, boys or girls, nor any sexual drive.
Third, being trans is really, really hard – no one in their right mind would choose that path if they didn’t feel utterly compelled to do so. It is fundamentally ridiculous to suggest that Sam could conceive of, and execute, an elaborate plan to become the opposite gender to access the bunkroom of a group of girls on Year 10 school camp.
However, perhaps you think I’m being melodramatic with the suggested risks stated above – of course, no one thinks that. Well, good for you, I’d love to agree. But I ask again – what harm are we concerned Sam will do to the other girls? Honestly, what are we frightened of here? What are we keeping the other kids safe from?
Put simply, what risks are we trying to mitigate?
I want to be very clear now. There are NO RISKS to mitigate. Sam poses absolutely no risk to anyone. There is nothing to keep the other students safe from.
However, this policy of school-sanctioned discrimination poses very real, tangible risks to Sam. Not only does it make her feel disrespected, degraded and accused of crimes she could never even conceive of committing, it also, once again, sends a loud and clear message to the other kids that Sam is a danger, someone to be scared of. Someone they can feel justified in bullying and harassing.
How would you feel if that was happening to your child?
Maybe you’re thinking, well, I don’t have to worry about that because I’ll never have a transgender child. OK, by weight of numbers, you probably won’t. But Sam didn’t choose to be transgender; in fact, she fought for a long time not to go down this path as she knew how hard it would be.
Similarly, I didn’t choose to be the parent of a transgender child. I could see all the issues that would lie ahead for her, all the extra things she would need to deal with in life that other people don’t even think about – starting with blatant discrimination from her school. We play with the cards we are dealt, but that gets hard when others hold all the cards and don’t play fair.
So, lesson #5 is this: Transgender people pose no risk to cisgender people. There is nothing to “keep kids safe” from here. Policies which impose limitations on what transgender people can do, where they can go, and how they engage with those around them abuse the human rights of trans people and spread unjustified suspicion and fear in others.
Bathrooms are still important – and contentious.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Sam’s in her Food Tech class. She likes Food Tech, they’re making burgers at the moment, she’s happy about that. It’s a double period, though, and she realises she drank a bit too much water at lunchtime. Uh oh, too long to wait until she moves to maths. She excuses herself and goes off to find a bathroom.
The first one she tries is a four-minute walk away. It’s locked – not because there’s someone in it but because it wasn’t opened this morning. Sigh. The next one she tries is another three-minute walk away. It’s also locked. This is getting annoying, and she really needs to go now. She stops and thinks for a moment to figure out where to try next. Oh, that’s right, over by the Social Studies block. It’s another three-minute walk, but thankfully, this one’s unlocked. By the time she returns to class, she’s missed nearly fifteen minutes of the lesson. Just to use the bathroom.
I understand entirely if you’re feeling confused right now. What the hell is going on? Why are the bathrooms so far away in this school? And why are they locked? Let me reassure you, Sam’s school has a perfectly adequate number of bathrooms. They’re just not bathrooms she is allowed to use. You see, school policy dictates that Sam must use the unisex bathrooms. In everyone else’s language, these are the disabled toilets. She’s not allowed to use the girls’ toilets because, yep, you guessed it, we need to “keep the other kids safe”.
Of course, no one uses the disabled toilets. To my knowledge, there are no disabled kids at Sam’s school, so they’re not routinely unlocked in the morning by security staff. Hence, she needs to spend 15 minutes running around the school campus, desperately trying to find a bathroom she’s allowed to use.
Now, there are so many things we could tackle here. It’s a veritable feast of absurdity served with generous lashings of bigotry. We’ve already dealt with the fact that Sam poses no risk to the other kids – not at school camp, not when using the bathroom, not anywhere. However, there is one issue worth mentioning that we haven’t touched on yet, and it’s particularly relevant to gendered bathrooms.
Which bathroom do the gay kids use?
Before we go any further, I want to clarify one very clear. I am in no way suggesting that gay kids pose a risk to other students. That is as ridiculous as suggesting that the trans kids pose a risk. They just don’t, none of them, at least no more than any other kid, independent of sexual identity, gender identity, or any other arbitrary personal trait, like whether they prefer apples to oranges. But the only possible basis for insisting that Sam uses the unisex toilets is because biologically she is male, and thus, in the confused minds of the school’s policymakers, girls and boys can’t share bathroom facilities. Who knows what that could lead to? Shenanigans in the shower stalls at morning tea for sure.
I’m being deliberately provocative here, but with good reason. Not only does the toilet use policy at Sam’s school, once again, imply that she is a danger to the other kids, but it also assumes that everyone is heterosexual. Which, of course, they are not. Plenty of kids at Sam’s school identify as gay – there’s even a Rainbow Club. But those kids all use same sex bathrooms. Surely, if Sam, as a biological male, is considered a risk to other girls if she uses the female bathrooms, the gay kids also pose a risk to other students when they use same sex bathrooms? That makes sense, right?
No, it doesn’t! It’s not just nonsensical; it’s offensive. Society has, thankfully, moved on from this sort of homophobic thinking. Gay people are allowed, in most domains, to live normal lives just like everyone else, with their dignity and respect intact. Not so for trans people, though, and not so for Sam – as seen by her school’s bathroom use policy. Transphobia is alive and well in so many corners of our community.
So, lesson #6 is this: There is no risk imposed if a trans person uses a bathroom which aligns with their gender identity. Don’t be afraid; no harm will come. Let’s start using our brains and stop treating trans people as if they are all sexual deviants.
Sexuality is complex when you’re trans.
This is a tough one for me to write about. As a cisgender, heterosexual female, I’m about as vanilla as it gets. I worked out a while ago that gender identity and sexual identity were not the same thing – Sam helped me understand that being gender diverse did not mean that you are gay, which of course is blindingly obvious now. But that still didn’t help me fully unpick the Gordian Knot of sexuality and gender identity. However, watching Sam find her path through life over the last few years, one thing, at least, has become clear to me. Sexuality is complex when you’re trans.
When Sam was gender diverse but identified as male, he (sorry – those pronouns again) thought he liked girls. He hung out with girls; his friends were girls, and boys were anathema to him. He simply didn’t relate to them. He was also touchy (insert “very” here to be honest) about being thought of, let alone called, gay – although, strangely, he used this term to describe himself sometimes. I thought it was because he knew he was different and was happy to identify as Rainbow, but now I wonder if there was more to it. It’s important to couch all this with the knowledge that he was still very young – Sam transitioned just before his 14th birthday, so perhaps uncertainty about one’s sexuality at such a tender age is not at all surprising.
When Sam transitioned, things became even murkier.
So, now she’s a girl (to be clear – she was always a girl, we just hadn’t quite cottoned on previously), she still likes hanging with the girls and still thinks boys are, quite frankly, awful. The girls are her friends, nothing more. But if she was attracted to girls, then would she be gay? Yes, given that she identifies as female. But hang on, if she was attracted to boys, would that also make her gay? Ummmm….. no, she’s a girl. But she’s got boy bits (currently). Oh, so then she would be gay if she had a boyfriend – wouldn’t she?
Honestly, stop! (I’m talking to me, not you.) Hopefully, this little piece of ridiculousness can help you understand just how complex sexuality can be when you’re trans. Sam is confused by it, too. She honestly doesn’t know at the moment – which is, of course, completely normal and fine at her age, whether you are trans or not. She’s also puberty-blocked, so it isn’t relevant to her currently, although relationship gossip and “who likes who” is clearly an important topic of conversation among her besties.
The most satisfactory conclusion I can come to currently is this. You love who you love. Full stop, end of story. It doesn’t matter what words you put around that – they are words and don’t define you. It doesn’t matter if you start out thinking one thing and change your mind down the track. So, I’ve stopped trying to understand now. Sam will work out who is right for her, and she’ll do it her way.
So, lesson #7 is this: Sexuality is complex at the best of times, but especially when you are trans. But that’s okay because everyone works it out for themselves somehow, and the words we use just don’t matter. You love who you love, and that’s a pretty incredible thing.
She was always a girl; we just didn’t realise.
It’s a funny thing, this concept we have of gender.
The way we cleave so strongly to the idea that it’s entirely defined by external physical features – basically, by what’s between our legs. Sure, there’s more to it than that when we get to adulthood – hormones are crazy little chemicals, capable of inflicting inexplicable distress and infinite delight in equal measure.
But when you look at a baby bundled up in its bassinet, can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl? Without the artifice of the pink or blue woolly hat, the jumpsuit with flowers or trucks on it, or the balloon in the corner of the room joyously declaring whether the newly arrived child has a vagina or a penis (perhaps not in those words) – would you know?
I’m a paediatrician, so I’ve seen a lot of newborn babies, and let me assure you, you can’t tell. That first determination is solely based on genitalia, and then, to be honest, if you dressed every kid in green and never cut their hair, it’d probably take at least a couple of years before you could work out who had XY chromosomes and who had XX just by looking.
But we’re simple creatures. We like a rule we can stick to, and we really hate it when something, or someone, breaks that rule.
Sam breaks the rule. Looking back now, I realise that she always did. Yep, when she was born, we saw a penis and assumed we had another child of the boy variety. We didn’t assume – we were certain. We didn’t question it, not even once. At least, not for quite some time. But Sam was always Sam, and she was always a girl. We just didn’t realise it.
We should have, though; she gave us plenty of clues.
As soon as she could move or express herself, she told us. As a two-year-old, her favourite game to play in the morning while I was getting ready for work was to try on all my shoes; the higher the heels, the better. She gravitated to dress-up boxes, hauling out the princess costumes and fairy dresses. I’ve got some adorable photos of her wearing an Elsa costume at a friend’s house – Frozen was big at the time. Her joy was palpable. She couldn’t have been less interested in the matchbox cars our older lad adored.
Sam wanted to have tea parties with her dollies or help me do the cleaning. She’s always loved cleaning, bless her. As she got older, she shunned Saturday morning soccer games but loved her weekly dancing lessons. She was the only boy in the class, but that didn’t bother her because she didn’t think of herself as any different to the girls. She was always inordinately jealous of their purple leotards, though.
I could go on, there are just so many examples of how Sam consistently expressed the way she was on the inside from as early as she was able to do so. Even dressed in “boys’ clothes” she looked like a girl, with her blue eyes, curly blonde locks and cherubic face. I wonder now at just how blinded we were by convention, and how determined we were to stick to that, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
You see, what I’m trying to tell you is that Sam has always been a girl. She hasn’t just suddenly decided it’d be a crazy lark to try being a girl. She hasn’t been convinced to change her gender by malevolent societal influences. She hasn’t changed at all. She has always been a girl.
We are the ones who need to change. We need to realise that our very binary idea of gender, decided based on external appearance on the day we are born, is not true for everyone. Some people break the rules. They don’t do it intentionally; they don’t choose to be gender rebels. In fact, for most of them, at some point, I suspect they wish it weren’t their lot because it’s hard to be a life-long rule-breaker. Society wants everyone to conform. But for Sam and others like her, this is the way things are.
So, lesson #8 is this: Being transgender isn’t a path people choose. It’s the way they are born. Just like you might have freckles and your brother has big feet. You didn’t choose that, but there you go, you got it. Trans people got trans. They can’t give it back, any more than you can give back your freckles. We all learn to live with who we are, and can only hope that other people will learn to live with it too.
Attitudes won’t change unless we do something.
How many times in recent months have I heard people talking on the radio about how sick and tired they are of so-called “woke culture”? It’s often politicians of a certain stripe, but listen to a Talk Back station for more than half an hour and you’ll hear it from others – Trev from Taranaki, Carol from Christchurch, long-time listeners, first-time callers. You know them; we all do.
When the term “woke” started being used, I had to ask my kids what it meant. Even then, I wasn’t clear, so I looked it up. The Urban Dictionary defines “woke” as “a reference to how people should be aware in current affairs”. Similarly, the Oxford Dictionary defines it as “well-informed, up-to-date”. I was a little taken aback by this. It didn’t seem to be how the word was being used. To me, “woke” was a pejorative term used to slag off people who expressed views in support of minorities or who made space for perspectives which ran against the mainstream. It’s often said with a mocking or even aggressive tone, the over-arching message being that woke people are flaky, out of touch with reality, and need to harden up and get with the programme.
I’m proud to think of myself as woke, so maybe all that overlay comes from my own internal bias about people who use the term in a derogatory way. I’ll leave you decide for yourself where you sit on that spectrum. But the relevance here is, I hope, obvious. It seems to me that supporting transgender causes, and probably even related issues in the wider Rainbow community, would be considered well and truly woke by Trev, Carol, and a few politicians I could name but won’t.
And that’s a problem. Why? It not only pushes the opinions of woke people like me, and maybe you, into the shadows, shaming or even frightening us into silence, but it also pushes the causes and groups we aim to champion into the box labelled “bad stuff.” When that happens, we’ve moved from trying to progress society’s thinking on controversial issues through well-informed public debate to reinforcing popularist opinions, prejudice, and misinformation.
We can’t let that happen, not about trans issues and not about anything else that runs the risk of being classed by society as controversial. Attitudes won’t change unless we do something.
It’s hard, though, to speak out. Few are brave enough to stick their head above the parapet. The risks are not just perceived; they’re real. I’m certainly not very brave. However, yesterday, I decided I needed to be, so I did a radio interview about proposed restrictions on puberty blockers for trans youth in New Zealand. I was terrified – of saying the wrong thing, of further outing my child (Sam didn’t care about that, but my sense of parental responsibility certainly did), of my message being misconstrued to “the other side’s” benefit, of what blowback there might be afterward. Weirdly, I was also concerned about whether my employer would take offence at what I said. So many things to stop me from speaking out, and there is so little reward for doing so. But, I reasoned, I had a responsibility – as a parent, paediatrician, and researcher. As a proudly self-professed woke member of society. As someone who did know about this stuff, rather than Trev or Carol who, quite frankly, don’t know but think they do.
Will it help? Who knows. I hope so, although I suspect it needs about two thousand more voices to get any meaningful cut through. But we need to start somewhere. Rosa Parks was just one black woman on a bus, but look what a difference she made.
So, lesson #9 is this: If we want attitudes to change, we need to get more vocal. Don’t be put off by the “woke” accusations; be proud to be woke. It takes courage, and you must accept that there is risk, but there is a far greater risk from allowing bigoted and poorly informed commentary to get all the oxygen.
Being yourself is liberating, but it takes courage.
Sam had a non-uniform day at school last week. When I was a kid, we called them mufti days, but that term has fallen out of favour in recent years. Non-uniform days are always a little stressful in our house—both for the kids and for me.
“Is my t-shirt clean mum?”
“Sorry mate, which t-shirt?”
“You know, the white one!”
Oh, right, like that narrows it down.
Sam didn’t have a t-shirt problem, though. Her problem was narrowing down which dress to wear from the thirty-five she owns. Okay, that’s excessive, but there are a few mitigating factors. First, her Dad and I are separated, so half of the dresses are at one house and half at the other, to make sure there’s always something nice to wear no matter the domestic location.
Second, given that op shopping is one of Sam’s favourite past times, the average price for many of her dresses was about five bucks. And finally, in recent years, she’s been the fortunate recipient of several stunning cast-offs from friends of mine who have older daughters. So, she’s spoilt – for choice, and probably also just spoilt, but she’s got many lost years to make up for on the frock-wearing front, so I don’t begrudge her that.
Planning started several days before. We had to get a couple of dresses and shoes from Dad’s place to broaden our options. Then she tried a few things on and discarded some. Finally, an outfit was decided upon, which also passed the “Mum test” of appropriateness, only for Sam to emerge wearing something entirely different on the morning in question. The chosen dress was flowery and sweet, although the velvet high-heeled shoes she’d paired it with got a hard no from me, so a rapid exchange was made for her pink ballet flats.
She looked great, and I think she knew it, but inside, she was a tightly coiled spring. Would she get made fun of? Would the other kids be wearing shorts and hoodies? Would she be the only one in a dress? Would it be yet another excuse for her to be made to feel like a freak and whispered about? At least in uniform, she could blend in.
I know many teenagers face this sort of social stress regularly. Everyone wants to fit in, to feel part of the crowd and be accepted for who you are. I remember vividly going to the Easter Show with a group of the “cool kids” when I was about Sam’s age. God only knows why they invited me to join them. I was not on that team. I remember being nervous that they’d asked me along as a joke and would completely ignore me if I turned up. Then one of them said that I should wear an oversized shirt I had with a cartoon character on it (come on, it was the Eighties) – she said “they would like it”. I cringe now to think that this was enough to reassure me and make me feel part of the cool club.
But for Sam, every day she goes to school, she steels herself for what might come. For the taunts and the jibes. For the fact that, while many kids accept her, some seem to delight in treating her with disdain and contempt. For the knowledge that the majority of the girls will never fully accept her as “one of them”, and the boys always just seem to think that she’s a weirdo. For the sometimes overwhelming fear that she will never fit in.
How would you feel if you faced that every day? It’s so hard for her, but Sam does it because it’s better to be honest than live a lie. She does it because it’s more important to be herself than to pretend constantly. She does it because it’s liberating to truly be Sam, in every sense. I am, and always will be, in awe of her courage and willingness to accept that not everyone will understand or be kind. I’m not sure I could do that.
So, lesson #10 is this: Being true to yourself is liberating, but it’s also difficult, no matter who you are. I dream of a world where Sam and kids like her can be themselves in every sense without fear of rejection and be congratulated for their courage to do so.
That’s a long and winding tale, but it’s been a long and winding road for Sam, and for me by extension, and I know we are only at the start of it. I worry about her every day. The world can be a hard and unforgiving place for those who don’t fit the mould. I worry that her mental health will suffer and that one day, it might be too much for her. I worry that I can’t always be there to care for her, protect her, and keep her safe. Every parent worries about their children at times. I know I’m not special. But Sam is. Sam is the most perfect version of herself, and I know she’ll keep going. So, if she can, I can too.
I hope that this has made you think and that maybe you might have even learned something. For some of you, it will have been a challenging read. Some of you won’t agree with my, at times, strongly expressed views. Some of you might even feel more strongly than me. That makes the world an interesting and diverse place – you, me, them, everyone.
There will, undoubtedly, be more lessons from Sam. and I’ll keep you posted.
