The following is a letter sent to Our Duty. The author has kindly given us permission to publish it.
Hello,
I’m 16 years old and I believed I was transgender from around 12 to 15 years old. I was mostly pushed in this direction due to the internet. I was active on an online group called Trevor Space. I joined initially because I was gay and I was having trouble making friends so I wanted to make friends online. On the website there were a lot of teenagers who were either transgender, nonbinary, some other made up gender, as well as kids who were gay or bisexual. They would all say that gender dysphoria is being uncomfortable with your body. I started puberty at 7 and I was having problems adjusting to my body, even years later. I was also self conscious and depressed at the time. And so since I had this discomfort and I wasn’t very feminine I decided it must be that I was transgender, I thought I was nonbinary from 12-13 and a boy from 14-15.
I told my mom about this when I was 13. She didn’t buy into it and for a few days I was trying to make her understand and she was trying to make sense of the nonsense I’d been fed. In the end we ended up having an argument and she decided she wouldn’t accept this, and I never truly talked about it with her again. I commend her for not just giving in because what would have happened now had she let me transition as a teenager? However, I wish she could have done it in a way that didn’t turn me away so much, because now I had the narrative that my mom doesn’t accept and, and they’ll tell you that’s abusive and that you should cut off any parent that does this. If I had told more people about it I worry it would have ended up with me being taken into foster care or something similar, and they would blindly affirm me.
What she did do that was amazing was she indirectly would tell me that this trans kid thing was a lie, in a way where she was just talking about other people instead of being accusatory towards me. That really helped me see how dumb it really was. Another thing that got me out of it was actually my school and my own anxiety. I told a few teachers to call me by my new name and use male pronouns, but I started it during Covid lockdowns and it was a lot harder to do in person. I ended up getting so embarrassed explaining it to them that I just didn’t tell anyone, and that helped me get out of that mindset and get used to my name and birth gender.
I grew up a little bit and I no longer had depression. The end of my gender dysphoria came a little after that. It’s been kind of hard because I still have a few people who know me by my male name and for either being trans or a boy, so it’s been somewhat embarrassing. But I’m really glad that it wasn’t Medical, because then it would have been a lot worse.
I’m finally fine with not being the most feminine girl and being okay with that, as well as embracing the femininity I do have instead of denying it and being embarrassed about it. What’s been a little harder is accepting being gay, because it was actually easier when I was “trans” to just accept that I was “straight”.
I’m really happy to see organizations like this [Our Duty], as parents protecting children and teens from this. The wisdom I’ve gained from this experience that I want to share with you, is that there’s no point in denying the truth, and that it shouldn’t offend you. However parents need to show this to their kids in a kind way, because aggression will only lead them further away and down the wrong path. I also think that parents should help kids with being proud of themselves, and that they shouldn’t be embarrassed about their body or personality, and that they don’t need to change who they are.
