Watchful waiting is a medical term used to describe the approach taken when a condition is expected to resolve naturally.
While transgender ideation can be seen as a phase – there is no guarantee that the phase will pass in a suitably short time.
There are different cohorts of patient wishing to be the opposite sex. Watchful waiting is appropriate for pre-pubescent boys since the vast majority will grow out of it.
For adolescents, rapid holistic intervention is necessary. Their cases are time critical.
Holistic means looking at the whole. There are a whole raft of factors that might be contributing to an adolescent having transgender ideation:
- Prior Trauma
- Bullying
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Homosexuality
- Neurodiversity
- Discomfort with puberty
- Autism
- ADHD
- Sexual abuse
- Giftedness
- Non-conformity with sex stereotypes
- Disability
You might know which of these factors are present, or your child might need counselling to establish which are causing damaging feelings. Once surfaced, the young person needs help to learn to cope with or manage the feelings these factors generate.
Supportive Waiting
Given the need for an active variant of watchful waiting, the term supportive waiting has been coined to describe such an approach.
This approach can be described as “creating the right environment for the penny to drop”.
A young person with transgender ideation has to work out for themselves that they are not in fact transgender and that it was just a social identity – albeit one with drastic consequences if the medical route is pursued.