1.1 - Common Parental Emotions and Thoughts
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[00:00:00] Welcome to module one of the trans we'll being parents course.
We're going to start by talking about some common parental emotions and thoughts that we hear about, we've heard about through our work, but also through the research.
Perhaps what you can do as you're listening to these is to think about whether or not this resonates with you. Some of them may resonate with you, others may not. But you might have seen these kinds of experiences happening for other people in your child's life or your co-parent /partner. The first really significant set of thoughts and feelings that people tend to have are ones that involve fear. The first fear that comes up for people often, and the one that I think is the most common, or , the majority of parents that I've spoken to and worked with have had the fear that they're not really trans, that their child is identifying as trans, or non binary, or gender diverse in some way, and that they've misidentified themselves.
And of course, this is a fearful thought because it means that then you're often afraid that they're going to make choices, or do things. They might regret at a later stage, [00:01:00] or that they might even hold you responsible for having been allowed to make those choices. This fear that they aren't really trans is something that we're going to dive into much deeper later in this module and also throughout the course. What I will say right now is that even for people who have broadly accepted that their child is trans, that, that, that they feel clear that they want to support their child with making some necessary changes in their life based on that understanding of their child being gender diverse, even for those parents, what I've found is that after years of, of, of supporting their child on their journey, they can still have this sort of niggling ghost of a doubt that they may not be quite conscious of or might not want to admit that they're still kind of concerned that, that it's not quite real. The final fear, well, there's lots of fears, but the final really big fear that we wanted to name right from the get go is the fear that your child will not have a good life. .
And this has everything to do with the level of exposure that you have to trans people in your life. If you're someone who knows just one or two [00:02:00] trans people in your life, or perhaps you know no trans people, but you've seen some representations in media or in film, even if those representations are positive, which is fairly difficult to find, to be honest, it's usually just a very narrow data set of what a trans person looks like, how they present themselves, how they feel about themselves, the kind of choices that they want to make for themselves.
and usually that representation doesn't include the very, very early stages of that person's process. And so, what you're working with is essentially a lack of information. And part of what we'll do is explore the huge variety of different ways that someone can be gender diverse or not cisgender.
The second really big, set of feelings is what we've called ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is something that feels like a grief or feels like a loss, but there's no sort of finality or certainty to it. And often this is even expressed by parents as ambiguous, intense, loss . And like most grief, or if not all grief, it can come unexpectedly in particular moments like a wave, and then be gone again.
And sometimes those waves come at [00:03:00] times when you see your child changing in significant ways or, or little ways that are new to you, or, sometimes this loss comes after the acceptance of, "oh, I think that this is for real, and my child is really trans". One of the ways that this loss or grief feeling can get in the way of you and your child's relationship is when you're trying to avoid feeling the loss. And sometimes that can mean that you avoid being as proactive as you could be, or you resist your child expressing themself in more new and explorative and authentic ways.
And so it's really important to to honour the realness of that and to let space be there for that loss inside you, knowing that that can be there alongside of course these mixed feelings of having a loss, but also feeling happy for your child that they're exploring something that feels more aligned and more authentic to them.
one thing that's worth noting is, is that it's probably the aspect of your experiences that is the most at odds with your child's experience. And so because [00:04:00] of that, we sort of advise that you refrain from speaking to them about this loss and instead use other supports such as ourselves while they're finding themself and feeling more real, and more able to exist in the world and more able to envision a future for themselves, you're feeling like, the child that you knew and loved is not exactly as you had thought.
And that is also linked to the loss of the family future that you envisioned, the future of your child that you envisioned, and therefore the future of your family and of yourself as you are in relationship to your child.
The other thing that is often reflected in the research and that I've heard people speak about is their own personal identity as, and often this is not a, they're not people not aware that they have an identity around this until it's threatened or, or lost in some way, that they had an identity of being the mother of a daughter or the father of a son or the father of a daughter or whatever, what have you.
And that it wasn't just that being a parent was part of their identity, but actually being a parent to that type of gendered person was what formed part of their identity. And so there's this self loss that can be [00:05:00] really hard to describe.
There's a quote from one of the articles that's referenced in, in, in the references section. It says, I'm still mourning saying my three boys. It was really hard for me to stop saying, "boys, get down here", or "my sons". It has been really hard for me to form the words "daughter" and "sister". That, to me, was ending the group in my house.
And we'll talk more about that kind of thing when we talk about language and how language is symbolizes certain things, certain things for your child and also for you. And that can create a tension between them wanting you to embrace that language and you not necessarily finding that very easy because the language represents change.
So the third set of feelings or feeling that we wanted to include is around regret and guilt. an example of this is when people say, I should have seen signs when they were younger. And,, this is also something that we're going to get into in greater depth when we talk about femininity and masculinity.
But often there's an [00:06:00] assumption that you could have seen signs earlier. And to that all I will say at this stage is, the signs that you may register now, or the signs that you may identify now, could have also been happening for a child who didn't turn out to be trans. And often people turn out to be trans and those signs were not present.
And so even though there might be things that now that you know this about your child, it might spark a question in you or curiosity in you that it didn't then, what I would suggest is that,
the only really, really reliable sign is honestly what they say to you about themself. The next example of regret and guilt that people sometimes experience is the the feeling that they should have reacted differently. And this may be really difficult for some parents because perhaps they did have that sign, that really reliable sign, that their child told them, adamantly or clearly, or even in an ambiguous, vague sort of a way, that they were [00:07:00] trans or not cisgender or that they had some questions about their gender, and that perhaps the initial response wasn't to embrace or to lean in or to, to become curious or to, once I get to know more about that and maybe the response was to minimize or brush it away or not respond or even to question and doubt I think the thing to just bear in mind is that at least this is what I believe, we're all functioning with the level of knowledge and, capacity that we have at that time and that level of knowledge and capacity is entirely constructed based on the exposure and the experience that we have and our context.
And something that we'll talk about a bit later on is repair and how we can repair with people in a way that is really powerful. There are lots of, wonderful things that you can do to try to heal from ruptures in a relationship. And, and often when that does occur, the relationship is stronger than it ever was before. And that's [00:08:00] ultimately what we want to support you to move towards if that feels like something that's needed or wanted. And a third really significant way that regret and guilt can manifest for people is this idea that they might have done something to cause it.
And of course, there's a belief in there, that being trans is ultimately bad and that's something that hopefully through the process of the rest of the course, you'll be able to feel alleviated from that sort of belief but without going into that part of it from all the research that I've come across, that is good quality research, and from my experience as a trans person, and from my experience working with... like, hundreds if not thousands of trans people, and knowing, again, another hundreds or thousands of trans people my sense is that it's certainly innate. And it's something that people just come into an awareness of at a certain time in their life, hopefully.
And and that it feels very much to, I'd say, 99. 5% of trans people , that they were always [00:09:00] trans, that they were always the gender that they're now able to articulate. And that, in fact, this is not something that's changing in them, but that simply they're becoming more aware of what it is about them that they couldn't quite, that they didn't quite feel right before and that now there's a certain resonance to this. But we'll get into that a lot more next week when we talk about gender diverse identity formation.
There's a quote here that I also wanted to share around regret and guilt that says, "my husband was struggling a lot with it. He had feelings of guilt which it wasn't that he couldn't accept, he just felt guilty like all of these years I've had a son. And I should have been more of a dad to a boy." And I think that's a really beautiful quote because it shows just how deeply that person is thinking about the kind of parent they are and the kind of parent they've been, but at the same time, I would say that the more we can move away from attributing certain behaviors to gender and think of gender more as [00:10:00] an internal sense of self...
and if possible, having those conversations with them and saying, "I've had this thought that maybe I should have been more of a dad to a boy. And I wanted to know if you also feel that way. And
and if so, what kinds of things would you now like to be doing together?"
So the third, or the fourth, rather one, and this is a biggie, is the experience of disbelief and doubt.
And I know that I mention this in fear, but it deserves its own slide because it's just simply so, so common, if not unanimous, across all parents of trans people. And there are so many really valid reasons why parents would doubt what their child is saying that their felt sense of themself is, or their gender identity is.
And one really big one is this sense that maybe it's their mental health causing this rather than you know, their mental health is causing the gender identity or the dysphoria rather than dysphoria causing mental health. And whilst I certainly won't say that it's never possible that someone's mental health causes them to feel as if they are transgender or experiencing [00:11:00] gender
dysphoria.
I personally, honestly, have never met someone for whom that's the case. I don't think that it's possible to be in a state of questioning your own gender, questioning whether or not you're cisgender, realizing that you're not cisgender, thinking about what gender you might be, or what resonates with you, what you want to do about that, who you want to talk to, what you might say to them, how they might respond.
All of this whilst contending with absorbed, internalized transphobia oneself. I don't think it's possible to go through that experience and not also experience some mental health issues. And for many people those mental health issues are very acute. And I really am not sure of anyone who wouldn't say that was one of the hardest times of their life. And so... I suppose what I'm getting at is if you consider mental health issues to be fairly inevitable at this point of things then it shifts the question from is their mental health causing this to [00:12:00] what component of their mental health struggles could be alleviated
now that we know that they are saying that they're trans, or non binary, or whatever they're identifying as. And how can we affirm this, or move forward, or create some necessary changes that will alleviate much of that mental health struggle. And that doesn't mean there aren't confounding factors that aren't gender related, but often it's a big piece.
Another thought that comes up for people is that they might be too young to know. Um, and equally often is wouldn't they have known sooner? So whatever age someone is, whether or not they're too young to know because they're only four years old or they are a teenager, and teenagers say all kinds of things and go through phases and are in a process of self discovery and trying things on and being influenced by peers, or they're an adult and you think, well, wouldn't you have noticed this sooner or wouldn't you have said something sooner?
Whatever age a person is, usually there's some issue from someone external to that person, a parent or someone else who says to them [00:13:00] that their age is wrong in some way. And what we can see very clearly from the research and also that I see in my work is that it's across the spectrum of age. It really can be as young as two, honestly, up to 80 years old.
fourth really, really big one is they don't present like a boy slash girl or in an androgynous way or what have you. That they're always presented in a fairly stereotypical way. And this is one that we're going to explore much more deeply, so I won't go into details right now.
A really big one, particularly for parents with teenagers is this question of how do I know they aren't just trying something on or influenced by peers. And, I think this is a really tricky one, and often one that teenagers or worried parents will feel. And ultimately I think, people gravitate towards others who they resonate with. And so, they might have surrounded themselves with other gender diverse people because that felt
the most like them and then through that process they then were able [00:14:00] to start to articulate it. When we hear language and see other people who we resonate with, we're more able to notice something in ourselves. And so,
That might be something to just bear in mind if you're struggling with the idea that your child is surrounded by gender diversity and therefore they might just be trying it on.
