Comment: Trans kids are not just struggling with puberty

Published 1:30 am Monday, April 17, 2023

By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post

A controversial article was published this month by the Free Press, an upstart media company, about the mother of a transgender teenager in the Midwest. The thrust of the story: Caroline, the mother, felt she had been “bullied” into accepting gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, for her child. At one point she attempted to revoke her consent for treatment, she said, but since her teenager and the teen’s father (with whom the teen primarily lived) wanted to continue treatment, the teen’s clinicians stayed the course.

The story blew up for a lot of reasons. The teen — or someone who said they were the teen — took to Twitter to dispute Caroline’s account, and then someone who said they were Caroline took to Twitter to quibble publicly with their child. Journalistic ethics were debated and questioned; it was a giant mess.

Meanwhile, every time I reread the article I kept coming back to a quote that felt familiar, because I’ve seen many versions of it.

The quote was in a section in which Caroline described one root of her concern; her own experiences with puberty: “When my period started, I wanted a way to have that not happen again. It was traumatizing,” she said. “If I had had an option to get out of it, I would have. But it’s nature. There’s a reason it happens.”

If I’m understanding the quote correctly, this is what Caroline believes: Parts of her own journey from girlhood to womanhood were harrowing and unpleasant, but she eventually worked through those feelings and she assumed the same thing would happen for her child. Maybe her kid wasn’t trans. Maybe her kid was just dealing with the regular angst of puberty.

I’ve begun to think of arguments like this — which are primarily made by adults who oppose gender-affirming treatment for minors — as the Puberty Sucks fallacy.

It can take a couple different forms, but it boils down to, “You don’t need to transition to a different gender, you just need to transition to adulthood.” Or: “I wasn’t a trans teen, so neither are you.”

J.K. Rowling seemed to use a version of this when, in 2020, she published a long manifesto about transgender issues on her personal website. “If I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge,” she wrote, adding that internalized misogyny as a teenager could have persuaded her “to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”

A conservative obstetrician (his Twitter bio includes “#MAGA”) tweeted a version of this a few weeks ago to his 105,000 followers: “To take a confused young girl who’s terrified of body changes, fat, body hair, acne and tell her you’ve got a way to just ‘put it all on hold for now’ is the cruelest thing I can imagine.”

“Confused” is a watchword of the Puberty Sucks fallacy; the idea that kids today just don’t know what they want, or need, to feel more comfortable in their skin. “The vast majority of gender-confused children, if allowed to go through puberty, outgrow the problem and accept their bodies over time,” Idaho state Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, said when introducing a bill prohibiting gender-affirming care in February.

A volunteer longitudinal study led by a Princeton psychology professor found that, five years into the study, 94 percent of participants had continued to identify as their chosen gender. (The study, which launched in 2013, follows kids who began to identify as transgender between ages 3 and 12, and it will follow participants for a total of 20 years.) Last month, The Washington Post and KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation) published a landmark survey of transgender people. The survey focused on adults, not teens, but it found that the majority of transgender adults knew that they were trans before they turned 18. Thirty-two percent said they knew when they were 10 or younger; 34 percent said they knew between ages 11 and 17.

And yet, the Puberty Sucks fallacy haunts the public conversation about transgender issues. It is used as a justification for banning gender-affirming care, despite the fact that such care is recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The Puberty Sucks fallacy is used as a way to negate the experiences of trans youths, to assume that other people know who they are better than they know themselves.

I wasn’t trans, so neither are you.

It’s not always used malevolently. The sneakiness of this fallacy is that some caring cisgender adults genuinely believe that their own experiences with puberty are relevant and helpful.

I first encountered a version of the Puberty Sucks fallacy nearly a decade ago, when interviewing a nonbinary teen and their mom. As the teen described an innate bodily awareness that began in toddlerhood — instinctively standing in the middle of the room when a preschool teacher instructed boys and girls to line up on either side — the teen’s mother kept turning the conversation back to the superficial matter of clothing. Back in her own high school years, the mother hated when her dad informed her it was time to swap her overalls for skirts to be more ladylike.

This mother was seeking connection. She clearly cared for her kid. Armed with the wisdom of her own experiences, she believed she was trying to protect them from making decisions about their identity she feared they would someday regret. Maybe her kid wasn’t trans, she was saying. Maybe her kid just hated skirts, the way she had hated skirts. But this attempt at understanding was misguided, because her own experiences didn’t apply.

If you talk to enough transgender individuals, or read enough of their stories, what becomes abundantly clear is that gender identity isn’t about hating or loving skirts, hating or loving lipstick, dreading or cheering the arrival of one’s first period. It’s not about watching football vs. gymnastics, liking video games vs. shopping, choosing pink instead of blue. It’s not about “escaping womanhood,” because it’s not about “escaping” anything, but rather moving toward an identity that has been there for a very long time, whether or not parents recognized it or understood it.

“I’m in a body that has a couple more steps to being a hundred percent me,” a brave transgender teen named Elliot Morehead told South Dakota lawmakers earlier this year, testifying in opposition to a proposed bill that would prohibit certain forms of gender-affirming care.

Elliot had been working with a therapist for months to receive a letter clearing them for puberty blockers, should they decide to take them. Elliot said that lawmakers telling minors they would grow out of gender dysphoria was akin to telling people struggling with clinical depression to “just be happy.” They said they had missed a physics test to testify. They said they were proud of who they were.

South Dakota passed the bill anyway; the governor signed it into law about two weeks after Elliot testified.

But it’s hard not to think about that testimony. How confident it was. How optimistic. How Elliot’s journey wasn’t described as a sucky puberty they were running from, but rather a joyous future they were running to.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.” Follow her on Twitter @MonicaHesse.