On social transition and anti-trans legislation
With the unprecedented onslaught of hateful anti-trans bills and policies waging war on trans youth happening right now, I see a lot of rampant speculation about social transition in school, and an equal number of claims around "clusters of kids" doing the same. Any number of “concerned parents” groups, op-ed columnists and headline-starved science writers are swearing up and down that entire friend groups are suddenly declaring themselves with different names, pronouns and descriptors related to gender and sexual orientation. And for the right-wing, this offers a perfect platform to inject fear into an already hostile climate as they prepare to dismantle every inch of progress made over the past forty or so years.
Let's demystify this, though: as a therapist and social work professor, let me assure you that it is in fact completely normal for people to change how they want to be seen or referred to. You probably did it too.
This happens most during adolescence, as kids find new social groups and adopt the norms of that group. In the US and Canada, the move from elementary to middle school, and from middle to high school all in the span of roughly three extremely turbulent years accelerates the process. Friend groups may restructure, dissolve or consolidate based on where kids matriculate. This isn’t rocket science.
But huge portions of this generation are also rejecting transphobia and homophobia as social norms.
For this generation, difference doesn't need to be punished. Nor do variations in experimentation or expression. For trans kids, this is truly lifesaving, as it affords the opportunity for experimenting with different names, pronoun sets and modes of gender expression. For everyone else, it causes no harm at all.
Despite the fact that throughout history kids at this age have demanded to be referred to by different names, taken up theater or full-contact sports, dyed their hair or gone vegetarian, it is yet again apparently gender that draws the ultimate line in the sand for the arbiters of childhood. And while it is true that more youth are outwardly identifying as transgender, the national discourse among pundits at the so-called papers of record selectively leaves out the fact that the rate of open identification as lesbian, gay, or bisexual continues to expand as well— far eclipsing the relatively small number of youth identifying as something other than cisgender.
While right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson and Abigail Shrier may insist that this causes confusion and makes everything overly complicated, youth aren’t the ones having the issue. We are. Us, the alleged adults in the room. While they might look at you funny for asking, you can ask any kid in a school with an inclusive environment, and they'll walk you through how their friends manage any associated logistics. As one of my favorite young people put it:
“How hard can it be when someone says ‘I use this name now’ to just… use that name? Where is the confusion? Why do people care? Is this really the kind of thing that confuses adults?"
And yet dozens of states have introduced bills in state legislatures— with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert trying to do it nationally — that would require schools to get formal, written permission before they can ask to be referred to differently or go by a different name. While some are fairly mundane (albeit unnecessary), others force teachers who become aware of, or even suspect, that a youth may use different name or pronoun set to send written notification home. Aside from the logistical challenge laid atop teachers already stressed to breaking, this also puts many trans and nonbinary youth in danger.
But there’s also a compelling argument to be made that such processes are themselves adding meaning and ritual to something that needs neither of those things. Proponents of these bills claim that these formal processes prevent youth from “making a mistake” or being “locked into an identity” that perhaps they may no longer identify with later on.
But this is absolutely backwards. As someone who has witnessed young people navigate this with complete ease, flexibly moving through iterations of names, pronouns and self-descriptors, it is the formality itself that creates the problem.
The more formal you make these processes, the more hand-wringing adults have to do, with permission slips and signing on the dotted line that you make youth do before making what are ultimately still only minor incremental social changes, the more you transpose meaning that doesn't have to be there. Don't want people to be "stuck" with how they chose to identify? Then keep it easy to change.
The more we open the boundaries of exploration, the more we normalize the process of deciding "does this name work for me?" or "is this how I actually want to be seen by the world?", the more this benefits all kids, and truly all people in society as a whole. To follow the example of the younger generation is to give ourselves a real gift as we shed the baggage of the past.
It is a fundamental human rights principle that the only person who has the right to tell the world who they are is that person, and that person only. Truly, it should be uncontroversial to say that this is a fundamental right. And yet there have been additional bills, or clauses built into the aforementioned bills above that go a step further and enjoin schools and school districts from enforcing rules that say students have a right to be called by their name. Some have gone so far as to assert that this is an issue of religious liberty under the First Amendment. But when we pass laws enshrining the rights of others to define us how they see fit, we elevate bigotry and bullying to the status of rights— and then we're protecting no one.
While not nearly as common as, say, the editors at the New York Times want you to believe, the reason you see whole friend groups change their names or try new pronouns is that this is the process of expanding group norms to include all people. Why not?
You're watching kids do it right in all the ways we have previously failed in earlier generations. This doesn’t mean that suddenly every kid involved is experiencing gender dysphoria, nor does it mean that there’s something worrisome or nefarious afoot. And contrary to any number of opinion columnists, no one, and I truly mean no one, is demanding that the second someone changes pronouns they have to start blockers or hormones, because that's absolutely ridiculous. It is, at face value, such a ridiculous claim that even the Wall Street Journal or the Atlantic should be able to recognize it as fallacious and dismiss it outright.
All of this is to say that the progress we’re seeing is good. It isn’t just harmless, it is undoing and addressing harms that have been handed down like cursed heirlooms.
Because I don't know what world you, the editors of newspapers, grew up in, but in my corner of the universe, every time I got sucker-punched in the stomach, or someone spit on me, or threatened me in the halls, it was always, 100% of the time, accompanied by a homophobic or transphobic slur, often both at the same time. I wasn’t even out at the time — so strong was the reaction to any perceived gender non-conformity or suspicion of being gay. Nothing breeds hate like the fear of difference.
When I talk to youth in schools that promote tolerance and inclusivity, I am consistently floored — sometimes to the point of choking back tears, by how outrageous kids would find the world in which so many of us grew up to be. How truly, wretchedly unjust. How such a world could never, ever be defended, and how any progress away from such a world should be protected at all costs.
We have so much farther to go still, but if you actually want to protect children, and I mean all children, then you will do literally everything in your power to dismantle the groups and political machinery threatening to undo decades of progress towards safe schools.
I'll leave with this. Anyone who suggests it was better before says so because they weren't on the wrong end of the fist, the ones going to sleep and praying not to wake up. Which forces us to ask the question: where are they in that fight now?
