How to Reduce Your Anxiety Over the Idea of Trans Kids
Look at that ‘idea’, and change your assumptions about it
While a kid is small, the parent ensures that the kid wears clothes and socializes with other kids. Gradually, the parent backs off and gives the child more autonomy as the child decides what to wear and whom to befriend. The parent may even stop making comments on these matters.
A child’s gender affects decisions made by or about the child. Sometimes the child expresses gender differently than the parent expected them to, and this may make decisions a little more complicated.
All parents have assumptions, principles, uncertainties, questions, etc. — in short, ideas—about their child’s gender; if the child might be gender nonconforming, nonbinary, or trans, the parent has specific ideas about that, to the extent that it affects their child.
That seems obvious to me. Here, I’m not wondering why parents might feel anxious about a specific question involving their own child.
I’m asking instead why many adults—especially people who do not have a trans child—develop a deep-seated, long-lasting anxiety at the general observation that trans kids exist in the world, and why they assume they need to take some philosophical position on it, social intervention to…
