Since my son’s revelation that he can be who he wants to be and learn to love and accept his body as it is (and this will take some time) we have felt enormous relief all round. But this evening’s conversation with my 13 year old son was yet another heartbreaker for me—and evidence that the war isn’t over for us yet.
My son is transgender identified. I am gently encouraging him to drop the “trans” identification label and trying to explain to him how just the label itself is endorsing a much bigger and potentially dangerous and life damaging concept.
We are amongst the lucky ones. Because he is young, time was on our side and, for whatever reasons—and I couldn’t pin point exactly how or when—things changed for my son. He decided he was ready to listen and try to be happy. The road is long and I’m sure we’ll encounter many potholes along the way, but we are heading in the right direction at long last and I can finally (almost) sleep again. But the fear is still there, looming over me, that any day now we could wake up back in the nightmare.
My son is so lost without the “Trans” label. This evening he asked me, “but who would I be if I’m not a transgender” to which I replied, “do you need a label to define who you are?”. To this he replied, “but it is part of my identity”. So I told him: “we can and will figure this out and if you feel you belong in the LGB community they will still accept you with open arms—you do not need the trans label (or any label) for this”.
This need for identity and categorization is so toxic. Even though my son may be emerging from the fog, I am still devastated for him, for what he’s been through and for the loss he is feeling—and for the other thousands of children still searching frantically for their identities. And my mind still races everyday, looking for more stories, more evidence and information. And the worry and need to change things is still immense; who will this happen to next?
this essay hits spot-on re: identity fetishization.
the elite private high school my child attended completely focused on "identity" as the leit-motif for their curriculum. It was all about "discovering your true self" and "developing your unique identity."
why not focus instead on : fostering humanity and community.
Identity politics is a huge failure. All the schools that focus on this are failing our children.
This really gets to the heart of the issue: the modern concept/invention of identity. For the record, this idea is Bronze Age Pervert's, not mine, but essentially this desire for an identity is a completely new phenomenon in which people are encouraged to adopt certain behaviors and attitudes and have them validated by a central authority, the state. The state then compels others to affirm and buttress this identity, so long as it is acceptable to it (ie identifying as trans or queer or what have you is fine as it furthers the goals of the American regime, but one cannot identify as, say, a white supremacist or some such). This is completely neutered behavior, and it betrays a level of docility and oversocialization that is almost hard to fathom. To say, "I identify as trans," always carries with it the unspoken addendum "because teacher says so."
People like to joke that all this trans navel gazing is "snowflake" behavior, but it is essentially true. In any other context--that is, one in which a person could not appeal to a centralized state authority to be complicit in "identity formation"--the trans thing could not exist, at least outside of certain extreme cases. As to the causes of all this, who is to say? One gets into critiques of "neoliberal capital," atomization, hyperreality, etc. which may or may not hold water. In my estimation the most likely cause is something far more prosaic: sedentary lifestyles and estrogenic modern diets. It is in this regard that being very into fitness, diet, and health is the mirror image of trans nonsense: a desire to change the body, a dissatisfaction with certain cosmetic features of it, etc. The difference, of course, is one of these behavior regiments is healthy and the other leaves you a bitter, sterile husk of a human being.