A parent shares their experience and fears as public submissions are sought on the use of puberty blockers for gender-affirming care.
Both the author and daughter’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.
When my daughter Marie was born, everyone, including me, thought she was a boy. She started telling my partner and I that she wasn’t as soon as she learned to express herself. Many months later, when we finally understood what she was trying to tell us, that she was a girl and definitely not a boy, it took even more time to accept and act on it. We knew vaguely that gender non-conforming and transgender kids face a lot of bullying and friction in their lives and we didn’t want her to have to go through any of that. We were trying to protect her. We were both afraid.
That was almost a decade ago. We eventually realised we were wrong and set about raising the child we are now proud to call our daughter. Letting Marie take the lead on asserting her own identity was not an easy choice, nor was it one we made lightly, regardless of what the media or right-wing politicians want to tell you about parents of trans kids. We did not know any trans adults and had no friends with trans children. We had no “trans agenda” as we did not even have a working understanding of what being transgender meant. My partner literally started by Googling “my child wants to be a girl” and I raided the local library for every book they had on trans people. We just went from there.
A news article led us to a parent support group on Facebook, where we could connect with other families, and we both read as many resources as we could, searching for stories like ours. All of this was, frankly, terrifying at times. Every single parent we read about or connected with mentioned the heart-stopping moment when they learned about the astronomical rates of self-harm and suicide among trans children. One study from the United States shows that fully 40% of trans people have attempted suicide, and rates are higher among trans children.
So we started with the basics, like asking Marie what she would like to be called, buying some dresses, and telling our family and friends. We let her wear dresses every day at home and then, when we were brave enough, to school. We carefully considered every new step and we followed her lead as best we could, filling in the many gaps in our knowledge by reading even more books, talking to other parents, and interrogating everything we thought we knew about gender and identity. We didn’t know much, and much of what we thought we knew was wrong or, at best, overly simplistic.
We’ve never regretted choosing this direction; like every child, my daughter needs loving adults to walk alongside her and help her to be whole, at least until she can do it by herself. I do this with joy in my heart every single day, though in an increasingly transphobic world, it has never been an easy path to walk. Supporting Marie’s social transition and advocating for her at school and elsewhere wasn’t – and still isn’t – a single decision that we never looked back on; it is a continual process of learning, unlearning, negotiation and re-negotiation for all of us.
As a highly educated person, realising just how much I didn’t know and how many people I simply did not understand was equally terrifying and humbling. It was also quietly thrilling. Opening new possibilities for something as seemingly solid and immutable as gender profoundly challenges ideas how the world is made and who gets to make it. Loving and raising a trans child has been for me – as it is for many others – a radicalising experience.
While acknowledging that every transgender person’s experience is unique, my years raising my transgender child reveals the popular anti-trans talking points for the nonsense they are. Is it social contagion, which imagines that cisgender kids just want to be like their trans friends? My daughter was the only trans person any of us knew and she picked out a new name for herself well before we even understood that she was transgender. Kids learn about being trans from the media or from being online and then just … decide to be trans? My daughter knew she was a girl before she knew how to read or had watched a television show or a movie, years before she would first go online.
It’s just a phase? Marie has lived as a girl for almost twice as long as she lived as a boy and she patiently worked for literally years to convince her parents that we’d all gotten it very wrong when we gave her a male name at birth (we were a little slow on the uptake, as she likes to remind us on a regular basis). We asked her for a long time afterwards if she was happy being Marie, and she never wavered in answering “yes”, accompanied by increasingly dramatic eyerolls as she got older. Kids turn trans because they are abused or their parents are part of some nefarious conspiracy to reduce the population of the world, or something equally idiotic? Seriously, fuck off; she is a real person, we are a real family, and these kinds of toxic lies have very real consequences.
As she got older and we looked into gender-affirming medical care, we did everything the New Zealand health system demanded. We set up all the appointments, jumped through all the hoops. Actually, we did most of it twice because we moved to a different health district and had to start over. It literally took years – and multiple stressful appointments with GPs, psychiatrists and endocrinologists – to pass through all the gatekeepers to get Marie a prescription for puberty blockers. This came as a profound relief as the idea of going through male puberty and developing a beard and a deeper voice (among other things) has always been deeply distressing for Marie, as it would be for any girl. Anyone who tells you that thousands of New Zealand kids are just blithely getting prescribed puberty blockers is either misinformed or simply lying.
But now all of that work, all of that hope, all of our plans might be at risk. The government’s bad-faith consultation on puberty blockers – which could lead to further restrictions on their use, if not an outright ban – poses a direct threat to my daughter, our family and our future. Why is this consultation happening quietly over the holiday break? Why is the government using a jumbled online survey that appears to push people to advocate for restricting blockers to medical trials, an approach that is both unworkable and widely regarded as unethical?
In fact, why in hell are we having a public consultation on a question that should be answered by medical specialists? The government is manifestly unqualified to make any decision about puberty blockers, full stop. Many people will respond to the consultation after having been fed a steady diet of mis- and disinformation about trans people for years. Others, many of whom have never met a trans person, will respond out of outright hatred. Decisions about puberty blockers are decisions that trans kids, their families and their doctors need to make in the best interests of each individual child, not in the ideological interests of a government that wants a one-size-fits-all “solution” to a non-existent problem.
While I am not here to rehash the stacks of reliable, peer-reviewed evidence that are available now, this bears repeating in the clearest possible terms: trans kids exist and puberty blockers can help them live long, healthy, whole lives. Puberty blockers safely delay changes to the body that many trans people find most distressing so that they can grow up and make the choices they need to make for themselves. They give people like my daughter hope, a stepping stone to a future that they want to imagine, not one that they dread. The effects of blockers are reversible, and they are regularly prescribed to cisgender (non-trans) kids without anyone demanding a public consultation. Blockers take nothing away, but they give everything to the people who need them.
Gender-affirming care for young trans people, including puberty blockers, is supported by virtually every relevant professional organisation, including the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa. A recent high-quality review of standards in care from France, and two more from Queensland and New South Wales in Australia, make the safety and effectiveness of gender-affirming care very clear. Researchers from Seattle Children’s Hospital in the US conclude that withholding gender-affirming care “amounts to state-sanctioned medical neglect and emotional abuse”.
Bans on gender-affirming care are motivated by political, ideological and/or religious – not medical – reasons. They are an outright assault on the human rights of people like Marie, who never asked for any of this. They are also an assault on the rights of supportive parents like my partner and I, who just want to help our child navigate a world that seems ever more hellbent on destroying her.
On those nights I lie awake worrying – and there have been many of these lately – I wonder what my family is going to do if the government takes away Marie’s healthcare. Will we be able to find the time and the money to mount a legal challenge? How much of the wrong puberty is she going to have to endure while that case crawls through the courts? Should we take what little savings we have, abandon our lives and community here, and move to Australia, where things are safer (at least for now)? Are there any off-label medications that might limit the damage to Marie’s physical and mental health? Will I be forced to do something illegal? If it was medically safe, I absolutely would defy an unjust ban to get her care.
However, all of these questions are overshadowed in my mind by what might seem like a tiny question to someone who is not in the same situation: how am I going to tell her? How does a parent even begin to have a conversation like that? How do you tell a child, “All those things we promised you about growing up as a young woman, well, the government has just decided that you can’t have any of that, for no good reason”? How do you break your own child’s heart and tell her that you cannot protect her in all the ways you promised you would?
I just want her to be safe. This kind of fear and this feeling of powerlessness is debilitating for a parent.
And for what? Who will it benefit? Restricting or banning blockers is not going to protect children. On the contrary, it is going to harm them and some trans kids will tragically find another way out if the government forces them to undergo the wrong puberty. A recent study from the journal Nature Human Behaviour concluded that anti-trans laws in the United States led to increases in suicide attempts among young trans people by as much as 72%. Why force a young person to confront a decision like this?
This culture war, like any war, will have few victors and many casualties. This time, those who are injured, those who will be emotionally and physically scarred and, yes, those who will die, will be a small group of already intensely vulnerable children. Until January 20, you can submit comments directly to the government at pbconsultation@health.govt.nz and tell them to protect access to life-saving medical care for trans kids like Marie. If you leave her and others like her alone on this bloody battlefield and retreat, maybe thinking it doesn’t affect you, maybe hoping to save yourself, the casualties from the next battle in this culture war could be anyone. It could even be you.