r adolescents with gender variance
Carolyn’s refl ection: There were often parents who told me they did not want their daughters to become their sons. I remember asking our group of parents how I could respond to such parents. One of them said that, if parents do not support their adolescents through their transition journey, given the extreme distress the process causes, there would be a strong possibility of those young persons taking their own lives, as refl ected in the statistics stated above. Even though gender identity disorder is
no longer labelled as a “disorder” in DSM5, there is a new category, gender dysphoria, for those who experience distress from exhibiting “a strong and persistent cross- gender identifi cation” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The children and young people who came to our service
not only have struggles with their gender identity but also mental health or neuro- developmental issues such as Tourettes, obsessive compulsive disorder, self-harm, mood disorders or autism. Most of them self-identifi ed as transgender or trans. Similar to the experiences of the Tavistock service, we received more cases of young trans men than young trans women – a trend they noted occurring over the years; new referrals to them between Jan 2012 and Jan 2013 had 37.2% natal males and 62.8% natal females (Holt & Prescott, 2016). There were also a smaller group of those who self-identifi ed to the binary construct of male or female but saw themselves to be non-binary. The terms they used include gender-fl uid, gender-queer, a-gender, non- binary and pan-gender. We chose to use the
term ‘gender variance’ to describe the young people attending our group, borrowed from Gray et al. (2016), as it encapsulated a broader perspective, including everyone we described above. Carolyn’s and Yang’s refl ection: We were invited by the guest editors to consider if the term gender variance implies a binary cisgender identity as the norm. This made us re-read the Gray et al. paper and concur, as this term was defi ned by the authors as “incongruence between children’s sex assigned at birth and either their felt sense of self as male or female (gender identity) or their behaviours, interests, or dress used to communicate gender (gender role behaviour)”. This defi nition unfortunately regards any gender identity other than the one assigned at birth as incongruent and
Picture 1: Gender unicorn, visual representation of diff erent aspects of gender by
transstudent.org. Context 155, February 2018
9
Multi-family support for adolescents with gender variance
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