Accepting Dad: Embracing Gender Variant Youth A Father's Journey to Acceptance of his Gender-Nonconforming Son Not Always a Duck by Bedford Hope on March 9, 2011 The duck test is a funny term for a form of inductive reasoning. It goes,
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Except of course, when it isn’t.
Which brings us to a sentence taken from the recent article Management of the Transgender Adolescent by Johanna Olson,
Office 2007 Enterprise Serial Key, MD, Catherine Forbes, PhD, and Marvin Belzer, MD. I read this out of intellectual curiosity, remembering a time when my interest would have been far from intellectual.
One sentence smacked me in the face like a fifty pound bass.
“In using affirming treatment strategies, mental health therapists and physicians do not define adolescents as transgender, but rather affirm their sense of self, allow for exploration of gender and self-definition, and give the message that it is entirely acceptable to be whoever you turn out to be.”
That sentence looks reasonable at first glance,
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Huh! So you let them define themselves, but you don’t define them as transgender….So you are allowing exploration, but not granting them the full unchanging identity…until you have to, until you do…when it’s right…
As parents we think we are the ones who know our children best—but for most of us, this experience is new; we generally have the one transgender child. So our experience is limited to the one child. The best professionals bring with them the experience of other gender non-conforming children. So, you may know your child best, but a good therapist, who has had a lot of patients like your kid, knows things you don’t.
So we try to merge our deep knowledge of our kids,
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Nine years ago, I knew my kid was transgender; I couldn’t imagine a more girly boy than my boy; he was obsessed with it; the dresses, the icons of femininity, the characters; the ballerina, the princess, the tutu, the sparkle, the pink, the purple, the high heels, the make-up…relentless…never ending…
…but.
After hearing Dr. Edgardo Menvielle’s profile of these kids at a gender conference, these ‘hyper-feminine’ boys who generally don’t go on to identify as female later on, another phrase had hit me, hard, and stuck.
Barbies not babies.
My kid didn’t really…nurture anything. He dragged a baby doll around as a kind of totem, but it was more like Linus’s blanket than what I imagined a girls baby doll would be like; its clothes long lost, and never replaced. He never fed, it, talked to it, rocked it, cuddled it, slept with it.
I agonized before telling my son about transition, afraid to find out, to start some sort of avalanche. He was in first grade, and we saw a person presenting as female who was pretty obviously doing the real life test and I thought, “well, seems like he has a right to know.”
So I told him about it. And he didn’t care. At all. He was in first grade. It was impossibly far in the future. Well, I thought. This doesn’t mean anything really.
But he never asked again, was never interested when we presented the role models; Wendy Carlos, Ru Paul, etc.
I may have known my kid better than anyone else, but I didn’t really know about what my kid’s behaviors meant. My kid passed the duck test. But he wasn’t a duck.
At 12, my son’s voice is changing, his face is masculinizing, he does drag characters for fun on facebook, he has a girl’s hair cut, but people are all now pretty much using male pronouns now; for a few years he was ok with any pronoun you wanted to use on him, as long as you weren’t insulting about it.
Never body dysphoric; never self mutilating; never self hating in that way.
When he was three he cried himself to sleep, after asking his mother why she hadn’t made him a girl. And I knew then he was transgender. But he never said he was a girl. He’s happy now. Happier than I was at that age, anyway. He has tons of friends. Failing seventh grade, but you can’t have everything. We’re past the early transition window and I see no signs we’re going there.
It could all change tomorrow. We’ll do what we should, we’ll do what is right; we were willing to do early transition if it was necessary.
But it wasn’t.
As a father many years ago, I missed a son I thought I had. There are odd moments now when I miss the daughter,
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We just had to let him.
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Office 2007 Professional Serial Key Accepting Dad
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