"I felt it lift right out of me, a starling taking flight to join the murmuration in the sky, the place where pain becomes beauty. The loneliness transformed from poison into fuel." So lovely and so relatable . . .
I have taken a perverse sort of pride in my feelings of being a lonely outsider, never fitting in with all those other girls I envied for their beauty and popularity and bodies. Every time I thought I detected a stubbornness, a sign of refusal to conform, in my daughter, even when it inconvenienced me, sometimes embarrassed me, frustrated me because she was refusing to do simple things that would make interacting with others socially so much easier, I also felt a sort of pride at her awkwardness and her disagreeableness. I thought it was a sign of a strong sense of self, a sign she wouldn't slip into "lemming hood."
As I watch her suffer from anxiety, administering Testosterone to herself to erase her former identity as a daughter, granddaughter . . . I feel like such a failure as a parent. To the extent I hoped whatever failure to nurture I might have been guilty of might have had the useful effects on my daughter that the theory of "tough love" traditionally claims, somehow this transgender mindset she clings to has snuffed out even that hope.
My thoughts have wandered in recent days to that old Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue." It's interesting to consider the lyrics of that old song, in light of this whole gender nonconforming issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qImWFWtr-BE
Or maybe all the above is bullsh*t. Post-hoc rationalizations . . . a new delusion to get me through . . . Hard to know what is real anymore . . .
My own little tomboy was such a delight before she learned that all of these wonderful characteristics meant her body was wrong and her parents were not to be trusted. This obsession with gender is a big problem and it is so difficult to reach rank and file folks in the schools to explain this. and then when you do, you are just shining a light on your own family who will then be thrown into the abusive category. I wish I were a better writer like you Lisa. Thank you for this great essay.
Wow! I could not have said it better myself. I was incredibly touched by reading this post. My heart aches for our children in a world where adults fail them on every level. The wording is so sensitive yet so strong. Thank you for sharing. Your site has become a support group, Lisa. Kudos to you!
So many excellent points in this essay. Your points about unintentionally creating fragile children really resonates. I’ve become fascinated by the idea of what Lisa Duval referred to as “iatrogenic borderline personality disorder” during her interview on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff frame the same idea as essentially teaching kids the opposite of mental health and the tenets of CBT in their book. I feel like this needs to seriously considered and not just culture war fodder. There’s something about the good intentions of trying to teach kids kindness, compassion, acceptance, emotional intelligence and self-awareness, and creating good mental health that is backfiring and creating just the opposite (see the results of this study as an example: https://mobile.twitter.com/DrJackAndrews/status/1548925718746189824). I think a large part of it is that we’re not teaching kids how to “recover quickly.” We’re being told we’re harming our kids, invalidating their feelings and experiences, and creating future mental health problems by doing this. I think another part of it is that many adults are making the age-old mistake of believing they can give their adult knowledge and experience to kids and have them avoid the same mistakes and suffering they did. We know that unfortunately that doesn’t work, and for certain issues - like sexual orientation and identity (especially the concept of a “gender identity”) kids are being exposed to ideas they’re not developmentally ready to handle and being pushed to make declarations about who they are before they’ve gone through the developmental process of developing an identity.
Pulling on a totally different thread - the story about the woman’s reaction to your daughter in the women’s bathroom is so sad. But it also highlights how those critical of how this is being pushed on children and who are always talking about the growing number of detransitioners are going to have to change their attitudes and hard and fast rules about bathrooms and pronouns. With more deyransitioners, we are going to be seeing more and more people who look like they are in the wrong bathroom or asking us to use what seem like the wrong pronouns. That’s in addition to the people who are naturally presenting outside of the gendered stereotypes of the biological sex they accept. We can’t dig in with inflexible rules on this.
Thank you for this, Lisa. I love your family motto, "recover quickly". Here's to fortifying our children, and ourselves, 2023. Thank you for your words and for creating this space for others.
The time to install fortitude is 0-3 -- by providing external co-regulation, aka soothing or stimulating, depending what is needed, to help the baby stay inside a "window of tolerance." The ability to self regulate is at the heart of confidence: "I can handle this."
We have a lot of dysregulated adults (addicted, distracted, overeating/drinking, anxious) who do not know how to regulate themselves, nor imbue the skill to their kids. I believe these "snowplow" parents are **afraid of their kids' strong negative emotions** because they lack this intuitive sense of how to re-regulate them. They do not know how to sit with the child and contain/ withstand their negative affect-- like you sat with yourself at the dining table and let it move through you. Feelings always move when not resisted.
When I was a CASA to a very hurt, unhappy child, I had to psych myself up mentally to bear the very deep pain before visiting. I'd park a block a way and meditate for a few minutes... visualize myself as a huge redwood deck which could take any weight. I had to empathically hold all the lonely pain I knew about. Kids who have not learned self regulation via co regulation STILL need co-regulation... in therapeutic/friend relationships... because this is the only way the skill is learned: dyadically.
We're not providing what's needed at the right time, creating fragility, and then we provide what isn't needed-- to manage our own anxiety about the kid/us not coping well.
"We have a lot of dysregulated adults (addicted, distracted, overeating/drinking, anxious) who do not know how to regulate themselves, nor imbue the skill to their kids." This is me. And you are right about all of that. We do talk about it a lot, at least. But I definitely find my kids' discomfort difficult to tolerate, and teach them that they can't either. I'm hoping some awareness of it will help. But I also think any attempt to do this is undermined by our institutions.
It's a modeled right-brain skill - acquired implicitly as kids.
Most of us have that particular friend who just always feels good to be with, whether you are happy or sad they always give what's needed. Those friends are good at co regulating us. They don't fix us but they meet us where we are.
Dr Laurence Heller talks about the importance of just letting big emotions come in... being aware of the way even very intense/ upsetting feelings move through the body rapidly and do not harm us. His therapeutic method is just helping the patient retain awareness of their body as their emotions hit.... tracking the way the emotion feels physically with no story attached. Like what you did at the table - a perfect instinct - to allow the emotion to do it's thing. Emotions arise in the body... swell, move, change, intensify... and then they leave. A felt emotion resolves. Doing this can feel counterintuitive if suppressing bad feelings has been a coping strategy. Co regulation is being the safe "other" who gives a person confidence that they can let the rough emotions come in.
With right brain skills, verbal is not always helpful. One technique is to resist putting words on feelings while they are 'live' but rather just "surf the feeling." Let it rip. Let it move and pass through. Get in child's pose, shake if you need to; don't label the feeling but experience the intensity of it and track it in the body, with curious awareness. Doing this a few times is a very powerful lesson. No harm is done! No need to suppress!
With kids, gross motor coordinated movements with another person / people are very co regulating (drumming, dance, "catch," tennis, theatre blocking). Dr Bessell Van Der Kolk talks about this in his book.
To use non verbal skills when comforting another person, you can use a sympathetic facial expression, a hand on their arm, stroking their hair or back, a deep sigh, a big hug... those things will activate non verbal right brain systems and also convey empathy and presence without putting words to it. You can ask, "where is that felt in your body? is there a temperature? Is it moving?. To cue them to focus on the body.
Last I am a huge proponent of Neurofeedback. My CASA youth did "Neuroptimal" which is very very regulating and extremely easy (no efforting). About 20-30 sessions is full course of treatment - makes a huge difference in calming right brain.
What a touching essay. I have always been conscious of not raising my children to be fragile --primarily because my kids have such strong and outgoing personalities that I wanted to celebrate. Showing up with empathy? yes. Not shunning them for feeling sad or angry? yes. But I also try to show grace and understanding when people make mistakes or are just human and imperfect, so that my children can learn to accept their own humanity and imperfection. Alas, my older child who claims they are non-binary/trans has long sought to feel special and stand out and the language of today gives them exactly what they have craved since toddlerhood. The irony is that I as a brown immigrant woman raised in low-income community who came through a life with regular experiences of violent racism and misogyny am dismissed by my light skinned, middle class, child of educated American parents who constantly acting as if their "oppression" is so much worse.
The "Genderbread Man" has morphed into the "Gender Unicorn," complete with print-out coloring pages from the site funded by the Arcus Foundation--ie, pharma money. Unicorn is just as illogical and inappropriate, developmentally, as the cookie guy. I'm glad I didn't have to face that when my children, the sons of a father who thinks himself into a "female persona," and claimed on official documents to be their mother, despite legal stipulations disallowing that. The indoctrination in schools now would have completely defeated my young sons' psyches. They were so relieved to hear, over and over, that their father has a rare condition, "it will never land on you." The fallacies of the "Dutch Studies" (the basis on which children are given puberty blockers) are still coming to light. These studies were funded in part by a Dutch pharma company, a manufacturer of exongenous hormones. Only favorable results get published in pharma-funded studies. How this trickles down to children is a travesty, and I'm so glad my days in the classroom are over.
The sex stereotypes rife in the online "trans" movement are the hyper-feminine avatars gamers choose for their playing persona, akin to playing pieces in a game of Clue. Drag Queens extend the stereotypes in a burlesque direction and Rachel Levine extends stereotypes in very frightening directions, indeed. I bet he's invested in those pharma companies.
Movement, nature and observational skills will help our children become resilient. For the real truth on long term use of exogenous hormones, Lesbians-United.org has the list of the studies the legacy media will not publish.
I think we are always modeling how to live in this difficult world. Our children are always watching us and learning how to be strong. In my work with children, I found that the most effective help was to help the parents.
Another wonderful, though-provoking post. What Lisa writes about the woman at the concert put in mind a recent experience my spouse and I had of the kind we do from time to time. We are both older women, and neither of us “present” in a stereotypically feminine way. So, for example, we were “outdoor dining,” and when a woman from the next table addressed one of us, she used “Sir.” As we typically do on such occasions, we corrected her misimpression. She was quick to apologize, as is also typical. One could almost see her internal gears working, adjusting her first misimpression, for, as so often, once she looked more closely, you could see her realize her mistake. I like to think that, next time, she won’t jump to conclusions so quickly. Whether that’s the best approach for all or in all instances, I would never judge. Indeed, I can see how it might be quite reasonable to avoid bothering with this with strangers, just as Lisa described. For us, I always feel that a bit of reeducation on what women and men are thought to look like is a good thing--particularly as, in our experience, it is typically an assumption made based on superficial things, like wearing a baseball cap.
Of course, in our gender-addled world, a man could be the one who is “mistaken” for a man and seeks to correct that “misimpression.” I haven’t encountered that one yet, and am not sure how or if I might respond!
I love this piece so much, Lisa. It is honest, compassionate and vulnerable while also being direct about the real harm these measures are causing. I, too, am really worried about the generation of fragility that is being created. I keep thinking of this idea you mentioned that “non binary” maybe creates a category for gender non conforming kids the way that other cultures have created alternate social categories. I do not think NB can work in the same way as, say, fa’afafine, though because “non binary” is rooted in sex denialism. The fa’afafine know they are male, but they can exist in this acceptable other social role if they feel different from other men. There is no such thing as a female fa’afafine so this cannot be equated with non-binary in our culture. Since NB isn’t strictly a social role in our society that makes it a gateway for more potential harm than good. Be it NB surgeries, or male NBs invading female spaces/sports. I suppose if we had “non binary girls” and “non binary boys” then it could work. But the idea that someone who identifies as non-binary should have access to whatever sports and private spaces they wish shows that NB is not the same as fa’afafine, because the fa’afafine would never attempt to participate in female sports. This would be an interesting concept to explore in a future piece, maybe. Sorry for the long rambling comment!
"I felt it lift right out of me, a starling taking flight to join the murmuration in the sky, the place where pain becomes beauty. The loneliness transformed from poison into fuel." So lovely and so relatable . . .
I have taken a perverse sort of pride in my feelings of being a lonely outsider, never fitting in with all those other girls I envied for their beauty and popularity and bodies. Every time I thought I detected a stubbornness, a sign of refusal to conform, in my daughter, even when it inconvenienced me, sometimes embarrassed me, frustrated me because she was refusing to do simple things that would make interacting with others socially so much easier, I also felt a sort of pride at her awkwardness and her disagreeableness. I thought it was a sign of a strong sense of self, a sign she wouldn't slip into "lemming hood."
As I watch her suffer from anxiety, administering Testosterone to herself to erase her former identity as a daughter, granddaughter . . . I feel like such a failure as a parent. To the extent I hoped whatever failure to nurture I might have been guilty of might have had the useful effects on my daughter that the theory of "tough love" traditionally claims, somehow this transgender mindset she clings to has snuffed out even that hope.
My thoughts have wandered in recent days to that old Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue." It's interesting to consider the lyrics of that old song, in light of this whole gender nonconforming issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qImWFWtr-BE
Or maybe all the above is bullsh*t. Post-hoc rationalizations . . . a new delusion to get me through . . . Hard to know what is real anymore . . .
I don't think this is "bullsh*t at all. For me, these are very relatable feelings. Thank you for your comment.
My own little tomboy was such a delight before she learned that all of these wonderful characteristics meant her body was wrong and her parents were not to be trusted. This obsession with gender is a big problem and it is so difficult to reach rank and file folks in the schools to explain this. and then when you do, you are just shining a light on your own family who will then be thrown into the abusive category. I wish I were a better writer like you Lisa. Thank you for this great essay.
Wow! I could not have said it better myself. I was incredibly touched by reading this post. My heart aches for our children in a world where adults fail them on every level. The wording is so sensitive yet so strong. Thank you for sharing. Your site has become a support group, Lisa. Kudos to you!
So many excellent points in this essay. Your points about unintentionally creating fragile children really resonates. I’ve become fascinated by the idea of what Lisa Duval referred to as “iatrogenic borderline personality disorder” during her interview on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff frame the same idea as essentially teaching kids the opposite of mental health and the tenets of CBT in their book. I feel like this needs to seriously considered and not just culture war fodder. There’s something about the good intentions of trying to teach kids kindness, compassion, acceptance, emotional intelligence and self-awareness, and creating good mental health that is backfiring and creating just the opposite (see the results of this study as an example: https://mobile.twitter.com/DrJackAndrews/status/1548925718746189824). I think a large part of it is that we’re not teaching kids how to “recover quickly.” We’re being told we’re harming our kids, invalidating their feelings and experiences, and creating future mental health problems by doing this. I think another part of it is that many adults are making the age-old mistake of believing they can give their adult knowledge and experience to kids and have them avoid the same mistakes and suffering they did. We know that unfortunately that doesn’t work, and for certain issues - like sexual orientation and identity (especially the concept of a “gender identity”) kids are being exposed to ideas they’re not developmentally ready to handle and being pushed to make declarations about who they are before they’ve gone through the developmental process of developing an identity.
Pulling on a totally different thread - the story about the woman’s reaction to your daughter in the women’s bathroom is so sad. But it also highlights how those critical of how this is being pushed on children and who are always talking about the growing number of detransitioners are going to have to change their attitudes and hard and fast rules about bathrooms and pronouns. With more deyransitioners, we are going to be seeing more and more people who look like they are in the wrong bathroom or asking us to use what seem like the wrong pronouns. That’s in addition to the people who are naturally presenting outside of the gendered stereotypes of the biological sex they accept. We can’t dig in with inflexible rules on this.
Thank you for this, Lisa. I love your family motto, "recover quickly". Here's to fortifying our children, and ourselves, 2023. Thank you for your words and for creating this space for others.
The time to install fortitude is 0-3 -- by providing external co-regulation, aka soothing or stimulating, depending what is needed, to help the baby stay inside a "window of tolerance." The ability to self regulate is at the heart of confidence: "I can handle this."
We have a lot of dysregulated adults (addicted, distracted, overeating/drinking, anxious) who do not know how to regulate themselves, nor imbue the skill to their kids. I believe these "snowplow" parents are **afraid of their kids' strong negative emotions** because they lack this intuitive sense of how to re-regulate them. They do not know how to sit with the child and contain/ withstand their negative affect-- like you sat with yourself at the dining table and let it move through you. Feelings always move when not resisted.
When I was a CASA to a very hurt, unhappy child, I had to psych myself up mentally to bear the very deep pain before visiting. I'd park a block a way and meditate for a few minutes... visualize myself as a huge redwood deck which could take any weight. I had to empathically hold all the lonely pain I knew about. Kids who have not learned self regulation via co regulation STILL need co-regulation... in therapeutic/friend relationships... because this is the only way the skill is learned: dyadically.
We're not providing what's needed at the right time, creating fragility, and then we provide what isn't needed-- to manage our own anxiety about the kid/us not coping well.
"We have a lot of dysregulated adults (addicted, distracted, overeating/drinking, anxious) who do not know how to regulate themselves, nor imbue the skill to their kids." This is me. And you are right about all of that. We do talk about it a lot, at least. But I definitely find my kids' discomfort difficult to tolerate, and teach them that they can't either. I'm hoping some awareness of it will help. But I also think any attempt to do this is undermined by our institutions.
It's a modeled right-brain skill - acquired implicitly as kids.
Most of us have that particular friend who just always feels good to be with, whether you are happy or sad they always give what's needed. Those friends are good at co regulating us. They don't fix us but they meet us where we are.
Dr Laurence Heller talks about the importance of just letting big emotions come in... being aware of the way even very intense/ upsetting feelings move through the body rapidly and do not harm us. His therapeutic method is just helping the patient retain awareness of their body as their emotions hit.... tracking the way the emotion feels physically with no story attached. Like what you did at the table - a perfect instinct - to allow the emotion to do it's thing. Emotions arise in the body... swell, move, change, intensify... and then they leave. A felt emotion resolves. Doing this can feel counterintuitive if suppressing bad feelings has been a coping strategy. Co regulation is being the safe "other" who gives a person confidence that they can let the rough emotions come in.
With right brain skills, verbal is not always helpful. One technique is to resist putting words on feelings while they are 'live' but rather just "surf the feeling." Let it rip. Let it move and pass through. Get in child's pose, shake if you need to; don't label the feeling but experience the intensity of it and track it in the body, with curious awareness. Doing this a few times is a very powerful lesson. No harm is done! No need to suppress!
With kids, gross motor coordinated movements with another person / people are very co regulating (drumming, dance, "catch," tennis, theatre blocking). Dr Bessell Van Der Kolk talks about this in his book.
To use non verbal skills when comforting another person, you can use a sympathetic facial expression, a hand on their arm, stroking their hair or back, a deep sigh, a big hug... those things will activate non verbal right brain systems and also convey empathy and presence without putting words to it. You can ask, "where is that felt in your body? is there a temperature? Is it moving?. To cue them to focus on the body.
Last I am a huge proponent of Neurofeedback. My CASA youth did "Neuroptimal" which is very very regulating and extremely easy (no efforting). About 20-30 sessions is full course of treatment - makes a huge difference in calming right brain.
What a touching essay. I have always been conscious of not raising my children to be fragile --primarily because my kids have such strong and outgoing personalities that I wanted to celebrate. Showing up with empathy? yes. Not shunning them for feeling sad or angry? yes. But I also try to show grace and understanding when people make mistakes or are just human and imperfect, so that my children can learn to accept their own humanity and imperfection. Alas, my older child who claims they are non-binary/trans has long sought to feel special and stand out and the language of today gives them exactly what they have craved since toddlerhood. The irony is that I as a brown immigrant woman raised in low-income community who came through a life with regular experiences of violent racism and misogyny am dismissed by my light skinned, middle class, child of educated American parents who constantly acting as if their "oppression" is so much worse.
The "Genderbread Man" has morphed into the "Gender Unicorn," complete with print-out coloring pages from the site funded by the Arcus Foundation--ie, pharma money. Unicorn is just as illogical and inappropriate, developmentally, as the cookie guy. I'm glad I didn't have to face that when my children, the sons of a father who thinks himself into a "female persona," and claimed on official documents to be their mother, despite legal stipulations disallowing that. The indoctrination in schools now would have completely defeated my young sons' psyches. They were so relieved to hear, over and over, that their father has a rare condition, "it will never land on you." The fallacies of the "Dutch Studies" (the basis on which children are given puberty blockers) are still coming to light. These studies were funded in part by a Dutch pharma company, a manufacturer of exongenous hormones. Only favorable results get published in pharma-funded studies. How this trickles down to children is a travesty, and I'm so glad my days in the classroom are over.
The sex stereotypes rife in the online "trans" movement are the hyper-feminine avatars gamers choose for their playing persona, akin to playing pieces in a game of Clue. Drag Queens extend the stereotypes in a burlesque direction and Rachel Levine extends stereotypes in very frightening directions, indeed. I bet he's invested in those pharma companies.
Movement, nature and observational skills will help our children become resilient. For the real truth on long term use of exogenous hormones, Lesbians-United.org has the list of the studies the legacy media will not publish.
Thanks again, Lisa!
I think we are always modeling how to live in this difficult world. Our children are always watching us and learning how to be strong. In my work with children, I found that the most effective help was to help the parents.
Another wonderful, though-provoking post. What Lisa writes about the woman at the concert put in mind a recent experience my spouse and I had of the kind we do from time to time. We are both older women, and neither of us “present” in a stereotypically feminine way. So, for example, we were “outdoor dining,” and when a woman from the next table addressed one of us, she used “Sir.” As we typically do on such occasions, we corrected her misimpression. She was quick to apologize, as is also typical. One could almost see her internal gears working, adjusting her first misimpression, for, as so often, once she looked more closely, you could see her realize her mistake. I like to think that, next time, she won’t jump to conclusions so quickly. Whether that’s the best approach for all or in all instances, I would never judge. Indeed, I can see how it might be quite reasonable to avoid bothering with this with strangers, just as Lisa described. For us, I always feel that a bit of reeducation on what women and men are thought to look like is a good thing--particularly as, in our experience, it is typically an assumption made based on superficial things, like wearing a baseball cap.
Of course, in our gender-addled world, a man could be the one who is “mistaken” for a man and seeks to correct that “misimpression.” I haven’t encountered that one yet, and am not sure how or if I might respond!
I love this piece so much, Lisa. It is honest, compassionate and vulnerable while also being direct about the real harm these measures are causing. I, too, am really worried about the generation of fragility that is being created. I keep thinking of this idea you mentioned that “non binary” maybe creates a category for gender non conforming kids the way that other cultures have created alternate social categories. I do not think NB can work in the same way as, say, fa’afafine, though because “non binary” is rooted in sex denialism. The fa’afafine know they are male, but they can exist in this acceptable other social role if they feel different from other men. There is no such thing as a female fa’afafine so this cannot be equated with non-binary in our culture. Since NB isn’t strictly a social role in our society that makes it a gateway for more potential harm than good. Be it NB surgeries, or male NBs invading female spaces/sports. I suppose if we had “non binary girls” and “non binary boys” then it could work. But the idea that someone who identifies as non-binary should have access to whatever sports and private spaces they wish shows that NB is not the same as fa’afafine, because the fa’afafine would never attempt to participate in female sports. This would be an interesting concept to explore in a future piece, maybe. Sorry for the long rambling comment!