Parents feel new gender was a foregone agenda

The wave of positive coverage of the treatment of trans kids is unsettling for these parents.

Phillip and wife Alison (not their real names), who have experienced the tendency of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne to push gender-confused children on to the risky path of medical treatment. Picture: Aaron Francis

 

EDITORIAL: We will not shy away from uncomfortable topics that deserve attention. This is particularly so when the health and wellbeing of vulnerable children are at stake.

“I said, ‘I’m here to see my daughter, Claire’, and they said, ‘Oh, you mean Jason,’ ” recalls Karen, who took her teenage daughter to more than 70 mental health ­appointments over three years.

Admission to a hospital psychiatric ward late last year was not a one-off, but this time was different because Claire had gone ­transgender and christened herself Jason.

It made no sense to Karen or her husband James, but when they came back to visit their daughter after an all-night admission ­ordeal, the staff had not been idle.

“It was absolutely immediate. Her name written above her bed was Jason,” Karen says. “Every time we said Claire, we were corrected. We were told that if we didn’t use that preferred name, she would be killing herself.”

Media solidarity

Journalists have told many stories of brave transgender kids and teens, parents who embrace change, all the more proudly if after initial resistance, and clinicians who in difficult cases give puberty blocker drugs and cross-sex hormones, even organise surgery. It is pitched as a mental health emergency in which “affirmation” of a new gender ratchets down the risk of suicide.

Witnessing this wave of positive coverage is unsettling for parents whose story is seen as negative, and therefore goes ­untold. These parents, among them Karen and James, have begun to contact The Weekend Australian, wanting to talk about the other side of trans. How many others are out there?

Karen and James saw no cross-dressing when Claire was little, no other early clues of classic ­gender dysphoria in which the sense of self suffers because the body, ­imprinted with biological sex, feels alien. Karen remembers a girl who was “very kind, had a lot of empathy for other kids, very intelligent”.

But toxic bullying began when Claire was four and it went on for eight years. “She was called a slut, she was told to go and kill herself,” Karen says.

At the time, her parents did not grasp just how “catastrophic” it was. At age 15, the decline in Claire’s mental health became ­obvious. She outed herself as a lesbian, her mother simply saying “that’s fine”. But Claire was not. She developed a “big crush” on a girl at school, asked for a date and was rejected.

She and her family descended into a disorienting, sometimes terrifying mental health crisis, going from one practitioner to another, collecting a diagnosis of anxiety, then depression, possibly bipolar and one off-the-cuff guess at borderline personality disorder.

“She wouldn’t do anything she was told, she was cutting, binge-eating, she would steal things,” Karen says. She and James felt ­besieged and traumatised.

Then, just before her 18th birthday, Claire “announced she was really a boy and wanted to be called ‘him’. I had to start learning all this stuff, pronouns. I found a web history of indulging in trans websites and videos of girls injecting themselves with trans hormones and bragging how their voices are deepening.”

If anything, Jason’s behaviour got more out of control than Claire’s.

What about regret?

After a psychiatric emergency led to the locked hospital ward, the clinician who seemed in charge told Karen she wanted to introduce Claire to a transgender person on staff. “And James said, ‘Have you got someone who’s transitioned and regretted it? Can she meet that person too?’ ”

Come the weekend, the staff who had stressed the suicide risk if Claire were called the wrong name told her mother to take her out of the hospital on day release. “It was a disaster, she kept telling me she wanted to kill herself.”

The hospital stay was short and Claire came home the day after discharge with her head clean-shaven, marking the ­occasion with a social media post “Claire 2018, Britney 2007”, tagging the meme of a celebrity’s downward spiral.

Karen: “Every day I was given a lecture about how I was a white privileged bigot, transphobic, a boring heterosexual, on and on and on.”

Meanwhile, a hospital endocrinologist wanted to meet the family. Karen: “I know why you go to an endocrinologist — to get jolly hormones, and we said, no, no, no, we’re not doing that.”

Happy hormones

Claire kept asking until her parents relented and the family ­meeting went ahead. Karen ­detailed the mental health problems, which predated trans self-identification and, in her opinion, ­required investigation and therapy before any talk of risky hormone treatment.

She explained they were waiting on the opinion of a psychiatrist in private practice with a specialisation in gender.

“The endocrinologist looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you just want to see your child happy?’ I said, ‘I think there’s a lot more to parenting than just seeing your child happy.’ ”

Later, she and James found out Claire had begun testosterone two months beforehand. She was 18, although her first endocrinology appointment had been made, without her parents’ knowledge, at 17. Still, Claire agreed to keep the appointment with the gender specialist, who took a careful history.

“He diagnosed her with complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her going through an enormous amount of bullying as a child,” says Karen.

“He said he most definitely would not have put her on male hormones at this point of time ­because clearly with PTSD you need therapy to sort through mental health issues.”

But as Karen and James discovered, there is little parents can do to separate a young woman from hormone treatment that is seen by authorities as her right and vital for mental health.

Gender identity might have changed but the abuse and conflict at home did not let up, until things became unbearable and Claire was set up in student ­housing nearby, the rent paid by Centrelink and her parents.

Karen: “She dropped out of school, she’s not working, she’s not going to uni, she just lies in bed all day. I don’t think her mental health has improved at all.”

The hospital insists staff did the right thing at all times with Claire’s best interests in mind. Karen says friends find the whole story difficult to credit. “They just can’t believe this is happening to children and adolescents, they just can’t. I feel like I’ve been screaming into the wind about this child abuse and nobody’s listening.”

Deaf to doubt

Alison casts her mind back to the defining moment: “I realised about 20 minutes in that I wasn’t going to be heard, it wasn’t going to be a thorough investigation. They were basically saying there and then, on the spot, they were going to move down the track of hormone treatment.” That meant testosterone for Alison’s daughter Zoe, 16 at the time, who identifies as male and these days no longer talks to her mother.

Zoe was two years old at the separation of her father and ­mother, who did their best to make shared parenting work. She was imaginative and sensitive from an early age. “She would ­immerse herself in an identity, very creative, happy and much loved.”

But there was bullying — one nasty incident in primary school and two in high school, the tormentor her best friend. Alison didn’t find out until later. At ­puberty, when Zoe was almost 14, she began to talk about “gender fluidity” and told her mother she believed she was bipolar. “She’d done an awful lot of research ­online and she self-diagnosed.

“She had a laptop for school and we discovered she had been heavily involved online with a platform called Tumblr and a group of transgender people from all around the world. Up until that point she had never ever shown any sign of being anything other than a girl, so it was completely out of the blue.”

On board

Zoe was anxious and depressed and the family entered the revolving door of mental health. The psychiatrist at a private clinic ­appeared to have no doubt Zoe was a boy trapped in a girl’s body and gave a provisional diagnosis of gender dysphoria. “In front of Zoe, the psychiatrist told me I had to ‘get on board’. I was completely bullied,” Allison says.

“I kept saying, I think you need to be exploring beyond what Zoe is saying. She had always been a brilliant actress, very creative — when she was in kinder she had the entire class believing she was a dog. I asked them, how do you know this gender dysphoria didn’t arise as a result of being anxious and depressed and not the other way around?

“She spent six weeks at the clinic. She came out convinced she was transgender.”

Alison put her faith in a referral to Australia’s biggest gender clinic for children and adolescents at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. “We were desperate, we were trying to keep her alive. I honestly believed it would be a full investigative process at the children’s hospital.”

Meanwhile, Zoe became dogmatic — “If people weren’t going to accept her as a boy, then they had no part in her life.”

“She always looked fantastic in clothes but she started wearing clothes that completely disguised her form. She had very long hair, she cut that off. She got piercings in her nose, she started wearing a chest binder.”

Alison’s partner, Phillip, who helped raise Zoe, says: “She was slated to be 6 foot 2 or 3. Imagine you’re a teenage girl, imagine the changes in your body, then thinking you’re going to grow up taller than most men — it must have been an amazingly confused time for an adolescent.”

In for the journey

Zoe moved in with her father, who supported her transgender “journey”, and Alison saw less and less of her. She was almost 16 by the time they all turned up for the first consultation at RCH. What Alison didn’t know was that her daughter had been seeing an RCH psychiatrist in private practice and her report had already been presented to the clinic.

Zoe’s bipolar self-diagnosis was dismissed, her self-declaration as a boy embraced.

Alison: “When I tried to talk about the bullying incidents, it was just noted that there were three ­instances of bullying but there was no further exploration, nor had there been any attempt to get my side of the story for the report.

“The last thing the professor said to me — he stood up and said, ‘You should be proud of your child,’ and I’d had no more than half an hour with him and I’d had the opportunity to mutter five or six words.

“I was devastated, he knew nothing about me or the relationship I had with my child. It was never about, ‘I didn’t support my child’ — it was about getting her the right help. Why did the decision to put her on hormones have to be so fast — and why were long-term risks glossed over?

“She was young and vulnerable and needed support, and sometimes there needs to be a level of tough love involved. You tell them what they need to hear.

“It was as if she was running away from one set of problems without understanding she was in for a whole new set of problems. It’s very different making that ­decision at age 13-14 to making that decision at age 24-25 when you’ve had life experience.”

Alison doesn’t know if her daughter began to take, or still takes, male hormones. By now Zoe is an adult entitled to privacy. “It has torn apart what was once a very, very close and loving family, and I grieve daily.”

The 2018 RCH treatment guidelines say: “When a child’s medical, psychological and/or ­social circumstances are complicated by co-existing mental health difficulties, trauma, abuse, significantly impaired family functioning, or learning or behavioural difficulties, a more intensive approach with input from a ­mental health clinician will be ­required.”

The Weekend Australian asked RCH and transgender groups to pass on the reporter’s contact ­details to families happy to talk about their experience but RCH refused and nothing came of asking trans groups.

All names have been changed to protect people’s identities.