Poll on social transition
Can social transition work as a way to relieve gender distress in a young person or does it exacerbate their distress?
There are many mixed reports about the impact of social transition and, in the absence of any research, it could be useful to collect some parents’ perspectives. Please leave comments below
This question should be multifaceted- from my experience, it is completely different according to the kid. For ASD and pre-pubertal children it seems to be a lock in, as socially transitioning appears to build the fiction too deeply for them to get out of. This was clear from Ken Zucker’s research with young kids. Anyone that has an ASD kid knows that any concretization of the gender issue without the push back of reality is difficult to undo.
The ASD kids seem to be running away from themselves in shame, usually bc they’ve had very bad social interactions as their ‘former selves,’ and if you couple that with the absolute black whole that adolescence and identity building is for them, then it is clear that social transition does not work as a sort of experimentation and self-exploration, but rather as a maladaptive coping and escaping mechanism that leads down the road of ‘becoming someone else.’ Many of our kids have a real hatred of their selves and feel failed in their sex- and socially transitioning robs them of the opportunity to heal from that and to explore those feelings in a way that they can be resolved healthily.
As for non-ASD kids, I’ve seen some use social transition to explore and then realize it’s not for me, but for the most part, they all tank on their mental health, I suspect bc it has to be a doozy to accept that there’s something so fundamentally wrong with you that you need major medical and social interventions in order to ‘align’ your feelings with your physical self. Also, and few people ever talk about this- but the culture- online and in person- that goes with trans is very unhealthy, romanticizing depression, mental illness, sexual deviance, and highlighting social isolation (you don’t fit in), that formerly happy kids suddenly find themselves in a bog of bad influences, and this is a real threat to MH.
Lastly, I think that if the world was not colluding in the fiction, then the kid may be able to emerge from social transition as exploration with some real self understanding, but as we are now building a world that incorporates these fictions, I don’t see how the kid can make it out by themselves anymore.
It might create a temporary improvement in the child’s mood - they are after all getting what they want. By all accounts the novelty wears off and then the child is left entrenched with an off-ramp looking further and further away.