How to be a great parent or friend to transgender kids | Elijah Nealy

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Elijah Nealy: It is true that transgender youth, gender diverse youth, youth who don’t necessarily transition but whose gender expression is diverse or considered nonconforming or fluid are at higher risk of verbal harassment and even physical bullying within a school context. That’s been consistently demonstrated in surveys over the last 10 to 15 years.
So what I’d say to trans youth who are experiencing bullying is that it’s absolutely important that you talk to an adult in your life about what’s happening. That you don’t need to navigate harassment or bullying by yourself. In fact it’s critical to reach out and let someone safe in your life, another adult, know what’s happening, and that you can identify who that safe person is whether it’s a teacher, a school counselor, a school social worker, a parent, an extended family member. But it’s important to let someone know what’s happening because you have a right to be able to go to school and be safe and be free from the experience of bullying.
What the research is telling us in the last ten years is that family acceptance, a young person’s, a teenager’s experience of being accepted by their families is the critical mediating variable in queer young adult risk factors. So teenagers, queer teenagers, lesbian, gay, bi, trans teenagers growing up in families they experience as rejecting are eight-and-a-half times more likely to have attempted suicide by the time they’re 21 to 24. And they’re three-and-a-half times more likely to be at risk of HIV, to be using drugs and alcohol in an addictive way or problematic way, much higher rates of anxiety and depression, and that by contrast those risks are much lower for adolescents growing up in families that they experience as accepting.
The important piece about that for parents is the degree to which we can have an impact in lowering the risk factors that trans youth already face in a world that sometimes is still hostile or discriminatory, and that even in the face of external discrimination or harassment by peers or other adults or discriminatory laws family acceptance shows up as the critical mediating variable for young adult risks among trans youth.
So one best practice is to recognize that everyone of us as a human being has a right to define who we are, and that gender identity is not necessarily about our body parts but it’s about our own understanding of who we are as male or female, both or neither. It’s what’s in our brains. It’s what we know to be true about ourselves.
And so if we begin with that understanding and an acknowledgement that every human being deserves to be acknowledged and respected for who they know themselves to be that sets a real foundation in working with trans youth: That each trans young person like any other young person deserves to be acknowledge and treated with respect for who they are.
That means things like using a young person’s affirmed name and pronouns regardless of whether or not that matches your understanding or knowledge of that young person. But if I say my pronouns are male and my name is Elijah, then part of respect is respecting my understanding of myself.
From a treatment perspective that means what’s been emerging as best practices in the last ten years is an understanding of gender expression within young children and adolescents as gender diversity (and not gender variance or gender nonconformity)—And that all children experiment with gender expression, that children can have diverse and different ways of expressing their gender—young boys might like to play house, young girls might like to play with trucks—and that that’s simply gender diversity, and while it may not be “the norm” to have a boy who has feminine gender interests it is within the realm of normal; and that there’s nothing inherently abnormal or pathological. It’s simply gender diversity, and may or may not mean that that young child grows up to identify as trans.