Experiences of parents and carers of young trans and gender diverse people

I don’t think there’s a lot of information so, you know, you have to go and kind of try and find stuff out for yourself. And so, I know that there is loads that I don’t know. Absolutely loads that I don’t know. And information that might be helpful to me and therefore to him and to the people around us that, you know, with my husband and my other son. So, I do think that’s a problem. I do think having to, you know, not saying things like Mermaids. They should absolutely exist, but that shouldn’t be your primary source of information. You know, if you, if you were accessing healthcare for another reason, you wouldn’t have to go to a support group or an interest group or something like that to get information. And so I do think that that is, I do think that is a difference with accessing trans care for trans kids.

Obviously, I went to lots of websites and trawled through some websites.

How was that experience?

Poor, really. Because you just read loads of things. I mean, I think I've sat down and read lots of things. And then I got very, very upset. And then I called, I found a support group and so I've got to talk to someone. I'm not [sighs] I'm not [laughs] I don't want to read and assimilate information. I want to talk to someone about it. I'm better with one to one or in a group talking about it than I am about sitting down just, you know, reading stuff. So that's, that is the way I did it, really.

So what was upsetting about finding the information online?

Oh, there was just lots of things. How long people would wait or how, I mean there is lots of stuff out there about how people trans people are discriminated against. How, you know, violence against them. There's lots of that stuff out there. It does make you depressed. You do think to yourself, you know, this is not a life I envisaged for my child. And how tough is this going to be? So I think that's looking online can make you do that.’

Where do I get it? Well, I get it from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Because of my professional role, I have been able to become a member myself. I get first hand access to all of that. There’d a lot of academics who are trans or trans friendly on Twitter. They can give you links to their work and because I’m both an academic and a student I can get past the pay wall and have access to the journal articles and stuff like that. Plus there’s loads of really great, good books out there by people who are trans so I’ve read quite a lot of them and speak to parents who have experienced a wide variety of different services as well. I link into Mermaids and their residential zone and their forums. I try to get the biggest broad view as possible.

I must say that the main, the main resource that's still Mermaids and still the parents that post on the forums. So, I'm a member of the Facebook group and the forums on there are the best, the best information you can get for a practical, practical support, because you can read as much as you want on the in articles and research, but if you want practical advice on different ages of children and what's happened to people and what's, you can find out so much more through the forum. So I mean, they are the main support, the parents and getting to know if you've got any questions you can go and ask the other parents, you know, “has anybody got any experience of this?” Little things like does anybody know where to get good underwear, you know, for children, trans girls, that sort of thing. There's nothing like that anywhere, apart from asking other parents and getting recommendations, swimwear, you know, a child wants to go swimming, you've got a whole other dimension to think about. You've got all these things to think about. If they're confident about going in the swimming pool then they'll be, they'll like, they can go swimming. Swimming costumes is an important aspect of that to be able to do it. It's like all these things. But you don't get that sort of practical support anywhere else. So I would say the parent forums on Facebook are the most, on the Mermaid's forum, are the most important place. But then if you want, if you want background information about the research that's been done then yeah, there's research papers. But that can be confusing as well, because you've got so many conflicting papers about and you hear things quoted that you can't necessarily rely on and so there should there are organisations like Gendered Intelligence and there's another one, I can't remember there's a few different organisations that you can rely on and Stonewall even you can rely on for good information. So I would go to those organisations probably first and then look at their resources of what they recommend to read.

There's a couple of really, really good documentaries as well that I watched very early on, which really helped me to understand, not that I needed to accept, but I did need to understand what [participant’s child’s name] was going through to help him. One of them was the National Geographic which happened to come out in the January after he came out. So there were two magazines and then the company programme that Katy Corrick did and I think it was called, The Gender Revolution. So the magazines and the programme combined were really informative. There's loads of information and detail in there about the spectrum. Different countries having different things. And it really made me realise that it's both, is it a, are we called, Westerners, we are aren't we. Our idea of gender is very different to most of the rest of the world. And that was a bit of a revolution to me, cause I was like, oh, oppression, I get it, you know [laughs]. I didn’t really understand before. I'm one of those people that doesn't really watch the news and I'm not really up on current affairs. It just confuses me and upsets me, so I just kind of ignore it. Which has meant that I've not really, it's passed me by this kind of stuff until now.

So those programmes and those magazines were fantastic. And I always think things that you can hold and read and look back on are really useful. The magazines were great, cause, you know, I've still got them. And it means that I can show them to other people and say, have a quick look at this, if you're not getting it. If I'm not explaining it right just have a quick look and see if this helps. But it was written really well, it wasn't all, it wasn't jargoned, you know. I'm not a jargony person. I don't understand jargon. So, I found that very useful. There was also, I think there was a programme Louis Theroux did, and I think he was in America, and it was very balanced.