“What the hell are you doing?” my patient Dan screamed at his 4-year-old son, who was dressed in his wife’s floral apron and twirling a whisk.
“I’m cooking, Daddy,” Bobby responded as he started to cry.
“I felt like such a jerk,” Dan told me. “I know I’m not the poster child for gentle parenting, and I know I shouldn’t have yelled, but I can’t stand it when he wears his sister’s pink dresses and plays with her dolls. I dreamed of having a child who played football, the way I did, and my father did.” He paused. “He’ll grow out of this, won’t he?” Dan asked in a voice that was almost pleading.
For the past 30 years, I’ve worked with parents who have struggled with the gender choices that their children are making. Sometimes they berate themselves, other times they take out their rage on their children. Often, family members compound the guilt and shame. Years ago, it was often unusual for children to want to transition in middle school or high school, but we are now seeing this conversation arise as early as elementary school.
I’ve seen this anguish from many perspectives. I trained at a college counseling center in the mid-1980s when gender questioning was uncharted territory, and there was little support for teenagers to come to terms with the complexities of sexual desire that challenged the traditional norms. And the issue of sexuality emerges full force in college when students are away from home and family.
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