“There were no trans kids at school in my day”

 

Playing the foolish games of the foolish Facebook folk.

Whoever created this thought they were proving a point: "see? In those days, there were no kids at school with gender dysphoria, which proves it's not a real thing, just a current trend because permissive parenting, social media, and the all powerful militant trans lobby. They run corporations, the governments, schools, the media. The militant trans folk are everywhere! They're in the room with me right now!"

But I'll play their silly game. I'll call the bluff of all those who think" there were no trans kids in my day" somehow proves a point. Here's my honest answer to the question "how many students did you know who experienced gender dysphoria?" 

My answer is: I don't know. There might have been lots, or only a few. But in the 1980s, there were approximately zero students who could have been open about feelings of gender dysphoria. It was a world without a place for kids who didn't fit the gender binary. 

Trans kids were probably lying awake at night thinking there was something wrong with themselves. Rebuked by their parents if they expressed non gender conforming behavior. There was no one they could turn to for support - no books, no characters on TV, no pamphlets at the library telling them they were okay. They had no language to explain what they were feeling. The terms "transgender" and "gender dysphoria" didn't exist for most people. These kids had no name for what they were feeling. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw writes "It can take years for experience to find its way into language, and from there into knowledge." How much more difficult when the language isn't there yet.

Theese kids sure as heck wouldn't have admitted anything at school. Like the rest of society, teachers would have had no concept of gender dysphoria, no concept of transgender other than something weird, freakish, abnormal - even something evil, for many people, in accordance with their religious beliefs. How many kids would have felt that telling their teachers they wanted to be known by a different name and pronouns and wear clothing traditionally associated with a different gender from the one marked on their school records was even something they could do - let alone have felt confident doing it? 

It was an time when left handed children were forced to write with their right hands, with justifications ranging from left-handedness being somehow evil, through to it just being generally a problem, abnormal, and wrong (views that sound familiar... bizaarely, some people still think this way about left-handedness, but harking back to the way things used to be, when kids were forbidden to use their left hands, doesn't make those people right). 

And in a society that had no concept of gender identity, with parents and teachers who saw deviation from the gender binary as freakish and wrong, what chance was there that children who didn't fit that binary would find acceptance with the kids at school? Kids have always had a capacity for being brutal to the outsider, to anyone perceived as unacceptably different. How would a kid expressing gender dysphoria have been received by their peers in an era when bullying was largely considered good kids, keeping them in line, toughening them up, preparing them for a world where people are jerks.

If you look back at your school days and think "there were no trans kids back then", ask yourself how you would have reacted if you'd known a kid who was?

What is different now is that the kids who feel, or know, that who they are doesn't align with the gender they were assigned at birth, now have names and language to describe their experiences. Concepts like transgender and gender dysphoria aren't something new. They're just naming something that has always been there.

There have always been trans kids. I know this because I've listened to the stories of trans elders. Most of them speak of believing there was something wrong with them from early childhood. They didn't know its name. They thought that not feeling like the girl or boy they'd been announced to the world at birth meant there was something abnormal and broken about themselves. So they tried to hide it for years. Deny it to themselves. Come to view their desire to dress in clothing of the opposite sex as sinful urges they needed to overcome. Many of them married. All those decades forced to deny who they really were, to play a role they never sought for themselves. Some of them had to wait until aged in their seventies and eighties to come out as trans, to finally be themselves. These are not people influenced by TikTok trends. They've spent a life time conforming to how the world thought they should be; the last thing on their minds now is performing a role for the world's approval. 

Whilst there is a lot of joy in hearing their stories of freedom now, there's also sadness and frustration of the years wasted, the slurs encountered, the conversion therapies, the uninformed psychologists and counsellors masking their ignorance with terrible advice, the damage done by being forced to live life playing the role of someone you are not.

It's even more heartbreaking to reflect on the stories we'll never hear. The voices that were silenced. The people so convinced they were wrong and forced into living as a person they were not that they took their own lives. Or the ones that did attempt to live as their true selves, and were killed for doing so. 

That's a very long answer to a question asked by the type of person who sees the world in simple binaries - male/female, yes/no, right/wrong. They expected a simple answer, when the real world is messy and complicated and can't always be summed up in a sentence or two. But one thing is simple to understand: gender dysphoria has always existed. Trans kids have always existed. We know that know, and we must take what we know and use it to protect them, to give them apace to be.