I’ve just heard another story from an acquaintance about a therapist encouraging someone to cut off contact with her parents. This is such a fraught and complex area, but I have thoughts. Here goes. First, of course, there are times when a parent has been so horribly abusive or is currently so difficult to contain that it makes sense to have no contact. However, I think these cases are unusual.

Before I became a mother, I asked an older woman who was a mentor to me what she would have done differently if she could live her life over. “I would have had more children,” she said. “Being a mother was my refiner’s fire. Who would I have become if I had had more?” With its extremes of emotion, parenthood is a little like a crucible in which we are cooked. The superfluous gets burnt away, the soul becomes tempered. Before becoming a mother, I imagined that the work of raising children would be a pause in the self-development process.

THREAD: On relationships with adult children. There are so many parts of the parenting experience that are sugar-coated in the popular imagination. Pregnancy is supposed to be blissful. Having a newborn is supposed to be transporting. 1/ And parenting small children is supposed to be full of love and hilarity. I’ve spoken with women who were really shocked at how miserable it can be to be pregnant, how grueling it is to have a newborn, and how tedious it can be to parent young kids. 2/

"I should have been challenged on the proposals or the claims that I was making for myself," she said. "And I think that would have made a big difference as well. If I was just challenged on the things I was saying." bbc.com/news/health-51… For years, I’ve been speaking with parents of teens who have announced a trans identity out of the blue in adolescence. Most were pressured by clinicians to accept child’s declaration without question.

Really interesting. First, this person appears to have been a GNC boy who grew up to be gay. That’s pretty typical. His father disapproved of his feminine interests and tried to force him not to be gay. Seems that that’s when the issues with GI started. journalofpsychedelicpsychiatry.org/feature-article I see anecdotal evidence that this might be a common pathway to GI issues — parents become worried about their young child acting “gay” and trying to repress GNC behavior. In some cases, parents appear to feel more comfortable having a trans kid than a gay kid. 2/

This LTE from @marcusevanspsyc makes me proud to be an analyst.

“The treatment of gender- dysphoric children has become highly politicised and, in many ways, operates outside good medical practice.” thetimes.co.uk/article/letter… “There is pressure to view patients as consumers who have a choice over their gender, rather than people with underlying conflicts about themselves and their relationship with society.”

I'm thrilled to see the issue of gender transition among minors receiving more critical attention from around the world. It seems as though more people are recognizing that there are serious ethical lapses in how this issue has been handled. While it's wonderful to see more and more journalists, clinicians, and doctors taking note of this, I want to take a moment to honor some who have been in the trenches for a long time. @4th_WaveNow tops the list. Her blog was one of the first places where these issues were aired.

It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves. nymag.com/intelligencer/… I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl.

“It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,” one male clinician said. “I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay,” thetimes.co.uk/article/it-fee… So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left”.

I've spoken with hundreds of parents whose teens suddenly announced that they were trans out of the blue. Their stories are heartbreaking. Kids are learning on the internet that if their parents don't immediately embrace medical transition, that their parents are transphobic. 1 Information on the internet stokes parent-child conflict -- which of course is normal for teens. But kids are being encouraged not to trust their parents -- even though most parents are supportive of their kids but want to slow down and think before undertaking permanent steps. 2