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Hello and welcome to teenagers untangled the audio hub for parents going through the teenage years. I'm Rachel Richards, mother of two teenagers and two boneless daughters. Now today I have a very special guest called Stella O'Malley. She's a practicing psychotherapist, a parent, and an expert on recent developments in sexuality and gender. Her latest co authored book when kids say they're trans is written to give parents a guide to how they can best navigate the rapidly changing landscape of gender and talk to their teen if they're struggling with issues relating to their sexuality. Even if we don't have anyone in our family who's struggling, our teens are growing up in an environment where the narrative around sexuality has shifted dramatically in the past decade.
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And it helps if we have a clue about how to approach it. So I think you're going to love this interview in which we talk about what's happening, why, and how we can best support our teenagers. So they feel loved and accepted for who they are.
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dela. Thank you so much for joining me. I've wanted to talk to you for so long about this because it's been a subject that seems to be coming up a lot with my daughter's my daughter when she first went to senior school, came home talking saying this girl's by this girl's pan this way. And I was really confused because she was 12.
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So I think things are very different now from when I was a teenager what what's what's happening? They certainly are, there's been an extraordinary change in the last, I suppose about 10 years.
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And suddenly kids are coming home at 11 and 12 saying you know, I'm fine, or I'm gender fluid and things like that. And parents are blinking kind of going. Fine. You know, to me, because most of us most of us these days are pretty liberal.
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Certainly parents generally love their children more than anybody else and are more committed to them. And so we we've mostly got with the program and understand that you don't shame anybody in that there's a developmental kind of stage that happens between roughly 10 and 20, where a child goes from being a nonsexual person to being a sexual person. And it's, it's a little bit awkward for everybody, because the sexual awakening is happening in the house, and especially obviously for the child. So that's happening, and we are for the first maybe for the first generation, or certainly fairly recently, we're accustomed to the fact that lots of these teenagers will be gay or lesbian or bisexual. So that's all we're ready for all of that. And then in like a rocket has come gender identity, where everybody's like, Oh, this is new. I don't know anything about this, you know, lesbian thing, but yes, this Yes. What is that? What people familiar with it? What is? What does this mean gender identity? I think it's new. So we don't really, we you know, there's so much theory, and people like myself are working in the field. So we there's some kind of very kind of definite, professional anecdotes, but there's very little evidence, the very, very little long term research that we can actually say, This is what's going on.
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And this is what this is how this is likely to play out. And anybody who's saying that is frankly a snake oil salesman There isn't. There isn't a strong body of evidence that gives us any ability to talk confidently. What we can do though, when we're parents and when we're psychotherapists. One parents can approach things with love, and gentleness, and psychotherapists can approach things with curiosity and compassion. And between that it should be okay, if you follow me that that's enough to carry it anything. And if you think about it, lots of other new kind of psychological phenomena have happened in other in other eras.
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You know what I mean? Like, if you think about it, when people first considered the concept of the teenager, this was a new concept, you know, fairings know what to do. I didn't go so well.
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And then there was different mental health conditions that arrived that nobody knew what to do when the first driver anorexia first arrived. 60/70s Nobody knew what to do. They were like, wow. Okay, starving themselves. Then believe me a cane. Nobody knew what to do. It was people are vomiting in the ACS. It was a huge contagion that happened. And contagions are very extraordinary phenomena that happens in psychology where they happen in lots of different ways. And once they arrive, they're very serious, like suicide is probably the most serious, socially contagious issue. So it's something that you'd have to take very, very seriously. Then self harming arrived. Nobody knew it. They didn't see it coming. It was very strange when you first heard about it. Now we're all used to itself harming you. So I'm not equate and these aren't similar. You know, there's, there are similarities between anorexia and self harm. They're very different. experientially, however, there are a new thing that have arrived. The parents just want it Do not know what to do with this. It's new. And it's it's very difficult to understand. And nowadays, arguably, the new concept of gender identity has come in and it's not just gender identity.
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Maybe I feel like a boy or I am a boy. It's actually things like Neo pronouns, and new identities like I am gender fluid. I'm pangender. These are words that, you know, if I had said this 10 years ago, you would have said, What are you talking about? So, for starters, I think parents need to be very self forgiving for not knowing what how would you know, I would you know, what's in the middle of the teenage zeitgeist, you know, no more than we knew what was going on in the late 80s, with guts and emos, and even the Nazis, you know what I mean. So these things come and go, they often begin in the teenage population.
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And I think our job is to just support a process of exploration, so that some of these things might stay, some of these things might be identities that are very, very empowering and liberating for people. And so long as they are I'm thrilled, if you follow me. But I think all that psychotherapists can do is make sure that we approach it with curiosity, like I said earlier, parents with love, love and compassion, generally, as a parent, if your child comes home and says, I want to be referred to by these pronouns, or I'm, I'm, you know, I'm something different from what the parents
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Are you saying that because there's this model of of complete affirmation, you just basically you don't challenge them? If you say, of course, and then you you follow through with that? Where Where do you sit on that?
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Well, there's kind of two kinds of beliefs.
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This is a controversial field, and anybody who speaks up can be kind of misrepresented by these live. But there's two basic beliefs and the more parents or anybody who's listening, engage and think, Well, where do I stand with these beliefs? I'll think about it, the clearer your own mind will be so effectively one, one camp for want of a better word, would believe in originally thought they were, how would you?
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the concept of trans is like an inner identity. It's almost like a soul. It's within you, nobody else can describe it. It is completely subjective to you. So it's unfalsifiable. Very like, well, you know, my mother is obviously I will, I'm born a Catholic, and she tells me I have a Catholic soul. And I say, I don't think I do. But you do.
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And we jog along, we can handle this, you don't have a we didn't you know, agree to disagree, we wrote on pass the sword.
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And so that's the concept. Some people truly believe there's such thing as a gender identity within you. And that could be transgender identity, or it could be just a cisgender. So that's some people's beliefs, my own belief and many people and let's say the the other therapists who wrote the book with me, Lisa Marciano, Sasha I add, we believe in a more developmental understanding of gender distress. For some people, maybe during a stage of development, or maybe for others. Other factors, such as bio psychosocial ahead, put in all the jargon, record a thing, a social reason, it could be a psychological reason, it could even have some biological roots, we don't know, it's still open.
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But we do know that some people seem to get very, very distressed at a certain stage.
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And there's certain commonalities with these children. For our example, you know, the numbers of the children seeking medical transition in the injured at the Tavistock in London, you know, depending on the study, some of them are as high as 48% at autism. So there's high high links with other issues, such as rigid thinking like OCD, autism, anxiety, a very kind of very definitive black and white outlook can make you very attracted towards seeking a new identity because you can feel I don't feel like a girl, I don't think I'm good looking to be a girl, I don't even fancy other boys like I'm supposedly meant to. I must be trans. And so that's the kind of that can be an understandable issue. If somebody has that issue. It's not about having a gender identity within you. It's to do with the fact that they're kind of rejecting themselves, maybe because they hate their body.
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Maybe because they're really anxious and lonely and the look of our community, maybe because they don't like the roles that are imposed upon them from society to the men who pressured them and to have long hair.
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Maybe the mentor have a boyfriend when they don't want a boyfriend. And so like there's high numbers of children who are gender non conforming, who it's about 70 80%, who later become gay, lesbian, or bisexual. So when you have issues like that, you think Well, is it because she is a butch lesbian who doesn't quite know she is or doesn't want to be? A Butch, Lesbian, but this is what you seems to be. Maybe she preferred to be a straight boy, rather than a butch lesbian. Yeah, it's a really incredibly complex.
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It's also what that says to me it because I've noticed, for example, Lego when I was a kid, Lego was all sorts of colors.
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And then I started to notice Lego in the shops became pink.
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And you know, and things became much more sort of agenda.
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Segmented. So I think I think it's become, yeah, yeah, we do that we explore that in the book. What did you when kids are trans. And in the book, we talk about how in the eighth is honestly, Lego and children's clothes, babies rooms that were really cute, but they were not blue or pink. They were quiet and lemon or green. You know what I mean? There was lots of different colors people used, but they didn't, they didn't divide the children into the pink and the blue. And then frankly, it was a consumer decision, a consumer related decision, you know, shiny suits and shiny offices in the 90s.
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realized, if we have pink Lego and blue Lego will sell more, we have a pink birthday cake, and a blue birthday cake. If your pink baby grows and blue baby grows, we will sell more. And they did.
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And honestly, I think I don't have numbers on this. But I'd say roughly 80% of kids are fine with it. Another section could live without being told that they're brave and boyish and adventurous. And girls are pretty and feminine. But then the roll. And then there's a small section who hates us who are like, I'm brave and adventurous. And I don't want pink. And I don't want to be pretty. And I don't want to talk about fairies. I want to climb trees. And it really sits badly on them. And it was funny because you know, journalists commented on the pink, the arrival of the pink and blue in the 90s. But nobody really ascertain what will be the impact. And an amazing little kind of anecdote is in 2008 Time Magazine, and they reported on the first well the first well known first famous gender reveal party, where the the mother was in New York, of course, the mother got her all her friends together, they had a cake. And when they opened the cake out came, you know, the pink insides because it was a girl and it was revealed with a balloon and pink balloon that it was a girl, I think of the pink, pink pink.
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And that child has since come out as non binary. And yeah, yeah.
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Interesting. Yeah. So I think if you impose pink and blue, this is one of the many, many theories that are out there.
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There really are many to keep on imposing it. There's a certain section who just push back and say, stop, stop, because some people aren't very naturally feminine. And some aren't. I know I was as a child, I had an awful lot of distress about being a girl that lasted for many years, I would have wilted.
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Had I been forced into that pink thing. I never wore dresses. I had a really, really hard time.
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I don't know what would have happened. But it would have been really awful for me. And so that letter that continues on to the teenage years, I gave a talk at a school recently. And it was at an all girls school. And I looked around there was about 100 of them. And I said Does anybody here have short hair they didn't.
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That's because it's definitely because my daughter even talked about that.
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And she said, I'm growing my hair. Because it's a status symbol for girls. It's actually it's you've just got to have the long hair. And both my girls and my girls used to have cropped hair when they were kids.
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Because I didn't want to have the washing it and it kept falling in their food, and interestingly, my bonus daughter who's now 25 she said to me that when she was a teenager, I mean, I remember it because I was with her when she was little. She went through a very, very hard phase of it. I'm a boy, really insistent she was a boy, and she's looking on with horror now saying, I think if I was living now, I would insist on transitioning. She's a very feminine girl now woman just very happy.
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So interesting.
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I'm gonna just add that it seems like it's liberating to say, Oh, I'm not gender conforming, I'm trans. I'm going to take medication and I'm gonna look different. Arguably, it's more liberating to say, I'm not gender conforming, I'm going to cut my hair. I'm going to act like a boy if I want to. I got to open my legs when I'm sitting down. And uh, nobody's going to comment about it. You know what I mean? I'm going to live in a society which doesn't make me medicalize my identity, just because I don't feel like being a very pretty feminine girl.
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Fascinating.
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Yes, I'm, I completely agree with that. I think so as parents, how do we you know, given that they're living in a society where that that to an extent is being pushed on them that they're still it's strange, isn't it? Because we talk a lot about feminism. We talk a lot about, you know, men being able to, you know, talk about your feelings. And there's a bit of a crisis in masculinity, but I think that it feels confining.
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It does. It's the, it's a, when you study it, and we do in the book, you realize that it's, it's, we've got this obsession these days with labeling, sound bites and labeling and categories. And so no sooner do you cut your hair, and people are saying, you know, is this a gender statement?
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Rather, you know what I mean.
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And so, I do think it is quite confining for all the talk, when it feels quite regressive, that girls and boys are so heavily gendered into pink and blue in various different ways in a way that just didn't happen 40 years ago. And I don't think that has been good. For children, I think it'd be better if girls could be brave and adventurous. And without being labeled. And boys could be pretty and feminine and flouncy, with the little princess dress without anybody thinking that they need to change their name change the pronouns change the way of being. So I think it's more regressive. On first glance, you could think this is progressive, I would argue it's progressive to medicate, when somebody just wants to just effectively present in a different way. But the question you asked, which is very important, and it's why we wrote our book, is to help parents, because parents are dealing with this, like I said earlier, new, new issues arrive all the time, there's gonna be something else we and you haven't even conceived of in 20 years. Yeah, and this is a new issue, and it's arriving fast.
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And parents are often feeling like they are, you know, pedaling on their bike trying to catch up while the child is on a train. And last, the state left the station, like, the children are far ahead of us, and all these acronyms and jargon. And we give a list and at the end of the book of the jargon, so that you will know how your words you need to know your language. It's a world where people can be incredibly sensitive to the language you would use. We believe that the parent does have a child who comes home saying, I need to transition I need to change my name, I need to change my pronouns. I need to I think we should wait. You know, we have this acronym. We use what ourselves, which is why am I talking? Wait. So first of all, our job is to listen and listen and ask curious questions. Open questions, not accusatory not well, what the hell is this? You're lesbian last week, and now you're in now you're trans? What? What's going on? That's not the approach we recommend that will be more like, could you tell me you know, where this happened in the beginning, when you first started talking about it? Who are you watching online? Who are your favorite social media influencers? What's your favorite sites, most of us have an R, when we go online, I might go over to moms that flick on to WhatsApp, over to Twitter, back over to Facebook, and then back to moms that most of us have a little. I'd like parents to ask their kids what's your art, it will be very different thing that can give, I can elucidate a lot of information, and who are their favorite influencers that can give you and tell me the person you most identify with.
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So I can get to know that person. So I can kind of get to know where you're at. Because I am at sea. I am utterly, utterly at sea. This is new, new new to me. So I'm going to find out about it. And all I ask of you is to have some patience with me. Because right now, you know, way more than me, and that upsets the natural order, because parents genuinely guide their children. And so my job is not only to catch up with your knowledge, it's to far surpass it. But you're going to have to give me a little bit of time because this is new. And then after you've done that, you do have to give quite a lot of time. And it is difficult, but both of us will do anything for our children. And it's worth it because it means you get to understand the world your kid is living in rather than making decisions and allowing your child to rule and make you know, they often talk about child centered and we're very into child centered as an approach.
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But child lead is a whole whole different approach, which I would argue puts a burden of responsibility and decision making on children's shoulders.
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And I don't think that's very healthy.
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I agree. Yeah.
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Yeah, we have to be careful what we give our children decisions over because Are they ready yet to actually make those decisions? Are they competent?
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Yeah, on that subject. I was because of a weird mix of circumstances. I was allowed to choose my secondary school and always regretted it and always thought it was me. Yeah. And it was my decision, right? Just a random little thing, but it was my decision as such, always regretted it never liked it.
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Always thought I'd made the decision to this day. I think I made this as I was 12 What the hell?
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Yeah, yeah, no great point. Yeah, children shouldn't feel like it's their decision, it's the adults decision.
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And if they allow the child to make the decision, arguably, it'll weigh heavily. It'll weigh heavily on them, I think we should free them from making decisions. And so our job is to catch up, surpass them in the knowledge, and then make some decisions about the ways to do that.
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There's this book, which actually is brilliant, I love it. But also I one of the reasons I came to you was because you have gender, the wider lens, which is another podcast and all our people listen to podcasts. So that's a really, really good way of exploring this entire topic.
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I love it. I love what you call. It's a labor of love. We love our podcast is really the book is the Podcast, the podcast is about right.
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Right. Yeah. Yeah.
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So they will that really helps because you're interviewing a lot of different people about what's going on. And it's a good in, because one of the things that one of the reasons I even ended up down this route, because I don't have experience of homosexuality just I've got so many friends who are homosexual, because of the industry I was in. And because I just love them because they see the world. And it's such an interesting way. I don't have any trans friends, I've met trans people, and never had any issues. But I came to this because I found that my daughters were coming home saying that they felt uncomfortable about talking about being a girl, and what that meant. And that then led me into trying to understand what's actually been going on and what's going on in the schools as well, in terms because because. I think one of the problems is we sometimes we might find out about this a bit late because then school, they might tell the school, someone in the school, and we can be on the backfoot. So yeah, how do we how do we manage? You know, would you call in a therapist?
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Or what stage would you call in a therapist? Well, there's there's two things. One is what's going on in the schools, some schools are being quite authoritarian and choosing to navigate the students, for example, gender identity, without informing the parents.
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And we explore this in the book, and we offer advice, and we offer kind of just different options A parent can take, if that happens. So for example, many parents we've worked with, they didn't hear about anything to do with the child's gender issues, until they got a report card, and it was addressed to Charlie now, Charles, this is happening yet and this is happening on way more often than people don't think it's their own crazy school. But it's not this is common. And it's a bit to please the child. And so it might be he him Charlie, and they're gone. I remember one parents and and I rang up schools, and I've got the wrong report is I don't know you don't know. I love me so much. It's very disempowering for the parent. It's very and so we sent this is primarily a parent book, and we send to the parents kind of role in their children's lives. And so while we do think that you should I, I'm a psychotherapist, I'm pro therapy, but we do think you should use a therapist, if this is what you think is required.
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Don't maybe jump there first.
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You know, don't disempower yourself, make sure that you send to yourself and all decisions for your family. Make sure that you like read around us and decide whether you can maybe help. Sometimes bringing in the therapist can triangulate the situation. So when a triangulation occurs, there's a victim which is the arguably the child has a persecutor which is arguably the parent and as a savior, which is the therapist.
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That's not healthy. It's not good for anybody to be either victim persecutor or our Savior.
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So we're, we kind of say, Yeah, fine, go to a therapist, if this is what's needed, could you make sure you try yourself, first of all, to connect with your child, you know, don't disempower yourself, and don't presume we've got this world where we just bring in the professionals bringing the professionals. On top of that we have a world where we're terrified of our children's distress, rather than realizing not only does the child become a sexual being between 10 and 20, they complexify their understanding between 10 and 20. And they realize that life is very hard.
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And it's not fair. And this is a very bitter pill, and an awful lot of children kind of believe that everybody else is living this golden life with golden sure for sure. That all the Tick Tock Yes. So they think something's wrong with them. So when they feel uneasy, sending them to the professionals is buying into the idea that most of our default setting is happiness when honestly the lucky few have the gift of happiness. Most of us rock along up and down a little bit worried about this a little bit worried about that, enjoying a cup of tea and they get this view lovely then going into a little bit of a fret. That's the usual that's, that's the human condition. But I'm very worried about how many teenagers come to me who think if they're not pretty much happy most of the time something is wrong and needs to be fixed, rather than understanding that is life.
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Right?
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I love that.
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Yes. And if they feel so so just to sort of round it up, obviously read, read read this book, there are other books. I know that this is I think the only book that really talks about how as a parent, you go about pushing back or not not pushing, but what's the what's the word for it?
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So we're just exploring it on a deeper level, we, you know, our podcast is gender a wider lens, and I think was well named if you follow me.
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And you know, the book is when kids say they're trans isn't?
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Yeah, we Yeah, sure. But make sure that you know, your child deeply, you know, don't don't take things at face value.
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Because, honestly, we all say a lot of things. And so for example, for myself, I know we're one of them. But like with me, a client would often come in saying I need to leave my husband and six weeks later, they're talking about their alcoholism. That's common. So presuming just on face value, this is what's going on, arguably undermines what is actually happening for there might be other things underneath it that you could find by digging. Yeah, make sure you don't miss it. But by being a little bit superficial about it, yes.
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Okay. That's brilliant. I love that advice.
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Are there any is there anything else that you would love to be able to say to parents who either have kids who are because because some of them might have children who are by homosexual, and then they people come out as trans? They're not necessarily in the same camp? Yeah.
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I think people conflate that's what I'd like to say people conflate the experience of being gay as the experience of being trans. And so remember, I said earlier, there's two beliefs, one of those an inner trans and the other is more people develop distress, and some people transition because they develop distress around their gender presentation. I think I would love if parents realized being gay, or lesbian or bisexual is is a kind of an inner drive.
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That seems to be kind of either you're born with or you develop in infancy. And it's see it's empirical, you can test it, and it's your relationship with other people. And it's, it's almost instinctive if you follow me, while a gender identity is completely in your mind. And so it's a very, very different experience. You're not born with it. I got there's no evidence, there's no nothing in the in the research, it will show you that some people are more feminine and some people are more masculine, but you're born there's nothing in you. And it's not testable. So it's a very, very different experience. And obviously, it needs a lifetime of medication should you wish to medically transition. So it's a very different experience. And conflating those two experiences. Just because it's LGBT doesn't mean they're all the same. For example, being lesbian is very different than being gay. But being trans is specifically really really difficult different than being gay, lesbian or bisexual.
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That was Stella O'Malley, author of when kids say they're trans and host of the podcast, gender, a wider lens. I put all the links and information about stellar on our website. That's www dot teenager's untangled.com. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please share it, hit the Follow button or give us a review. Everything you do helps us to get our message out to support more parents. That's it for now. Next week, Susie will be back with us and we'll be talking about how to encourage your team to exercise
