Mick Hartley

Stella O’Malley – co-author of When Kids Say They’re Trans – is interviewed by Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

We have gone from ‘mother knows best’ to ‘mother is a clown who doesn’t have a clue about her children’.

Most pseudo-experts on parenting and on gender are incredibly derogatory about actual parents. They’re also very prescriptive. They like to go on about how you can ‘fix’ your kid. When a child is given a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, for example, it is a very sudden fast-track to medicalisation. As a parent, you feel so disempowered and useless….

As a parent who has been disempowered by society, you have to think up ways to regain authority in your family. Parents are the project managers of the home and if you are thinking somebody else is, you’ve given your power away. Parents should make sure they are not afraid of the word authority. I’m not authoritarian, but parents do need to be authoritative.

It’s very important for parents who are trying to figure out their child to keep tabs on what might be influencing them online, and to enforce the necessary boundaries. You might need to bring in some tech controls, for instance.

Have deep conversations with your child about who they are, what they want to be, what it means to be a person, what it means to be a boy, what it means to be a girl. You should talk about what the social causes might be. You can talk about past examples of social contagions that have passed, the impact of social media or the impact of different traumas they might have experienced. If they have an autism diagnosis, you can talk about how that might lead them to have a very literal understanding of gender. Or you can talk about the impact of being young and naïve, and how that has often led people to fall for fantastical ideas.

Or you could try the traditional approach: