Mick Hartley

A "first person" story from the Times – My teen son got hormone pills online with his pocket money:

Harry told us his authentic self was a woman during the second wave of lockdowns. That was the period from November 2020 to the following spring. He was 15. Teachers were doing their best to provide work but he spent a lot of time online. He watched a YouTube channel, Philosophy Tube, which involved a man in his late twenties talking about philosophy. One day, the presenter transformed himself into a woman and appeared on the video with make-up, long hair and wearing a dress.

About a week after Harry watched it he told us he was transgender. In the video the presenter had said that as a woman all the stress had been lifted off her shoulders. My son said to us: “I feel the same way. I’ve realised my stress is because I’ve been pretending to be this person I’m not. I’ve been living this inauthentic life.”

“I’m really a woman,” he said.

I was quite calm about it. “How could you possibly know what feeling like a woman is?” I said, to which he had no answer but took offence at the question. From then on there was quite a lot of tension at home.

At his single-sex state school in London, he told his friends his new feminine name. He joined the LGBTQ+ club, run by a teaching assistant who had helped her own son transition. Later, when we were called into a meeting with the school — over his absences and because he said he was unhappy that we weren’t calling him by his new name — the teaching assistant was wheeled in to give her perspective. She said it was a good thing our son was coming to terms with this new reality.

Harry applied to a mixed sixth form college using his new name and gender. The school took him in as a girl from the outset. He started wearing make-up, very short skirts and short dresses. I did say: “I think that’s really inappropriate clothing for school.” To his credit he didn’t wear one particular short skirt again. But I was quite tortured by all of it. I found it difficult to say anything without crying or arguing so I gradually started to not say anything at all.

We tried family therapy. I found someone who didn’t have strong views on trans issues and I said it was not that particular issue we wanted to talk about. It was the conflict. We wanted to be able to live together having different views. My son was adamant, he said there are no compromises: “I will cut off ties with you at some point.”

He’s polite when he argues. He doesn’t shout, he just comes back with a word salad: Authentic self. People assigned sex at birth. Gender is in your mind.

I believe that being a part of the club at school gave him a sense of belonging. He was excited to find out he was special and would command respect in this group, that he had an explanation for why he felt uncomfortable. He had always been small, thin and never at all sporty. He never wanted to admit to himself that he cared [what others thought] and yet this sideways move to become someone of note on the school scene must have felt special.

He did go to the GP. From age 17 you can go without telling your parents. And he was added to the adult gender clinic waiting list. But the list is five years long, he said. The doctor declined to prescribe hormones on the basis that he didn’t have enough expertise, which is right.

Aged 18, Harry took what he felt was the next logical step. He went online, without any medical supervision or prescription, and ordered his own hormones. They came from India or China. We realised what the package was straight away and we didn’t let him have it. We said this was borderline illegal — yet the law seems to be quite grey in this area, possibly because it was not a British company. He accused us of stealing. As he had bought it with money earned on his Saturday job he reported us to the police for theft.

Young people are able to buy these hormones online with their pocket money, essentially. They’re not too expensive either. There has to be a way to stop it. My daughter, currently at university, knows several people who buy these drugs in bulk online and hand them out as a charitable act.

My son is definitely taking the hormones. I can see the effect on his body because he has got larger breasts. He still lives here. He comes down for meals but we don’t talk very much. We don’t use his new name and we avoid pronouns in his presence as we know that will kick off arguments.

I don’t think he has any regrets. He has said to me he feels a social responsibility to be a pioneer, even if it doesn’t bring him happiness, that he needs to sacrifice himself for the good of other people. He’s always been quite a social justice warrior, even if he doesn’t do the recycling.

Our family life has been completely destroyed. I find the situation so depressing. I can’t talk him out of it. I’ve tried. It only seems to make the situation worse.