TOfluid, inclusive adolescents, resistant to any attempt to pigeonhole them into predefined identities, including gender ones, today’s kids define themselves and present themselves through new categories: transgender, genderfluid, agender… Terminologies that confuse people adults, dazed by the quantity and scope of novelties and languages so far from what they were used to. It is difficult for them to find keys to reading and understanding on which to base their educational responses. In an attempt to bring order to this confusionsometimes the positions are taken to extremes to the point of opposing one another in a fierce tug-of-war which does not contribute to improving understanding and communication.
But is there a “right” way to relate to a genderfluid child, who feels male one day and female the next? How to read and what meaning to give to his words? How to be supportive? The answer is not easy.
Some people think that these experiences are the expression of a current trend. Others fear they are the perverse outcome of a deterioration of customs. Others believe that the stigma kept hidden truths that can now emerge. In an essay recently in the bookstore, Fluid teenagers (FrancoAngeli), Sofia Bignamini (unfortunately recently passed away) and Elena Buday, Minotaur therapists, clinical center in Milan specializing in adolescence, have tried to analyze the complexity of these experiences, describing them as «one of the multiple languages that young people use in their path of growth and self-exploration. As if fluidity were at the service of growth.”
Fluid adolescents: a difficult middle ground
«After a phase of disorientation and confusion, parents’ reactions are often of two types» observes Buday. «Some fully welcome their children’s confessions, on the basis of “I love you unconditionally and whatever choice you make is fine for us”. The risk, however, is that this acceptance is hasty or uncritical, limiting itself to recording the story, without investigating the reasons and understanding its meanings. Others, however, entrench themselves in an a priori blind, repelling position, which is very painful for the kids.” Both answers, however, risk being trivializing.
«To understand these experiences – suggests the expert – the effort to be made by adults should be to delve deeper not so much into the fluidity itself, but into the meaning it takes on for their specific son or daughter, in that specific moment of its growth and in that specific context of events and relationships, both intra and extra-familial. Limit yourself to educating yourself on the Internet regarding the supposedly existing 23 genres or delegating only to external expertsgiving in to the fear of no longer having any emotional tools available to understand the growth of one’s children, does not seem to be the most effective response.”
Freedom but also uncertainty
What characterizes today’s teenagers, explains Buday, in the context of a society marked by traits of more general liquidity, precariousness, flexibility and uncertainty, «is the fact that they feel called to find the answer to the question “Who am I?” on their own, without the support of predefined values determined by religion, politics, family, the community to which they belong . This theme of self-definition, perceived “as a task and as a problem”, often places them in a condition of (apparent) freedom but also of growing uncertainty and insecurity.” To which they try to give answers through new categorizations, distant from previous methods.
Cropped shot of unrecognizable woman holding a piece of paper with gender equality symbols outdoors
«It’s not that today’s boys and girls simply don’t know whether to define themselves as male or female, it’s that they just don’t know who they are: they have a very confused identity» observes Maddalena Mosconi, psychotherapist responsible for the “Minors Area” of Saifip, of Adaptation Service between Physical Identity and Psychic Identity (Metafora Institute, Rome) That it has welcomed transgender and fluid adolescents for over twenty years. «I believe that this is the first generation in which, it is no longer (only) the parents who choose the names, but the children themselves» observes the writer Silvia Ranfagni. The sentence that fell on her two years ago, while she was draining her spaghetti, was this: “Mom, I’m trans. In fact, I’m non-binary. Sometimes I wake up more male, sometimes I wake up female. On Wednesday, for example, I was male.” In front of her is a thirteen-year-old who she thought was her “daughter” and who slowly learned to call her “son”, Alex. «People older than me would have said: two slaps and away we go. I, on the other hand, kept wondering how to welcome her? At the same time, however, a voice inside me did not calm down: Was she really serious? A week ago she wanted to be a vampire».
Fluid adolescents: the rejection of the patriarchal model
According to Buday, the definition of a gender identity with new characteristics could express, in some contexts, the need to distance oneself from the models embodied by parents, a way to “cut” with them. This would be true especially for teenage girlsthe. In the eighth edition of Standards of Care (the international guidelines for the health care of transgender people, the latest edition of which is in 2022), the data is reported according to which, of the minors who turn to specialized centers to undertake a gender transition process, There are between 2.5 and 7 times more people assigned female at birth than individuals assigned male. There could be many readings of this data, but two in particular are the most widely shared explanations. «The current devalued representation of the feminine (associated with fragility or the imperative of seduction) could contribute to the more frequent need to identify as masculine, based on a predilection for the values of independence” explains Buday. In other contexts, «the choice to express oneself as masculine would depend on the desire to cancel that feminine thing that unites them to their mothera way of saying: “I will never be like you”».
Mosconi also agrees: «The struggle of some girls to recognize themselves in the female gender could arise as a responseeven rejection, towards rigid patriarchal models and to an image of the hyper-sexualized woman. Refusing by choice – or not recognizing themselves – in the photos of super sexy girls, with heart-shaped lips, pin-up bodies, some go into crisis and ask themselves: but if I’m not – or don’t want to be – like that, who I am?”. Furthermore, she adds, «saying “I don’t feel female” is a cry for help which parents tend to minimize and dismiss with the typical phrase “it’s just a moment, it will pass with time”. Instead, this is the right time to seek expert help for your daughter.”
The suffering of trans children
«The fluid adolescents we have met in our work as therapists – explains Buday – generally do not show intense suffering or discomfort linked to their gender identifications, also because often the ambiguity of their positions does not elicit clear oppositional responses. In these situations, therefore, no other response appears necessary than an acknowledgment and a welcoming and supportive acceptance of the identity experiments in progress. Adolescent journeys are fluid by definition, and children’s explorations should not be reified or crystallized with definitive labels: these will arrive, built by them, over time.”
«The case is different for those transgender children who express real disgust for the penis and testicles and girls who refuse menstruation, who don’t want to see their breasts grow or don’t want to pee while sitting down” observes Mosconi. «Their experiences can be very painful» to the point of leading them to request medical interventions to support a process of gender affirmation. Not all young people, however, are destined to experience these transitions with difficulty. According to prospective studies, dysphoria tends to disappear with puberty in 80 percent of cases; but if it persists beyond puberty, it is rarely abandoned.
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