Simply Beyond

Hey, Cis! It's a weekly shakedown of the binary walls around us.

Breaking it out and building a bridge.

Checking our biases with empathy and humility and questioning the status quo.

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In a recent mom to mom conversation, I was able to connect with Megan K. Her daughter started showing signs of being gender creative around the age of two, three years old and, has since socially transitioned within the last year, so around the age of six turning seven. She's now in grade two. And in this conversation, I had the opportunity to talk to Megan a little bit about their gender journey thus far and their experiences within the education system and the health care system here in Nova Scotia.

She is a very loving, very bright child, and, she's very focused on humans and emotion and that side of thing, whereas my other guy is very logic and Spock like. So they're they're opposites, but they work well together.

Between the time that Brianna, I guess, started expressing her gender creativity around the age of three and then coming out to her parents, Megan noticed that Brianna was becoming a little bit quieter and more introverted.

She was more, like, when you described how Dylan was when he was like, you know, hoodie up, don't wanna be seen. She was like that before she came out, basically, or affirmed her gender. She was very afraid, actually, what her peers thought of her. It was really important to her.

And then so then, like, when you felt like that light was kinda going out, you saw hoodies coming on and Yeah.

Yeah. She was really kinda reserved and not as cheerful and very negative. And though I do think that she had some anxiety, and then it plays into that, whether that comes from, like, not knowing how to express who she is yet or or where that came from. She she still has that. But during that time, I'd say it was most of grade primary no.

Grade one. Sometime around just a little after grade one. So she was six in a bit. Her light her light had kinda gone out, and I I feel like a few people even noticed this. And over time I mean, she had told us when she was smaller, like, when she was probably three, she started seeing, like, saying that she felt like a girl inside and that she was a she maybe yeah.

Felt like a girl inside, but had what she felt like were different body parts or something. But we were just kinda, you know, like, she was also very feminine. We we weren't we're totally sure what that meant to her. So we were kinda waiting and, you know, letting her guide herself, but also being very supportive. And then she always played with girls, and then eventually, when we saw this change in her and she always tells me everything at bedtime because she doesn't wanna go to sleep.

So I was laying down with her, and we had a conversation. And, she was she was very afraid, actually, what her peers thought of her. It was really important to her.

So let's talk about the importance of school and how they can support, a child who is exploring their gender identity and how they can help combat the stigma around gender normativity and basically around the pressure to conform from primary onwards.

So school is huge because that's where, you know, they really can tell what people want for their identity to be versus who they really feel like. And I feel like she was really noticing this difference. And so her her she had all girlfriends, and she only ever wanted to play with girls. And she talked about that a lot. And she kept saying that she felt like a girl inside.

And I was trying to get more out of her because I noticed that she was shut down more. And then she basically we had a conversation and she was able to articulate that she again, she felt like a girl inside, but a boy on the outside. But this time, she took a step further and said, and my friends don't see that. So they don't see me for, like, who I am. And so and kids on the my my friends don't always wanna play with a boy.

She knew all she knew very well that what you know, your gender is about how you feel inside. It's not a physical thing. And so we taught that very young for lots of reasons, which I felt really good about after she came out because I realized, like, I had opened up a pathway for her really early to be yourself. So that was, I felt comforted that we'd done some good things early on, and she was scared. She was really scared.

So even though she was comfortable telling me something this profound, she hadn't said, I am a girl yet. She was, you know, saying, like, I feel like a girl outside, and she wanted I said, well, would you wanna wear girl clothes? And she did, but she did not wanna be made fun of at school. And she was so afraid of that. And when I reached out to the teacher, and this is where the school really came in, she was so incredible.

She, that day, sat down and had a circle talk, led the kids through a talk about gender, but in a way that they really came up with it themselves, and I thought that was really important. But, she really asked them a lot of questions and really made them think about what gender really was. And so in the end, they all were very, oh, well, are no boy things, and there are no girl things, and and you should be whoever you wanna be. And Brie shared that she wanted to wear girl clothes with the whole class and was so excited to share this. And so that really helped her.

And then she just was, like, so bright and so excited. I'd never seen her so excited when I took her shopping. It was unbelievable. So I don't think that without the school without that intervention, we would be in a we would have been in a really dark place in March. It would have been really, really hard for her, and it would still be really hard for her because she wouldn't know that her friends would be accepting like they were.

It was really such perfect synergy, wasn't it, that, Brianna's teacher had reached out to us. And her classroom was one of the very few, classes within HRM that participated in our inclusive reading event that happened on February 28 with the books, it feels good to be yourself, I am jazzed, not quite narwhal. And so her taking that time to create that safe space as well, not just for Brianna to feel more comfortable about coming forward, but also to help prepare her peers to be able to support her in a really positive way. So Megan explained to me how Brianna's transition at school initially went really well with a supportive teacher. And then COVID hit, which took all children out of the classroom last winter for the remainder of the year.

Brianna's now started into a new school, and things aren't going so well this year.

She hasn't regressed at all about who she is. She's just dealing with a lot more comments. It's almost a daily problem now that she comes home or every other day. So I think grade one is a very big identity year. Yeah.

And I would say that, you know, kids teased her. Yeah. The primary kids teased her the most. And honestly, if people if teachers could start integrating this kind of sense of what gender is and what gender isn't in pre primary, she wouldn't have to deal with as much of that. And she might not have been as scared so scared to to be herself at school.

You really need a holistic approach. You can't just say, okay. Well, we've got the wait list cut, and we've got all this access accessibility to transforming health care and then send our kids off to school every day that is not inclusive, where they're feeling like it's such a heteronormative, cisgender, cisnormative setting, because they're not going to come out healthy, like with good mental health outcomes. That way they're still gonna feel like they're on the fringe.

Like studies show transgender kids are just as emotionally and mentally healthy as their peers with the right supportive environment. And we are only with them on the weekends and nights, the rest of the time they're at school. So that's really big. All their time with their peers, that really tells them whether they're accepted or not in society.

And that is such a good point. And I would just like to take a really quick minute and pull in some statistics. So for those of you who are listening to this as a podcast, I'm gonna post these four slides, which have some very current stats gathered in 2019 on them, and that'll be, linked from the web page of our JESUS podcast. And then for those who are watching, I'm gonna really quickly just take you through these quick slides just to help tie in what Megan is talking about and how inclusion in the schools is so critically important. So if we look first at bullying in schools and we look at trans youth, What the 2019 youth risk behavior surveillance, so the YRBS data, for 2019 found that forty three percent of trans youth have been bullied in school, and that's compared to sixteen percent of non LGBTQ two plus peers.

So forty three percent trans youth compared to sixteen percent have been bullied. Now for kids who are even just gender questioning, so they're questioning their gender identity. They have not transitioned. They have not come out as trans or nonbinary or gender fluid. 40% have been.

So almost half have been bullied as well compared as 16% of the non LGBTQ two plus community. And when we look at, numbers of children of youth who have skipped school because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to school, they have skived off because they're not going there. They're not feeling it safe. Thirty five percent of trans youth and forty one percent of questioning youth. So, this is actually higher than the trans youth.

So kids who are questioning, their gender identity are more inclined to skip school compared to eight percent of non LGBTQ two plus peers. When we look at statistics looking around depression and anxiety, the numbers are quite high as we know because isolation if anybody has has has experienced the isolation in this last year with COVID nineteen, I think we can all relate to the effects and the impacts, the profound impacts that, isolation can have on our mental health. So what this study found was sixty one percent of trans youth are battling symptoms of depression, and sixty one percent of questioning youth are also battling symptoms of depression compared to only twenty nine percent of non LGBTQ two plus peers. So that's more than two times, the numbers. When we look at those who are seriously considering attempting suicide, forty five percent of trans youth have seriously considered suicide.

Forty percent of questioning youth have seriously considered attempting suicide. Thirty five percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered compared to only thirteen percent of the non LGBTQ two plus peers. So when you look at thirteen percent of peers compared to forty five percent of trans youth, that's more than three times, the population. What it shows is that there is systemic transphobia thriving in our school system. In order to break this down, we really need to take a holistic approach and tie it right back into our human rights code under Bill C 16, right into our health care system, which shows and illustrates how when trans youth are supported in home, they have perfectly healthy outcomes very in line with their non, trans, or non questioning peers.

And so this is really important to tie that into our health care system, our human rights code, and within the schools, if we are to create a village that is going to ever include trans youth.

Like, you have to think every book they read for the most part of school is hetero and gender normative. It's all that way. So and the only books that she's really gotten to read that weren't are specifically about being transgender. And I think that's very I think another thing that teachers really could do to help is to try to find some books with some transgender people in them that are, you know, transgen like, superheroes or something. It's not just about being Yeah.

Certain way because it really does give the sense of other and different versus just, you know, we're all just like you and we we all have aspirations and wants. And, you know, my whole life isn't about being transgender. I just am transgender as part of me. Yeah. So the school played a major role, and she was so excited the the first day to wear her girl clothes.

And then over time, she came on her own to this realization that she's transgender. She read the books and she kept saying, oh my gosh. She talked about jazz all week because she was like, just like me. Just like me. Just like you know?

She was shocked. Oh, she's so beautiful. Oh my gosh. When we read the books, that really helped her kind of think about her identity, I guess, even further. Because she knew who how she felt inside, but I don't know if she knew how she could express that.

About a week after that, after reading the book, she was we were driving home from school, and she was like, I wanna use the girl's bathroom at school. I want a girl's name, like, now, and I have she said, I have the transgender, which is really cute. Really cute. So her her understanding of transgender evolved over time because now she's a little critical of I am Jazz. She's like Jazz said that she used to be a boy, but Jazz was always a girl if she feels like a girl.

I used to think too that I was a boy before, and and then I became a girl, but I was always a girl. She's she'll crack you in a lot of things.

Wow. She is so wise.

So what what was really great about our school was it was very small. It was not bureaucratic, and they knew all the kids really well. It was there were, like, five four, five teachers in the whole building and no office. So when a decision was made, it was fast. There was no debating it.

The teacher was like, Risa, girl, she should use the the girl's bathroom. So she talked to the teachers about it. They're like, yeah. Of course. It wasn't even a thing.

Don't assume that all the teachers in the next grade are, you know, great allies. To be a great ally, you have to make a conscious effort. You can't just be not transphobic. Right?

Right.

So Yeah. So Brie was in a smaller school last year, transitioned to a larger elementary school. And the teacher that she had last year gave a really good handover report to the teacher that she's having this year and ensured that she was going to have a teacher that would be very supportive of her needs as a transgender girl in a new school. So that was really helpful. And then the teacher this year reached out to us in an email a couple of weeks before school started.

And that made me feel a lot more comfortable, especially because a big barrier this year is that we can't go into the school and meet anyone face to face due to COVID. So I really appreciated her reaching out and it gave me an opportunity to provide some more information and make sure that Brie was going to have a teacher that understood her experience as a transgender girl. She's quite proud to be transgender. So she's been lovely and she's let Brie share what she wants to share when she's ready. So it's good.

Fast decision making, talking like really thinking about the next school year ahead of time and having a conversation with a teacher, maybe thinking even about peers and peer relationships and maybe who's who's having a hard time and giving Brie a a hard time and Mhmm. Working through that, maybe giving them a break or just doing some extra Yeah. Education around that. But I I think if they're educating all the time, like we said, instead of making it a big deal, particular component of healthy living Yeah. It would make it less like you said, it would the divine.

Talking early with the kids about, well, what our boy thinks, what our girl thinks. You don't have to teach them all about transgender. You can just teach them about what gen like, what gender isn't and how it's about how you feel inside. And if they just know that core principle, I think they'll be more accepting. Don't be afraid to don't be uncomfortable.

We're just everybody's just like, we're all just trying to you know, we're all doing the daily grind here. We're all just trying to get through and, you know, be happy individuals. We you don't have to be afraid of people. You know? Don't be afraid to say the wrong thing, and don't let that stop you from figuring it out and integrating things into your care.

And just think about if if you have kids in your life, think about those kids. And if they were transgender, what you want for them. If that's what you need to get your head in the right space. Because once you're a parent of a transgender child, let me tell you, you get it. Like, you you're, like, immediately realizing, like, the types of things you need in place to really help your kid be safe, just to be safe.

Mhmm.

So, like, most of us don't have to think about our safety every day. But when you have a kid that's transgender, you have to think about that every day. Mhmm. Yeah. And every day when she comes home, I have to wonder I I don't ask her, but, you know, she'll come home and say, today was okay, but this person said that I wasn't a real girl.

And that happens all the time. She did have one kid apologize to her after the I'm Jazz book. My guess is that the kid went home and was like, mommy, like, this kid's lying at school. And the mom was like, oh god. Like, No.

No. You have to apologize to that kid. But, again, they wouldn't be thinking that penis makes your gender. Mhmm. And pajamas make your gender.

I mean, your privates are who your gender is if we were teaching them properly.

Exactly. It's so true.

So it is it is about their safety. And I would say, yeah. Okay. We're lucky that maybe Bree came out when she did, but whenever people come out, that's the right time for them. And so they have to be safe at every age to come out.

And if even at this age, she's getting these types of, like, very phobic questions I can't imagine at age 14 because kids are so sneaky then. Right? It's not as blatant in your face. Because what Brie's getting at school now is, like, the minute that she has some sort of conflict with a kid, they're like, well, you're not a girl. You have a penis.

Somebody said that to her the other day.

So, do you think then the teacher that that you have this year, that Brie has this year, do you think that they're gonna do some work around helping to combat the teasing that Brie's experiencing? And

Yeah. So I reached out. So having very tight communication with the teacher is really important, but it's so hard to know what's what, you know, what the boundaries are. But I think I would say as far as teasing goes, it should be zero tolerance policy anyway, but especially when it can be harmful to a child and it's you know, like, Ben's just straight up. He's angry about it.

He's like, transphobia. Like, he's like, this is transphobia, and you cannot stand. And I'm like, well, you know, in a way, isn't. And when a kid's being transphobic when kids are being transphobic, it's a failure on the part of the adults around them. All you have to do with kids, and I've worked with kids for years, is give them what they can handle and understand.

So it's like small gender what makes you a boy? I used to say, what makes you a girl? And I would say that, like, something, you know, very gender normative. So, of course, they already understood gender from the role modeling around them and from the world and from the cartoons they watch. Boy.

So they would say, no. It's about high feel inside actually. Some girls have penises and some boys have vaginas. Why people are afraid to talk? I think people are like, I'm gonna turn my kid transgender.

When I think about nursing, I would have to guess that teachers are taught to do the same thing and that's to be reflexive in your everyday practice. So you have to constantly reflect on things. And what I would challenge people to start thinking about is how are the processes in your organization and the structure of your organization contributing to gender normativity. Because if you're part of that system and you're not trying to kind of improve it, then you are perpetuating gender norms. And so you just have to start thinking about what can I do a little bit differently?

Right? That's really, really important. Yeah. It takes reflection and insight.

Like you said, not just about being trans, but just about, you said, the integration of that we're all very unique individuals. Yeah. And how we define ourselves is, you know, is very personal and worthy of respect.

When we figured out to treat Brie as transgender, all I did was celebrate her. Was very happy for her, and I tell that to parents all the time when they're looking for advice and, like, don't forget to celebrate your kid. You know, your kid doesn't have, your kid hasn't been in an accident or been hurt or have, you know, a debilitating disease, they're, they're still the same person they always were. They're just being more themselves, and they're unique. So it's, like, you know, exciting, not sad.

Don't think of it just as sad.

Right. And it deserves to be a forefront, I think, in the discussion of policy making. So, Megan, with your journey so far as a parent supporting a very young, trans daughter who has socially transitioned. What would be some of your advice from a health care perspective to parents of trans and gender diverse youth?

I am a health care professional with a transgender child, so I bridge the parent healthcare professional gap. And I think it's really interesting how I become visible as a parent with a transgender child because I feel like it's really given context to a lot of my coworkers as well. And everybody's been very supportive and excited for her, and I think I found that her journey has been very beautiful to see. So I think that's been really interesting. I think healthcare professionals and teachers really get into this profession to help people, and I know that.

And so it just takes a little bit of extra reflection about their practice.

Megan, thank you so much. This is great. Problem. I always love connecting with other parents of trans and gender diverse kids. I just think our village is so important and so healthy and nothing but great vibes and information comes out of it.

So, that was talking in conversation with Megan Kay about her daughter and their gender journey. If you have a story you wanna share with us or connect with us for a conversation that will help break down the binary around us here in Nova Scotia or beyond, please connect with us at connect@simplygoodform.com. Have a great day, and remember, inclusion matters.