[Ep. 346] Kids + Dysphoria: It Doesn't Always Mean They're Trans

We, or our children, can be gender non-conforming, or have body dysphoria and not be trans. There is nothing wrong with bodies in puberty (which is an inherently dysphoric experience): the problem is with our culture, families and society not having rites of passage, and not knowing how to support and hold space for teenage bodies as they mature. 

Dive into this podcast, and for a more in-depth exploration, join us for our six-month Embodied Parenting Slow Group, starting Tuesday October 6th. (There will be a live bonus session specifically about this topic offered to Embodied Parenting slow group attendees.)

For more of our podcasts related to dysphoria, discussions about the trans experience, and de-transitioning, check out podcast episodes: 169, 261, 262, and 280.

You can register for the Embodied Parenting webinar here: https://hln.thinkific.com/courses/embodied-parenting-webinar

You can also read more about, and register for, the 6 month program here: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/parenting-group

You can read more about, and register for, the workshop at Kripalu here: https://kripalu.org/experiences/food-therapy-how-eat-your-nervous-system

----

You can learn more on the website: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/

You can follow Luis on Instagram @holistic.life.navigation

Questions? You can email us at info@holisticlifenavigation.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Welcome to the Holistic Life Navigation Podcast. I am your host, Luis Mojica. I'm a somatic therapist and nutritionist who combines nutritional therapy with somatic therapy to help thousands of people around the world, including myself, recover from stress and trauma. This podcast serves as a way for me to teach you what I learn for free. How can food aid in the recovery of stress and trauma? What does it really mean to be embodied? And how can simple somatic practices help us better navigate this strange and sensational human experience? Let's find out. When you replace elders with TikTok, when you replace rites of passages with sitting on your cell phone and scrolling social media and eating processed foods, you're not learning how to relate to this changing body. And those changes become overwhelming. I find puberty to be one of the most common causes of dysphoria in kids that has nothing to do with them being born in the wrong body or the wrong sex, but has everything to do with their parents and their culture not knowing how to hold and steward and mentor these changing bodies. Just because your child has dysphoria does not mean they're trans. I'm gonna explain why. So a bit of my background is important here. I was born intersex, which means my body has a hormonal condition where it converts testosterone into estrogen. So I have male genitalia. I'm male, but to be most accurate, I would call myself an intersex man. Because from birth to now, my body will make more estrogen from testosterone than the average male. And what that meant for me was around ninth, tenth grade, I started developing breast tissue and hips, and I felt very feminine. I felt very female actually. And if I was born in this era and I was going through that, and someone told me I was trans and I was actually maybe a woman, or I should consider transitioning to female, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I went through a good decade of suffering from deep, deep body dysphoria and body dysmorphia because of my ambiguous sex characteristics. I felt like I was being pulled in every direction possible, but one clear path toward male or female. So I didn't even feel human at one point. I felt subhuman. And to make you understand why I'm even recording this or teaching, explaining this, is because I have an upcoming parenting program. And one of the most important facets of modern day parenting has to do with navigating gender. Because in the last decade, we have gotten gender and sex completely conflated. Historically, if somebody was gender nonconforming, it had nothing to do with them being male or female. It had to do with them changing their roles. But now, gender nonconforming is categorized under the trans umbrella, which means because you're gender nonconforming, you may not be male or female, or you might be born male but need to transition to female, or vice versa. So I'm speaking about this because it's a terrain that most parents have zero experience in because they didn't have the experience themselves. So I'd like to teach you about it as a parent, myself, and to you who may be a parent, but also as someone who experienced sex dysphoria, who experienced gender dysphoria, who experienced body dysmorphia and shame, and as someone who benefited from gender-affirming surgery. When I was 23, I decided to have top surgery and it completely changed my life. I felt so much more congruent and so much more in my male form than I wanted to be in this lifetime. And so the last 15 years of my life have actually been invoking my masculine and getting more comfortable being a man because I wasn't for a very long time. I didn't even feel like a, like I said, a human. So I have my personal experience and a lot of clinical experience with different clients over the years and working with different colleagues and biochemists around how to navigate dysphoria with your child without labeling them trans right away. And the reason why I don't believe in labeling a child trans, someone still in puberty, I should say, when I'm saying child, you know, anyone under 18, is because when your body is developing, you are going to inherently experience dysphoria. Kids will often feel dysphoric with the flood of testosterone or estrogen that affects their body during puberty. And puberty is not just the first erection or the first orgasm or the first bleed. Puberty is an eight to 10 year period of the whole body being transformed because of the increase in a certain sex hormone. Someone like me, very, very small group of the population, somewhere between one and two percent of people, have an intersex expression where they don't have just one kind of normal standard expression of male or female throughout their puberty, but they have a variety of male and female. But that's a very, very small group of people. Now, the group of people I'm referring to that I belong in, the intersex people, there is a term that was invented to advocate for those children because people who have, I should actually back up a little bit. There are three predominant expressions of an intersex condition. One is ambiguous genitalia. So it could be having a vagina with testes instead of ovaries. Um, another one is hormonal, which is what I have. So you are male with male genitalia. I have a penis and testicles, and my body had estrogen to the level of a young woman when I was growing up, right? So there could be a hormonal discrepancy where your hormones, your sex hormones are incongruent with your actual genitals. That's my condition. And then you have chromosomal conditions where someone's chromosomes are have an extra X chromosome, XXY, or the chromosomes read as male or female, even though their bodies are the opposite. So there's a bunch of different ones. Sometimes it's all three. So I wanted to say that to be clear because people who are born with a genital ambiguity, the gonatal intersex variety, what a lot of those children have endured were surgeons deciding we're going to make you a boy. You have an enlarged clitoris, you have undecided testes, yet you also have female chromosomes. But we're going to raise you as a boy. Okay. So we're going to do certain surgeries on you. We're going to give you testosterone as you grow up. Or we're going to raise you as a girl. You have a micropenis. We're going to turn this into a vagina. And we're going to raise you as a girl, give you estrogen. This was a horrible, horrible experiment that doctors had done for decades with kids. I don't think they do it anymore in America, but it might still happen in certain places. And this, these were non-consensual surgeries on kids who had perfectly healthy bodies, but their bodies were just ambiguous. They looked different. And to advocate for these children, a term was created. It was called assigned male or assigned female at birth. An intersex child who was assigned one or the other because they didn't fit into one clean category. That term has now made it into popular queer culture in particular. And it is now essentially given to any human being. People who are born without sex ambiguity, people who are born male or female, no issues, are using the term I was assigned male at birth. The only person, the only thing that assigns you male is your mother's womb and nature. The moment a man, the moment an industry can assign someone male or female, you literally put people above nature and above God, and you put men above women's bodies who create the sex of children. So I don't like the term, especially because it's an appropriation for intersex kids and it's meant to advocate for their well-being and to stop non-consensual surgeries on infants, right? So when you're raising a child and they're being exposed to this language of, you know, I'm assigned female at birth versus I was born female, it starts to introduce an idea that if someone assigned you female, you can reassign yourself something else. And there's a big difference between Amelia Earhart or Patty Smith, you know, like the first punk rock female and the first uh aviator who is female. Someone breaking the mold of a gender stereotype. There's a difference between not conforming to a gender stereotype based on sex and thinking because you don't conform that your sex must be wrong. Those are two different things. Someone who has sex dysphoria who then must treat it by transitioning, what we would call a transsexual, or what people call transgender, or trans now. These are individuals who look at their genitals, who look at their sex characteristics and say, this isn't right. And they often do this very early on, around ages four or five. It doesn't just happen during puberty. Puberty can increase it, but it starts very early on. So it's important when you're raising your child and they're starting to go into puberty, and for the first time in their life, they're starting to have discomfort around their bodies. Well, that's normal. A child should have discomfort around their body during puberty, especially when we've thrown away all of our rites of passages. We don't have rituals or ceremonies anymore to teach young women how to become women or teach young men, young boys, how to become men. We don't have those. Those are lost. I've I've met with many people who came from traditional societies, and they said right around puberty, they were split and had to spend more time. They were boys, they had to spend more time with the men. They were girls, they had to spend more time with the women. Because throughout their puberty until they reached adulthood, they had to learn how to come into these bodies. And they had to do it without any of the trauma that can occur, sexual trauma, especially when males and females are sharing spaces trying to understand their bodies. Now, am I for separating the sexes during during puberty? I'm not actually, but there's some kind of ancient wisdom of traditional culture that does that. And to this day, a lot of indigenous tribes still do that. And that reason is it takes many years and a lot of practice to come into a maturing body. It is a very, very important initiatory period as a human being. When you replace elders with TikTok, when you replace rites of passages with sitting on your cell phone and scrolling social media and eating processed foods, you're not learning how to relate to this changing body. And those changes become overwhelming. I find puberty to be one of the most common causes of dysphoria in kids that has nothing to do with them being born in the wrong body or the wrong sex, but has everything to do with their parents and their culture not knowing how to hold and steward and mentor these changing bodies. So the reason why I'm doing this video is because in my upcoming six-month program, I'm dedicating an entire bonus section to navigating dysphoria, to really understanding what it means, first of all, to be dysphoric, what the difference is to be sex dysphoric, which usually happens, like I said, around four or five, and gender dysphoric, which means the way I'm supposed to be in society, like a woman being a housewife, for example, doesn't feel good in my body. I want to be a traveler. I don't want to be a housewife. That gender stereotype will confine you and create a dysphoria. It will depress the hell out of you. It can cause you to feel suicidal. All that needs to be held and honored and worked with. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have been born female. It means society has to actually open what it expects a female to be. We have to open our minds and our family systems and our cultural relating to decide and find new ways to let people emerge as they want to be, not how we think they should be based on their immutable sex characteristics. So understanding the difference between your child doesn't conform to gender stereotypes and your child was born in the wrong body is life-saving discernment. Because a lot of kids who identify as trans because they have gender dysphoria, now that they're under the trans umbrella, feel the pressure of medical transitioning. But oftentimes, unless there's some kind of sexual trauma, their actual bodies aren't causing the dysphoria. It's how their bodies are treated by people around them and it's how expectations are impressed upon them because of their sex, because of being male or female, that creates the dysphoria. Them being alone at home with their bodies doesn't do that. It's how they're being received in the world. So it's an important distinction because when you have kids like four or five-year-old boys trying to remove their penises, you have a child who's truly sex dysphoric. That child needs a lot of intervention, a lot of help. And when they're old enough, they might need to transition to female. I do believe transsexuals are real and are an important part of society, actually, because they've lived both worlds. They have a lot to contribute. And proper therapy, proper support, taking enough time, not urgently responding to it, can create a really healthy transition later in life and they can live beautiful, functioning lives. Some of my closest, dearest friends are transsexuals and they are incredible people. And if you reach out to my team, if you're reading this and you need some resources, we can send you some for people to work with. If you're curious with your own child or yourself and you need some discernment. But just consider your own experience. Consider, and I'm speaking to you as a parent, and anyone can take this, do what they want with it. But think about yourself when you're going through puberty. Think about the changes, the feelings, the confusion, the pleasure, the shame, the guilt. I was raised Catholic, so there was this extra piece of guilt around any kind of self-pleasure or orgasm or erection, anything happening that was impure. There are a lot of factors throughout puberty that cause us to not feel close to these bodies, that cause us to feel betrayed by these bodies. And transitioning can temporarily save you from that. A young girl who doesn't want people to look at her breasts, well, binding her breasts so no one can see them can save her from being objectified. And that can temporarily cause relief. But that doesn't mean she's not supposed to have breasts. There's a difference. And we need to hold the difference. So this is a call to get curious. Is my child sex dysphoric? Their own relationship with their body is incongruent and their actual body causes them stress? Or is the environment that the child's body lives in causing their stress? Is it not their breasts inherently, but how people treat them because their breasts are showing through their shirt? Is that what causes the stress? That is an important piece to discern. And I have done so in my private practice for years. I have worked with people who turn out to be actual transsexuals, which to me means someone who requires medical transitioning to treat sex dysphoria so they can function, and people who actually had sexual trauma or didn't have proper rites of passages, or didn't realize they could be gender non-conforming and still be the sex they were at birth. So learning this difference will help your child actually settle into who they are. It will cause them to be curious and to open their mind to what's their body actually teaching them. And in the session, I'm going to be diving into really teaching you how to do that for those of you who are interested. And the reason why it's a bonus section is not everyone is navigating this, nor do they want to. So I'm making an optional session that's an add-on to the six-month program. You can easily scroll through my YouTube and find a good handful of uh not sessions, but interviews I have done with transsexuals. I have an amazing one with a detransitioner. I have uh individual recordings where I teach you more about navigating dysphoria and holding your child, holding yourself, how I've done it with my intersex body. There's a lot on my page. So I'll even ask the my friends who edit this to just put some things in the episode details to show some other episodes you can listen to to get more support and you know, learn more about this, as well as some people I've had historically that expand the conversation around gender and sex. I hope you can take this with an open mind. I hope it's very clear that I'm not saying people shouldn't transition. What I'm saying is we need more discernment and this separation between gender and sex. And we need to understand that just because a child is gender nonconforming or just because they're uncomfortable during puberty doesn't mean they were born in the wrong body. It could just mean their environment isn't supporting their developing body the way it needs to. And that's an invitation as a parent to create a new community, a new support group to help your child mature and develop in their new body so that they can anchor in and find a safety in the body they were born in. That's the end of today's episode. Take a moment to notice where you feel the episode. Take a breath into that place, maybe even put your hand over it, and let whatever wants to come up, come up. And remember, our bodies speak through sensations. What's yours saying right now? For more information on any upcoming events, please visit holisticlifenavigation.com. And feel free to check out my YouTube page where you can watch any of these episodes, leave a comment, and even request a future topic for me to dive into. I'll see you next time.