Why gender distress can look like social difficulty
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
If a trans child is struggling socially, the struggle is a sign that something is wrong with their identity, not with their circumstances. Social difficulty gets read as evidence of confusion, or of autism, or of something that needs fixing in the child rather than in the situation around them.
What I was trying to say there is that social difficulty can be the entirely predictable result of a mismatch between who you are and what your body is doing in front of everyone. If you are a boy and your body is going through a female puberty, fitting in with the girls around you becomes almost impossible, because you are not one of them, and you know it even if nobody else does yet. That is not a symptom of something wrong with the child. It is what happens when the wrong puberty runs, unchecked, in a social world that is organised entirely around it. The social difficulty is the signal, not the diagnosis.
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