Experiences of parents and carers of young trans and gender diverse people

There have been things that have been difficult because he has a lot of difficulty at school and stuff like that. So, those sorts of things are hard to, to manage, ‘cos it’s quite hard to manage with the school anyway and sometimes it’s hard to not get too emotional about things whilst still achieving the best for him. Sometimes I don’t feel that he’s had enough support. But also, sometimes, I think anything that he is experiencing is put down to the fact that he’s trans. Whereas, he is also just a teenager. So, I think it’s, it’s separating out what is just normal teenage life to what is the difficulties with having a trans child.

I was pleased that the school were being accepting. I was sort of set, I was worried that there'd be a challenge. You know, they might challenge it in some way. Cause I'd heard of other situations where schools hadn't been accepting. So it was a relief more than anything, a relief that they were going to be supporting of her. And then it made me confident and we could instil confidence in each other so the day that we walked, we went to school when she was first dressed. We both were scared. But we supported each other and that gave me confidence that she could do it and she was confident that I supported her and that I would do my best to make it as easy as possible for her. And anything, any little bits of bullying that she had initially, the head teacher just nipped it in the bud straight away and she hasn't really had a problem at school at all since then.

We thought maybe they, that they struggle, the school would maybe struggle with these issues, ‘cos maybe we thought that we were the only parents on the planet that were going through this. But, of course the school told us that there’ve been three or four children before, before ours that transitioned in the school. So they were quite familiar with it, actually. And then we had a meeting with the teachers, didn’t we? And got everything out and sorted and—that was the essence of it.

The teacher, as soon as this situation happened, he obviously researched locally and found other schools locally that had trans kids in their school and he wrote up a policy based on some of the websites that I sent in through my contact with Mermaids. I sent him like a toolkit and things from [city] and he took that along with the advice from other schools in the area and he wrote the policy, quite quickly, which he gave to me to look at. And then once that was approved, that was in place.

He transitioned at school in primary year five. Primary school was really supportive. They couldn't have done anything more. They didn't quite understand how they didn't have the right to tell every single parent in the school that he was trans. They thought, you know, because he wanted to use the boy's toilets, he wanted to get changed separately from the girls. That they had to inform everybody. So it was just a case of updating them in regards to the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act and the Gender Reassignment Act. Once they've got the swing of that they changed the policy and they created a whole new trans policy for the whole school. The transition went really smoothly. We did send a letter out, a very generic letter saying, there was a child in year five who has started at the school as female and will be coming back as male after Easter. The only phone call school got was ‘my child is confused. What name do they want to be known by?’ You know, what pronouns do they want to use. There was no negativity from the parents or the kids. When he went back to school, he was accepted near enough straight away.

When I think of her journey from transitioning at junior school, last year junior school or was it the year before. I can’t quite remember the dates. It was all pretty much, I mean it was a bit tricky in the beginning because I mean the talk was around toilets. Which toilet does she use? And then a letter went round. And then it was obvious because she went to a very small village school that he was now a she. Everyone knew that this letter that went round the school was referring to her. And I think there were a couple of comments like ‘my mum says or my dad says you’re a pervert’, something like that. Which was really, really hurtful. However, I think it’s, children these days are so accepting. They kind of just got on with it. And as far as I know then in those really early stages, there wasn’t the same bullying. There wasn’t, she still had friends and had friends round to stay and would go to sleepovers and go shopping and with all her friends from school, there wasn’t many major shakes at all.

So, he is in a different school now, which he doesn’t particularly like. He doesn’t feel a member of particularly. He’s very, very, very guarded around other kids. There is he was, when I enrolled him, when we went to enrol, we got his name legally changed that morning. We got it witnessed so that he was always on the register as his male name so that there could be no mix up. And so he was, he has still been misgendered by teachers there which he finds very upsetting obviously because his name is you know, categorically a boy’s name. There’s no room for, it’s not an ambiguous name. But we have, I said to him, we need to sort it out straight away, not just let it drag on. So, I got in touch with the person at school and that was sorted out. And they apologised to him so, you know, that’s good. They’ve dealt with that well.

There was a counsellor that came in. It's and it did help him a lot, cause it was at the time when everything was really, really bad with his dad. And he was refusing to go and see him and having lots of meltdowns and he was frequently very upset and, and kind of traumatised by it, by what's the name, I don't know how to word it. Anyway, yeah, he needed it right then and, because it was in school it meant that it wasn't hugely disruptive to his day and he got to know the person really well and it was weekly and he saw her about the school and said hello to her and the familiarity built up really, really quickly, enabling him to speak to her openly very quickly. So it helped him really like lots and very quickly as well.

We looked at the pastoral support, in general. The emotional support what they offered students. We had already moved schools once and the jargon from the second school was all about individualised wellbeing support and stuff like that. And I was sold on that. I thought this is fantastic. But in reality it didn’t fit with they said they provided and what they did provide had huge discrepancies. So with this school, I went to great lengths to make sure they provided what they said they provided That’s the bit that’s made all the difference. He’s got a pastoral support, a named pastoral support, that he could link to at any point. He was able to manage himself and his emotions during this time and during the day. And they have been great. 

I didn't want her to be in that position where she was teased and bullied for wearing a girl's uniform. But eventually, after we bought her a pair of girl's school shoes and she wore those with her normal rest of it, boy's uniform, trousers, everything and she just, it was like one step at a time for her. She was trying it out. I felt like she was trying to move forward and sort of questioning me whether she'd be able to do that and so we, we decided to go and see the head teacher. We made an appointment. Oh no, actually, just before we made the appointment, we went to a parents evening and with her teacher and she was like, “tell her, tell her, tell the teacher” [whispers]. So I said, ''He - at the time – wants me to tell you that he wants to come in a girl's uniform.'' And the teacher's response was, without flinching, ''That's fine. Don't worry. There's no problem with that, you know.'' As soon as she said that, the teacher, [name of participant’s child] started crying. It was like a relief and then the teacher accepts me and I can move forward with what I want to do next. And she wanted me to go see the head teacher and so we made an appointment with the head teacher and again, he was accepting. So all these, all these accepting steps meant that she felt more confident, every day through this quite short process, really. He said, ''When do you want to come dressed in the girl's uniform.'' And she said, ''Tomorrow, tomorrow.'' So we left the head teacher's office and went round to George at Asda then tried on all the uniform, bought her the uniform. The next day she went in the girl's uniform and that was the beginning of it all of her just becoming this confident little girl that she always was and we didn't realise.

His current school is great. You know, everything in terms of use of the toilets and games and stuff like that. They’ve given him lots of support. He does pull up one of his science teachers when they have lessons about the reproductive system and stuff like that. And he’ll pull them up and they’ll go, “oh ok that’s because of that”, cause they’re so used to teaching in a typically gendered way. But yes, school are great. The current system is quite okay. 

We had to inform the school, because things were getting a little bit tricky with regards to PE and, and changing rooms and sports, ‘cos it’s a typical school where boys play football and rugby and girls played hockey and netball. So and the school, in fairness got on board with it and were very supportive and just said, whatever our daughter wanted to do then that was absolutely fine by them. They just still wanted her to continue with her schooling and they would make it so sport was completely out. She didn’t have to attend any sport.

He's a very business-like type teacher. And he wants to everything right. I think he had a bit of push back from some parents and governors, you know, he never said much about what that was. But he was challenged by some of the governors, I think and several of the parents did go in with concerns about toilets and things to him. But he, one example he did give me was that a parent had said, ''My daughter is, I'm concerned that my daughter is going to have to share toilets.'' And he said, ''Well that's fine, she can use this other toilet.'' So he was quite business-like about it and set them straight. So [name of participant’s child] was always been allowed to use the girl's toilets from the start.

It got worse when he had his hair cut. He started binding as well, wearing a binder. And so, that was a much obvious sign to everybody that he was different to them. He had told them that he was gay some years earlier. So, I think that whole, you know—I don’t know that they thought he was trans or what they thought. But they were vicious. And to be fair to the school because we didn’t know. We didn’t tell them and so the school couldn’t do anything about it. I do sometimes feel let down that nobody noticed at school. That nobody kind of was looking out for him. Especially, as he had had these problems before and the main person that was causing him the problems was the same person from previous years. So, I do sometimes feel quite disappointed that, actually nobody, nobody thought to even ask the question. And he put on a lot of weight and things like that ‘cos and I would talk to him about that. Not in a, you know, not in a horrible way. Well I tried not to be in a horrible way. But you could tell when he was having a particularly bad time, but I didn’t really know what it was about, because he would eat more and secretly and things like that. So, there were lots of, there were signs but you would ask him and he would say, everything was fine. But I do you think the school maybe should have seen something. When we did go and tell school, we had to in year eleven, he didn’t, he was on a restricted timetable and he didn’t actually go to school as much. He went every day. So, he was brilliant in that his attendance didn’t suffer. But he was not in any social time at school, so he was completely isolated. So, he went, he missed tutor group at the beginning of the day. At break time, he was given a special place to go to. At lunchtime, he would come home and then he wouldn’t return to lessons after lunch. He, out of his ten subjects, he didn’t go to three of them anymore because he just felt unsafe in those lessons. He felt unsafe in social times at school. So, in year ten, his, he just kind of existed at school as a bit of a ghost, if you like.

I guess it was because they were trans. But it's, the main thing at school was my child being called a butch lesbian, because they kind of identified as male and dressed as male. But the kids didn't actually know necessarily that they were trans. They saw a girl with a short haircut who wears boy's clothes must be a lesbian. And it was more sexuality than gender. At that age they can't differentiate between the two. Most of the bullying there was more on their sexual bias than a gender issue. They didn't have the brain scope I guess to get their head round it’s a transition of gender. It's got nothing to do with sexuality at all.

How did the school deal with that?

Again we are going back a little bit and they weren't informed and they were absolutely diabolical, really. Didn't, didn't do any—I went in to see the headmaster over the three year period I think I went in six or seven times. And all they’ve actually done was put my child in the isolation block, rather than deal with the bullies. There's five or six people doing the bullying. It's easier to deal with your one individual than it is deal with the five or six, rather than stop the bullying we’ll extract your child from the situation where they get bullied and put them in the isolation unit, which, my child was isolated already or feeling isolated, feeling different from everybody and then was put in the isolation block, which then actually created more bullying, because then, “why you in the isolation block?”. And then they'd either have to explain or just get bullied for being a thicko in the isolation block.