A child is considered to be transgender if they consistently, persistently, and insistently express a cross-gender identity and feel that their gender is different from their assigned sex. Often expressing this feeling at an early age, they are more likely to experience gender dysphoria, discomfort related to their bodies not matching their internal sense of gender, as defined on the American Psychological Association’s Fact Sheet on Gender Diversity and Transgender Identity in Children. This dysphoria tends to increase at adolescence as the body matures.

When our first twin announced their identification as transgender, we were unfamiliar with gender dysphoria and educational materials were not readily available at that time. We were two years into our journey when we finally came across Dr. Yarhouse’s Understanding Gender Dysphoria book. It gives a similar descriptive account about the experience, expression, and timeline of transgenderism.

Learning about the experience opened our eyes to the realness of our twin’s situation. Looking back, we could see hints of their discomfort.

Around the age of three, they would occasionally say, “I wish I were a boy.” My normal response was something like, “No, you don’t. You just don’t want to be a typical girl. You want to be a girl just like you.”

That stage didn’t last long, but all through childhood, they chose pants over dresses, preferred shopping in the boys department, and focused more on comfort in clothes. We weren’t proponents of the philosophy that girls needed to fit a certain mold, and didn’t believe (and still don’t) that clothes or hairstyles are really important in the larger scheme of life.

All our children have been a little “outside the box,” and we affirmed that. I expressed to them that if someone called them weird, they should say thank you! Why would you want to blend in when you can be uniquely you?

The remainder of childhood was uneventful in regards to gender issues. Having a small comfort zone and being inflexible were the more challenging traits we engaged when dealing with this twin. Because those traits were familiar to me in my life, I wanted to teach them about flexibility and expanding their comfort zone so they could get past those challenges sooner than I had. But apparently those are things you cannot teach. They must be learned through individual experience.

Junior high came and things seemed to progress fairly normally, though our twins are both quiet, so they didn’t share their feelings and difficulties very openly. I had struggled to connect with our first transgender twin over the years. Their quirkiness, difficulty with comfort zones, and very black and white way of seeing the world didn’t mesh well with my intensity, my verbosity, and my own strong opinions. I was hoping as they matured as a young woman, we would find more connection and could grow together in that female bond. A moment of needing my help with some female problems in seventh grade gave me hope that our chance to bond was just around the corner.

Eighth grade came and with it an extreme haircut, documented with photos of cutting off 8-9 inches of long blonde hair to donate. That spring we received a letter from them spelling out their identification as transgender. It wasn’t asking for our help to deal with not feeling like they fit or that they were uncomfortable with their body. It was announcing that this was who and what they were.

The past five years have encompassed a trajectory towards full social transition, recently moving into medical transition with a testosterone prescription.

Needless to say, the bonding I was hoping for didn’t occur. There was a lot of turmoil, especially in the first nine months after the letter. An external calm occurred during sophomore year. During their last two years of high school, we were working on coexisting peacefully in our home in the midst of disagreement and pain, determining that family had to supersede our differences.

I tell this story because I want you to know that this experience is real. It has been insistent, consistent, and persistent in some pretty noticeable ways, when you look at it in hindsight. It is this realness that keeps me searching for better answers.

Authors writing from a faith perspective tend to expend their energy on explaining the foundation for the sacredness of God-given gender and that any other expression is wrong. They encourage compassion towards people who experience a disconnect with their birth sex, but don’t address the fact that this experience is real and happens to some through no overt choice of their own. They don’t address what to do when it happens. They don’t give concrete advice to families about how to manage.

On the other hand, though the APA Fact Sheet can be helpful in understanding people’s experience, I feel they move away from facts when they suggest, “Psychological interventions should aim to help children understand that their gender identity and gender expression are not a problem.” That sounds like a good idea, except I think it misses the point that male and female are biological classifications, not identities. I think it’s missing some truth. It’s making the biological facts not pertinent to one’s experience of them. One’s gender identity is then relative to how one feels about the physical reality. It is elevating mental experience and perception above physical experience.

Men and women do not fit in neat little boxes. There is more variation within a group of men or of women, than there is between those groups. We don’t need to conform to anyone’s perception of what it means to be a man or a woman. But when we take the physicality of our biological bodies out of the picture, we are removing another key component to personhood and the reality of being human.

“Nobody is Superior, Nobody is Inferior, But Nobody is Equal Either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you. I am I.” – Osho