Teenagers are being told that puberty is a time for them to make decisions about sex and gender, this at a time when they have none of the life experience that would be necessary to make such existential choices.
Puberty had been distressing and rough. He’d began to cut himself, and saw transition as a way out.
Anime offers vividly coloured worlds, in which giant-eyed kids and anthropomorphized animals conduct heroic journeys against beautifully detailed backdrops.
The recent spike in trans self-identification has made things even more difficult for these parents, because gender-related body dysmorphia often appears alongside other kinds of physically focused anxieties.
Gay men and women fought long and hard to be accepted for who they are, often battling reactionary bigotry in the process.
This isn’t to say that all causes of transgenderism are exogenous: the presence of neuro-atypical cognition comes up over and over, as does the sons’ process of discovering (or rejecting) their sexuality.
Many of the young men in question have, in moments of candour, hinted that their motivations for transition are unrelated to actual gender dysphoria.
