Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We're here today with Diane Ehrensaft talking about kids who get creative with their gender. Many kids in today's world are thinking beyond the binary, or even the spectrum of male to female.

There is a whole world of gender experimentation and creativity.

How do we navigate this world as parents and help our kids thrive?

Diane Ehrensaft is a developmental and clinical psychologist. She's the co founder and director of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, as well as an associate professor of pediatrics.

Her work has been featured by the New York Times, the Huffington Post, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, Anderson, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and the Today Show, among others.

She's the author of multiple books, including The Gender Creative Child.

Diane, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Diane Ehrensaft: And thank you so much for having me.

Andy Earle: Really excited to dive into this topic. I've been reading through your book, The Gender Creative Child and learning a ton and really interested to talk to you about how kids can construct their gender or figure out their gender as they grow up and interested to hear from you about how you came to be writing the books on it.

Diane Ehrensaft: Where would you like to start?

Andy Earle: You talk a little bit about your studies and developmental psychology in the book. how did that path then get into this focus on gender?

Diane Ehrensaft: I would back it up to both my undergraduate and graduate school career, where my focus was on gender. And at that time, I was really focused on do adults treat little boys and little girls differently.

I was not thinking about transgender children at the time. But I would say in my graduate training, I had my first experience clinically in 1968. With a child who did not like the gender norms of 1968 and working with them and their parents, and I was quite young myself, so that was my launching into clinical work, and I always been interested in gender because what I was learning in school made no sense to me.

It didn't feel like it matched what I was seeing. And also because this was the 1960s. So this was the explosion in the women's movement where gender was a thing for people to be thinking about. Therein lies the roots, and it probably it goes way back into my childhood, because I found my first quote unquote book that I wrote in eighth grade.

And I had a chapter on gender, and I didn't even remember I wrote this till I found it in a box of things I had saved from childhood and went, Oh, there I was at 13, talking about how boys are raised how girls are raised and you should just be happy with who you are.

So I guess we could say somewhere it went way back. And I would say the most significant experience for me was having children, being a parent. And I have two wonderful children, four years apart, who fought over the tutus. And one was a boy and one was a girl. that was my best learning experience around gender outsider boxes and gender creativity.

Andy Earle: Talking about getting outside of boxes you in the book talk about a gender web and these different threads or different strands that kind of make up this web and how different ones might be more important or less important. What is the web, and how is it woven?

Diane Ehrensaft: Based on everything I was thinking about related to gender, at the time I was really zooming in on it, was when we talked about a gender spectrum. And we talked about that it was a great idea that you had these poles, and on one side was male, and the other side was female.

And I thought, that's a great idea, but it's very linear. Everything is measured by boy, girl. And are you closer to boy? Are you closer to girl? What about all the people who are doing something that's doesn't really fall on one line, but goes in different directions.

So I actually was. Thinking about this and writing and I was looking out my window and there was a spider web and I thought, how about the idea of a web? Because it's 3 dimensional. It's got all these different threads and it would work because I was thinking of 3 major threads that make up anyone's gender.

One is nature having to do with what you came into the world with, but also the day you were born, somebody registered you as boy or girl typically. And so there was all that goes into nature. Nurture, which would be, who's taking care of you? What are they teaching you about gender?

What are you teaching them back about your gender? So there's nurture. And then there was also culture. What about everything surrounding those parents or caregivers and that particular child that kind of give you tropes of gender that you live with? So I thought, okay, we've got three major threads, nature, nurture, culture, and they all interweave.

They're all important and every single one of us. Is doing that psychological work to weave it together, those three threads, which has lots of threads underneath them to make our own unique gender web and yours is different than mine and mine is different than the people next door. Everybody has one.

So I like that idea. And then I thought, oh whoa, wait, we get into the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is time, which means. Your gender web is a work in progress your whole life. It doesn't just remain stable, permanent, immutable. So from the day you're born to the day you die, it's going to go through a lot of different weavings with a lot of different look to your gender tapestry, your gender web.

Andy Earle: That is so interesting. And it really starts to help you understand gender in such a more nuanced way. And even this idea that it can change over time that it's not necessarily something that you just discover or something that you were born with, but that there is a fluidity.

To gender, as you have different experiences and interact with the world around you or with the other people in your environment that your perception of gender is not set.

You talk also about the spectrum boy to girl, or the boxes M or F on your birth certificate and how we need to get outside the boxes. But then you also in the book talk about. Not wanting to completely take boxes away from Children or that there is something helpful about having some boxes or some framework or schema to start to identify and have a vocabulary, maybe to say, Oh, that resonates with my experience or how I'm feeling.

So If we're getting off the spectrum, we've got the web, it's not just the M and the F, then what would those kinds of boxes look like? Or what sort of options would kids have to start latching onto?

Diane Ehrensaft: Great question.

If we throw away boxes and put in instead, it's called categories that there are different categories of gender.

And my greatest teachers on this. Or the kids coming up with their own categories, and I will preface it by saying little kids as well as adults like to organize life, and they're often like different categories. Like I like string beans, but I hate broccoli.

I think I hate and the ones that are tolerable, but we tend to want to find ourselves in a community with sometimes a label, but to make sense of it. I belong here. I belong there. So what I was learning from the kids was, whoa, they understand much better than us old folks about the notion is there aren't two boxes, just boy and girl.

And I started learning like one child. I went to get them in the waiting room at my office when they came just to talk about their gender, and they burst into my office and said, I am a gender hybrid. they said, if you look at me from the front, I look all boy, right?

Because they were wearing basically basketball shorts and a t shirt and high top sneakers, absolutely by our cultural norms, a box boy. Then they whipped around and showed me that they had a long blonde braid down to their waist. See that? That's what makes me a hybrid.

Okay. Got it. You are a gender hybrid. And then another older teen came to me and said, I'm a gender smoothie. Want to tell me more? Which is usually how I'm learning. Just tell me more, please. You take everything about gender, you put it in the blender, and you press the button, And it all mixes up and you have a smoothie.

That's me, a gender smoothie. And again, we never want to lock somebody in to a label or a box. But it's a little more complicated than that because on the other side, there are kids who know from age three about their gender and agenda that does not match.

Thanks. What was registered as their sex at birth and they are very stable and they do know and they keep knowing and persistent. So we have fluidity, but we also have stability, and both are to be respected as possible pathways of gender for all children, teens and adults.

Thank you.

Andy Earle: So that was something really fascinating to me throughout the book is these kids that you get that by age 3, or even when they're really, you would think wouldn't even know that much about gender or they're just learning language.

They're just putting their 1st sentences together, but some of the sentences might be no, I'm a girl. Or I'm a boy. They're not the gender that you're putting on them or that you would think based on their are their natal gender.

You refer to these kids as apples in the book. Okay. And so you have apples, oranges, and fruit salad. And I'm also interested in what the differences are between the apples, the oranges, the fruit salad, and then how that relates to those other categories.

We're talking about the hybrids and the smoothies and these other kind of categories that people might find themselves in.

Diane Ehrensaft: The origins of apples versus oranges. Comes from me a long time ago, reading the research that came out of the Netherlands, that many people know as the research on persisters and desisters, where they looked at little children who came into their clinic.

And got a diagnosis at that time of gender identity disorder. So there was something going on about their gender. And then they followed them, and the majority of them, by the time they were reaching puberty, no longer got that diagnosis. And went on to be whoever they were going to be, but not transgender In that case, they were just looking transgender, and the minority of kids were persistent, consistent and insistent into and beyond puberty.

And the conclusion from that is we can't know when they're little off the way till they're bigger. Because so many kids change their mind. And I read this and I'm having trouble with this. I think they're talking about apples and oranges in terms of these two groups.

And so based on my clinical experience, other research that was done, apples are the kids, who are dealing with their gender identity early in life. Gender identity is who I know myself to be, boy, girl, other, male, female, other. Your gender expressions are simply how you do your gender, how you dress when you're a little kid, what things you like to do.

It's just how we present our gender to the world. That's our gender expressions. So if we focus on gender identity, there are a group of kids from early on who do exactly what you said. They say, I am not boy. I am girl from very early on and they stay that way throughout their childhood into adulthood and typically they do what we call a social transition from one gender to another.

Often it is switching boxes. And often when they get to be old enough, they not all of them, but many of them decide they'd like some medical intervention to help that along and to bring their body in sync with who they know themselves to be. So those are apples. And if you know how to measure it, you can't predict with certainty and you always have to leave everything open.

Where gender identity is the core of it. And the mistake people have sometimes made, and it probably was my error in not making it clear, is it doesn't mean that you have to have done it early in life or it doesn't count.

For example, we have what I call late harvest apples, and they may discover for the first time when they're teenagers, that I'm not the gender you thought I was. They still count as apples where gender identity is at the core of it. And then in comparison, oranges are kids who are exploring how to do their gender, but they don't necessarily feel a disconnect between the gender everybody thinks they are and the gender they know themselves to be.

They just want to do it differently. And so they may sometimes say when they're little, I wish I was a boy, but that's different than saying I am a boy. these are the kids who are going to be gender expansive in how they do their gender, but not do a switch in their gender identity.

So those are oranges a fair number of those little kids grow up to be gay, but not all of them. But often that's a trajectory. You explore gender on the way to discovering your sexual self. They're two different tracks, but they cross. Then I thought, Oh whoa, wait a second. We have all the gender hybrids and the gender smoothies coming up.

So apples and oranges don't really capture the whole experience. So the biggest growing group. Of kids that are teaching us or presenting to us now are the fruit salads and the fruit salads, they mix up gender expressions and gender identity. I'm all or anything. I'm neither. I'm doing my own creation of gender.

Andy Earle: What box do I put you in here?

Diane Ehrensaft: You can switch boxes

Andy Earle: if you want,

Diane Ehrensaft: I need a box. And that is our bedrock of gender. There's two boxes. We've discovered gender is infinite.

There isn't two boxes. You might find yourself in a box. But it's among these, all these different gender webs.

Andy Earle: So all of the fruit salad situations are gender creativity or all apples, oranges, and fruit salads.

Diane Ehrensaft: I would like to say we should all be gender creative, no matter what our gender is. So yeah, it covers in terms of what we now the language. Language has changed remarkably, but these days it's gender diverse.

So it started out as gender non conforming, and then we had gender expansive, and now we have gender diverse as word on the street, and it'll change to something else, I'm sure, but yeah, covers All of these iterations of gender,

Andy Earle: Pretty interesting. I really got me thinking about gender a much more nuanced way, really starting to think in terms of these different frameworks.

I feel like I have a much deeper understanding of how this all works. I think what could cause friction in families is just a lack of understanding and there's So much more to talk about in the book. You talk about how much we're getting information online or how much we're connecting with other people in the community online and the benefits, but also the drawbacks of that So I would really highly encourage people to pick up a copy of the book, which was called the gender creative child. Diane, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your experiences and your knowledge with us about this topic.

It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Diane Ehrensaft: And it was delightful to have this conversation.

Andy Earle: Can you also talk at all about where we could send people to be maybe following updates from you or being aware of what you're working on next?

Diane Ehrensaft: Yes, the other book is co authored by myself and a colleague, Michelle Jerkowitz. The name of the book is Gender Explained, and it's coming out in early August, and you can get it directly through the experiment publications.

I think Target is pre selling copies, and you can certainly go to my website for more information about what's upcoming and that's dianeehrensaft. com.

Andy Earle: We're here today with Diane Ehrensaft talking about how to raise children who are creative with their gender. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Diane Ehrensaft: And the worst thing we can do as the people around teenagers is discount what they're telling us about their gender. It does tremendous disservice, if not harm, to teens as they are expressing something about their gender.

Andy Earle: A common response from parents or from doctors is this idea that, oh, it's just a phase, or they'll probably grow out of this.

Diane Ehrensaft: The first one is puberty blockers, puberty suppression. It's a medication that basically puts a pause on puberty. It stops it. It's just if you took the remote and you were watching a program and you wanted to just freeze it, same thing, pause.

They never go through the unwanted changes. So a little transgender boy will never get a period, never grow breasts.

Andy Earle: Because you can't really go back once you start through the puberty process.

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