During a visit to lobby legislators on transgender issues, Senator Carden Summers ® knelt down and told a child he would protect her. When he learned she was trans, he backed away.
On Feb. 6, a group of families met to lobby senators on issues affecting the local transgender community in Georgia. One mother, Lena Kotler, decided to take her two children with her to give the topic a human face. While waiting to meet with Democratic Sen. Kim Jackson, who they had heard was a big supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, another senator passed by — Republican Sen. Carden Summers, the primary sponsor of the state’s bathroom ban bill. Little did he know that one of the children he would be interacting with, Aleix, 8 years old, was a transgender child.
According to Kotler and other families who were present, the senator stopped to say hello. That’s when Kotler spoke to Senator Summers about how she was there with her kids to “talk to legislators about keeping her kids safe.” Although she did not mention that one of her children was trans, they were present with LGBTQ+ signage - something the Senator apparently missed when he knelt down in front of Aleix and said, according to Kotler, “Well you know, we’re working on that and I’m going to protect kids like you.”
Kotler then replied, “Yeah - Alex is trans, and she wants to be safe at school, she wants to go to the bathroom and be safe.”
That is when, according to multiple witnesses, Sen. Summers stood up and fumbled his words, repeating, “I mean, yeah, I’m going to make sure she’s safe by going to the right bathroom,” continuing to use the correct pronouns for Aleix. When asked if he would make her go to a boy’s bathroom, he then allegedly backed away, saying, “You’re attacking me,” turned around, and walked off quickly.
An anecdote of any specific individual is really not particularly helpful. Some kids very solidly identify and some do not. Externally it’s sometimes ambiguous but also sometimes it can be incredibly obvious you aren’t dealing with just a temporary exploration.
A lot of trans parents of those who are very solidly trans generally have their proof in certain ways. If trying a different gender presentation suddenly stops a child from being painfully shy, fidgeting and having emotion regulation problems… Often that’s your clue that it’s a need not a want.
I can also understand the parent’s desire to put a human face on the issue. Very often trans issues are talked about in the abstract or treated like a political token to be traded. The human cost is hidden from veiw. It can be overall a very dehumanizing experience. I have reached out to transphobes who just never met one of us before and while some of them have settled on a very misguided “Well you’re just one of the good ones… Not the bad evil slutty bad ones” you can tell that at least there’s at least a crack in their armor through which the idea of human empathy can reach.
But it is helpful, as sometimes the pressure on someone who has “come out” is immense the other way. That if they back away from the controversial identity they declared, then they rose a fuss over nothing. It should be emphasized that people can be flexible with core pieces of their identity. Also, in my opinion, that they don’t need to pick just one or the other because of some select preferences they have that are incongruous with one choice or the other.
It’s definitely a case inside the trans community that we recognize there is a lot of external pressure from the general atmosphere of doubt regarding trans peoples convictions that incentivizes people to stick to their guns.
But that pressure ultimately doesn’t come from inside, that is a force exerted from outside. “Being bad for the movement” internal policing is a fear reaction born out of being under someone else’s heel and trying to do what you can to stop the boot coming down. Cis hegemony is lining up to use the case of detransitioners to limit everyone else’s medical and social options. Yes, there are some not particularly great trans people who look at detransitioners as essentially a threat to us all… but the general concensus of the community is that if our ethics become shit because outsider pressure destroys our culture by forcing us to eat our own then we have already failed.
The end goal inside the trans community of folks is always comfort and happiness even if that means someone walks back out the door having come to the conclusion they aren’t trans. If we have a goal it is in part we want to lower the social cost of experimentation so that identity can be freely explored regardless of what identity you find. There isn’t a lot of harm in taking a year to understand yourself a bit better. Ideally there shouldn’t be any harm in taking a gender rumspringa and figuring out if maybe you’re a little bit non-binary or something. That is real freedom. It’s all the bloody idiots who don’t get the basics who make it about there being massive stakes and a bullet dodged because they only think in terms of medical transition.
To our eyes it’s everybody else who wants to make doing that somehow “political”. It can’t just be about what makes us feel like we’re actually living at 100 percent because we have to fight tooth and nail just to exist.
Yeha, but how do you know if it is something permanent or not for the kid? You don’t know, at that age they are fluid in these regards. So why frame them as “transexual” if they like having long hair or play with “girly” toys.
When I was a kid I thought I was a girl, I would always refer to myself with femenine terminology until I was like 7. If my parents pushed the idea of being transexual instead of letting me figure out that I was actually a boy who likes girls, I’d probably be very fucked up today.
I’m really against telling a kid what they are or allowing them to change their bodies permanently. Once they turn 18, they’ll be able to make these choices with a better understanding and perspective. A 10yo kid doesn’t know shit, they barely understand the world (in general), that’s why they can’t make choices like having sex with adults, getting pregnant, having tattoos, consuming drugs or alcohol, gambling… the list goes on. They aren’t mentally prepared for these decisions.
I understand that it is important to preach love to others, but don’t solidify these ideas in your kids just to make a political point. They may feel later that they can’t change because they became the face of this issue.
Don’t tell a kid what they are, just tell them they can be whatever they want to be, but permanent choices only at 18, once they have more perspective and understanding. That’s it.
First off nomenclature “Trans sexual” is pretty outdated terminology that no longer is used in the DSM for kind of good reasons.
Also generally speaking gender presentation is independent of actual gender. It’s a common mistake made but what toys kids play with and how they like to dress has very little to do with identity and is only at best tangentially related. The idea that “Little Timmy likes Barbies get him to a gender clinic” is going to actually render anything other than a “some kids like Barbies” response is just anti trans hysteria.
Gender questioning is a known phase of development that may or may not stick particularly at a young age like seven. Heck gender questioning is something anyone can go through at any point in one’s life and you may come out of it realizing that nope, you are actually cis. Inside the trans community we advocate for adults a good experimental phase by degrees and not to look at medical transition as the first potential solution until you feel solid in knowing yourself better.
For a kid a regular questioning period is around a few months to a year long. If they basically are consistent by the end of that year the evidence is that there’s roughly a 95% chance that will be consistent over the next 5 years… With a little wobbling between binary and non-binary trans identities to be accounted forhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9936352/#:~:text=Five%20years%20after%20an%20initial,back%20to%20binary%20trans%20identities. With trans people in general there’s usually something seemingly unrelated that gets fixed by a successful social transition. Anxiety and depression can sometimes have physical symptoms. In trans accepting environments Social transition can target the root causes of stress so usually you can physically recognize the difference in someone suddenly flourishing…
Also 10 year olds do not make permanent body changes. If you are taking puberty blockers at age 10 the chances are better that you are doing so because you are experiencing precocious puberty. In Canada where I am treatment options for trans kids are limited to blockers so they can basically watch the kid. If you have a child who has a consistent identity over a span of years then they might recommend horomone treatments at age 16 to go through a puberty. This is done only with parental consent but requires a team including a social worker, psychiatrist/psychologist and endocrinologist and a pediatrician who basically have monitored the kid for several years. The first surgeries aren’t available until legal adulthood at 18. There are no “children of 10 making unilateral decisions to change their bodies”- its a child of 16 and a panel of about 6 adults (assuming two legal guardians) doing a risk assessment and long term life planning that can be vetoed by any participant at any time.
Even when the door is open for medical help for trans kids it’s still stacked against trans kids transitioning. Kids in the system have to stick to their guns against a lot of forces that look at them as a legal risk for suing the system for any permanent damages. It’s less risky for institutions generally to just not intervene in natural puberty so they set a very high burden of proof to be absolutely sure beyond all reasonable shadow of a doubt that the kid is gunna be fine. If you hear anyone talking about it being as easy as just scheduling an appointment quite frankly they are full of shit.
For me the problem is that parents can sabotage their questioning period by steering them. Just let them be. For me, this mother taking her kids to something political like this is steering and not letting the kid figure things out themselves.
I mean… Is it though? The kid and others like her regardless of how she might identify in the future is going to be impacted from kindergarten onwards by the laws being voted on. She may have just been there to speak with someone representing her and her parents fight with words of encouragement. It sounds from the article like Republican representive just approached these two just sort of assuming she was a cis kid being brought in as part of the “parental rights” crowd and he initiated the encounter blindly not finding the presense of a cis child in chambers particularly unusual.
I actually tend to see a lot of youngsters given anti trans signs to shake that they are probably too young to understand and probably enforce a lot more restrictions on how free that child feels to be themselves than any politically active trans parent fighting to not have to pick up their lives and retreat like a refugee to a non-hostile state where they have to build their support networks again from scratch.
There are very real stakes in this fight for families.
Stakes are real, but still, don’t use children for politics.
People understand what a kid is without having to expose them to the world as trans at such a young age.
Did they really change this politician’s mind?
“Expose them to the world as trans”? I don’t know if their intention was to make the news but the article doesn’t frame this as a carefully constructed political stunt. They weren’t exactly storming the chambers their parents could have been there to speak on their behalf and just couldn’t leave the kid with a sitter for all we know. They were also waiting in line to speak to a Democratic senator… Probably for a heartfelt thank you. This confrontation seems entirely accidental.
Also… Why would there be any particular change to this kid’s gender journey just because this happened? This idea that we should be cloistered away where hopefully we will revert to a cis identity because we are just being influenced astray somehow is still assuming that being trans is somehow a failure state. You seem to believe some perceived pressure will cause them to somehow double down on their convictions to fight the tide as a targeted minority and is going to damage the child… Bit Gender doesn’t work like that. We don’t pretend to our genders solely due to spite. We don’t do what we do to strictly perform for other people’s benefit. Most of us know exactly what that is like and it is quite frankly fucking exhausting and untenable on any long term. Kids know they can detransition at any point because even if their parents are accepting they all have contact with adults who keep trying to “correct” them and they know that being openly trans isn’t going to be a cakewalk. I know trans kids who are 4 years old that already intimately understand these concepts.
The reaction of the politician definitely did not show any potential for him to change his mind. That he felt attacked by them just saying “My kid is trans and we’re not here to support you” is telling about how people like this react to trans people but we pretty much know they are hypocrites. This one just didn’t have a canned response ready to save face. This isn’t really news, it’s just a more bald faced transphobic reaction than usual.