#this is poorly written and doesn't encapsulate every single nuance of the situation nor every single crux of my beliefs

[detransdamnation]

A very common argument against educators keeping a student's (trans)gender identity a secret from parents is that it opens up a window for said students to be groomed because it sets a precedent that their parents or guardians are not to be trusted (at best) or that they are unsafe or abusive (at worst). To make the record very clear, I don't disagree—but I also think that the raw, unnuanced stance tends to ignore the fact that many parents are indeed untrustworthy, or unsafe, or abusive.

Many dysphoric and transgender youth grow up in abusive homes—in fact, many detransitioners, including myself, cite this as one of the main reasons on as to why they went on to develop dysphoria—and there are many parents who would use their child's dysphoria or proposed gender identity as ammo to further that abuse. I know because I was one of those children. My family was infuriated when I told them that I had dysphoria. My family discussed forcing me into clothes I was not comfortable in, activities I did not like, and heterosexual relationships I did not want with the explicit intent to "cure" me. It wasn't until the week I started my medical transition that they actually started to be a little bit okay with the thought of their child being transgender—and not because transition was something that would help me but because it would stop me from being, in their eyes, a burden on them.

My family were not emotionally safe people to know about my dysphoria, even though I was dealing with it in unhealthy ways, because they explicitly used my mental fragility against me. My home was never a safe place. Why, then, would it have been okay for my educators to—hypothetically—tell my family that I had been going by a different name within my inner circle years before my "actual" transition, all while knowing nothing about what I actually went through behind closed doors? We so often ask transgender people, "Why do you allow gender to hold so much power over you?"—but we so rarely ask ourselves, "Why do we allow nicknames and clothing"—(all gender identity and presentation is for the vast majority of these teens)—"to hold so much power over us as to justify playing tattletale, even to the extent of breaching student/counselor 'confidentiality,' to parents whose children may very well be keeping this information from them for very good reason?"

Controversial stance, though it may be—but it is through my own lifelong experience of abuse that I strongly believe that parents do not have an innate, deserved right to know anything and everything about their child just by virtue of being their parents. We cannot acknowledge the rates of abuse that dysphoric youth so often face whilst also conveniently forgetting in these such discussions that most abuse, in most cases, is perpetrated by immediate family members, especially parents, thus rendering these people potentially unsafe people to tell. Either way, these teenagers are hurting—and we can either bite our tongues and create a space where they feel they can safely work through that pain, or we can make their suffrage a political "parental rights" issue, very possibly causing even more suffrage inadvertently and further encouraging them to suffer alone, in silence, or in unhealthy echo chambers.

We must talk about the ways in which dysphoric youth are vulnerable. In doing so, we must also address the fact that danger most often comes from within the home.