By Karen Bluth, Greater Good Magazine, May 9, 2022
Lee came to the first day of our self-compassion class looking a bit uncomfortable. This wasn’t particularly unusual, as many of our students were signed up by a parent—it usually isn’t the teen’s idea to enroll in a class on self-compassion. But I do remember that Lee asked us to call them by a different name, one that wasn’t listed on the registration. Of course, my co-teacher and I were fine with this—whatever the teen wanted to be called was OK with us.
The next week, Lee asked us to call them by a different name—and a different name the third week. We realized that all this name changing had to do with Lee questioning their gender identity; trying out different names is not uncommon among gender-questioning teens. We would have been fine with this, except for one thing: The third name they wanted us to call them was “Zero.” We couldn’t bring ourselves to do that, and, moreover, we couldn’t ask the other students to call them Zero, either.
More than half of all transgender and nonbinary teens are diagnosed with depression and experience suicidal thoughts, and almost half engage in non-suicidal self-injury, such as cutting. These rates are two to five times higher than those of their cisgender (non-transgender) peers. The suffering that they experience is profound, and largely comes from transphobia, a wholesale rejection of who they are that comes sometimes from family and friends, and often from those in the larger society. Simply put, after hearing repeatedly in different ways that they are unacceptable anomalies, trans teens often take this message in to a deep part of themselves, believing on some fundamental level that they are broken, unworthy, and, as one teen put it to me, freaks of nature.
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