My eating disorder got questions. My gender identity got answers.
As the buzz of summer winds down, back-to-school season offers families a fresh start. Kids return to routines and extracurriculars. Moms like me return to schedules, snacks, playdates, forms, and the peculiar relief of getting everyone back on a calendar.
Before we get buried in backpacks and lunch boxes, though, parents need to brace for something harder: our children's mental health.
Our children need adults willing to talk with them, challenge them when necessary, and remain present when the conversation gets uncomfortable.
A recent Wall Street Journal investigation described Oregon as an epicenter of pediatric gender medicine, with diagnoses of gender dysphoria and use of cross-sex hormones among minors rising sharply in recent years. Oregon has only about 1% of the nation’s teenagers, yet its clinics reportedly accounted for roughly 7% of gender-related mastectomies performed on teenage girls from 2019 through 2023.
Those numbers are shocking. But behind every one is a child. I was one of those children not very long ago.
When I was 16, I found Tumblr communities full of girls who sounded just like me. They were uncomfortable in their bodies. They struggled with anxiety, depression, isolation, and the feeling that they did not fit. Their stories felt eerily familiar. We fed off one another's pain until many of us came to believe that being transgender explained it — and that changing our bodies might cure our mental distress.
I was already battling anorexia. I hated myself and hated the body I saw in the mirror. That is why the contrast in how adults treated my two forms of distress still haunts me.
When I told doctors and therapists that I was starving myself because I saw myself as overweight, they did not affirm that perception. They treated it as something to question and work through. But when I said my breasts made me uncomfortable, my gender distress was not challenged in the same way. I was told that transition could be the answer. No questions, no pushback.
Looking back, I was not born in the wrong body. I was a hurting teenager looking for belonging, certainty, and an explanation for my pain.
The reality is that adolescence itself is full of unstable explanations. Teenagers are awkward, lonely, impulsive, anxious, obsessive, and desperate to belong. They compare themselves with peers, test identities, reject identities, and search for language that makes their discomfort intelligible. Sometimes the first explanation that feels coherent is not the right one.
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Across the country — consider states such as New Mexico, where schools have adopted policies accommodating students' asserted gender identities — vulnerable children can encounter adults who treat social transition as an appropriate response before parents even understand what is happening.
That should terrify parents, especially when gender distress appears alongside trauma, autism, depression, eating disorders, or a simple discomfort with narrow stereotypes about what girls and boys are supposed to be. Those possibilities should be explored, not hurried past.
Previous generations of girls were told, directly and indirectly, that happiness required becoming impossibly thin. Today, some distressed girls encounter a different promise: Maybe the body itself is the problem. The common thread is not merely social media or “woke” politics. It is vulnerability.
That’s why therapy should help a young person untangle difficult emotions, not merely supply a label for them. “Why do you feel this way?” and “What name and pronouns would you like me to use?” are not interchangeable questions. One opens an inquiry. The other can foreclose it.
As another school year begins, parents should remember that adolescence has always been messy. Teenagers feel awkward and lonely. They try things, fail at things, discover new passions, abandon old ones, experiment with style and music, and slowly begin to understand who they are. That process can continue well beyond high school.
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Our children do not need adults who immediately affirm every explanation they discover online. They need adults willing to talk with them, challenge them when necessary, and remain present when the conversation gets uncomfortable.
Use the dinner table. Talk about your own failures and insecurities. Tell them what helped and what you wish you had understood sooner. Get them outside. A scraped knee from the monkey bars is often healthier than another four hours alone with an algorithm.
Most of all, do not surrender the hard conversations to strangers, schools, influencers, or online communities. Do not let someone else take the reins of your child's life while you are still trying to figure out what happened.
The best back-to-school supply we can give our kids is not another lesson in identity. It is the reassurance that they do not have to change their bodies, their appearance, or every uncomfortable feeling in order to belong.
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