 Hello, welcome to Think Tech. I'm Crystal on Quok Talk this morning, Tuesday. So listen, I've got a kind of a meaty subject. It's kind of controversial because it sounds like a little bit passé, but before when all those toilet laws, you know, the stupid bullshit about which bathroom the girls and the boys and the transgenders should go into. So that's kind of swept under the carpet now because it's not a political issue. But in fact, it's just this overwhelmingly new, well, I don't know if it's new, but it's a recent topic that people tend to not want to address, but it's existing and it's bubbling up. And there are issues with so many young women and men, boys and girls out there who are challenged daily confronting gender issues and identity issues. And so today I'd like to talk about that, specifically LGBT issues with teens and specifically, specifically transgender teens. So I've got a wonderful guest today, very, very relevant because she has like, she's in it because she sees a lot of transgender teens in her life right now. So I'm gonna welcome, again from the Honolulu Psychology, what, collective, sorry, Ingrid Middleton, who is a social worker and a clinical therapist. Welcome so much, Ingrid. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you for having me. So the reason I'm sorry to kind of steal your thunder and saying that you're personally involved with this, but because you told me that your daughter goes to school and you actually know her friends who are going through the transgender process, would you care to share that first? Yes, my daughter started an all-girls school and I was really excited at first because I thought there's not gonna be any kind of, you know, issues or anything. I think there's a lot of things that happen with girls when they're in their adolescence. They focus on boys and they get kind of sidetracked if they're going into a particular area, but so my daughter started this girl's school and it's actually been a very beautiful process of watching like a flower unfold. They really cultivate the uniqueness of each girl. However, there's a lot of other things that I didn't anticipate and some of those things are gender issues. So what we found is that there have been several, at least of the girls who are not comfortable with their female gender identity and they've decided to change. Not just one, not just one. There's several, so. So at any rate, at first I just, I really didn't know much about it. I had to do a lot of research and just talking with my daughter too and it was actually she that made me feel very comfortable with the whole notion of it. She said, mom. She said, mom, people are just trying to be who they are. They're trying to express what they really feel deep down inside and that they've always felt that way and for whatever reason, they just strangely enough going to an all-girls school and deciding to transition into a boy, which you wouldn't anticipate, but again, the school cultivates this uniqueness and this beauty that's within each individual and they feel safer, I think, making that decision. So the school is aware and supportive of their transitions? They're supportive, yes. And however, they don't go to the girl's school when they start transitioning. Right, okay, so let's just talk a little bit about that transformation. So, I mean, there are so many phases, right? Can you just go through briefly how the transition goes and what they need to do or what a parent needs to do to support that? Initially, I think there's just a period of really discomfort within themselves and I'm a therapist and so when I get folks that come in that really aren't identifying as having gender issues, I think that's just something normal that a lot of teens go through. They just have the sense of who am I and what am I about and that sort of thing. So I think that's normal, but then if you have somebody that comes in and they just feel like they don't have, they're not in the right body or they're not able to express themselves in a way that they feel like would be more authentic and a lot of those things aren't what we traditionally think of as women doing or girls doing which is playing with Barbies, wearing pink, you know. But that's a gender stereotype too, right? I wanted to go into that later, but go ahead and, yeah. So at any rate, starting with that particular process, they then think about what can I do differently and how can I be a little bit different with what I have now? And if they can't really organize that in their mind and in their bodies of how to do that, then they go a step further and then they start looking into this other way of being which is, I wouldn't even call it transgender initially, it's just like exploring different ways of being with their own gender. But as things progress and as social media is so proliferate now with just this whole topic. I mean, they have more to see, they have more to explore, there's more areas that they can identify with. That's what I was gonna ask is, do you think it's almost a trendy thing to have these kids come out? It's not necessarily even coming out, maybe it's something that they think is kind of a cool and trendy experiment. Yes, yes, and that is something that I think we go back to the psychology realm for because there is that need, I think, when people can't identify with one or the other and they shouldn't have to and I think I'll bring that up maybe later on, but I think because they're just trying to figure out who they are, it's almost like they can funnel into this third thing that isn't really identifiable and yet it does give them a sort of identity, so it's kind of this strange combination of things that we don't really expect and it just comes out in this manner. I think the dangers that come out of that are if someone just decides I'm going to 100%, I want to do the whole sex change and everything, then they go as far as blocking hormones. I mean, these are people making those decisions at younger ages. Miners, making these decisions. Miners, exactly. That aren't really reversible. Exactly, they're not reversible. So I think it's really, really important that we get into their heads and just kind of explore all the other things that are going on in their lives, what their histories are, how they've felt in their own skin from day one. And so I think, and I'm getting right to the point, but I think that it is easy now, like you're saying it's a trend, so I think it's easy to kind of jump into this third way of being without really knowing what that is exactly. Right, and also, like you said, social media, the impact and the influence is, and everything, you know, gender kind of definitions tend to be defined by society. And so when things are changing, when now the big talk of town is transgender is cool, come out and speak for yourself and find out who you really are and change it, that's morphing the whole concept of gender in a way that many people can't really, you know, deal with right now. So going back to the whole nurture versus nature issue, do we have to go back to that first? I mean, this is biological. How much of it is the society and community influence? So there's the 1.4 million that identify as transgender now in the U.S. alone. And all over the world, they say it's like maybe 0.6% of the entire world population. So I think, you know, I think there's a whole host of different things going on there and I think one of them is that, like you were saying earlier, I think people are trying to identify with something. They don't wanna be this and they don't wanna be that. So maybe the third thing, but then there are people that genuinely are born, they're called intersex. And so, so, and that was, I was gonna mention this earlier, but what is the first thing you ask if a friend is pregnant and they're going for their, let's say third or fourth ultrasound and they come back? Is it a boy or a girl? And so why do you ask that? I guess people wanna know. Oh, to prepare. To prepare. To prepare for her. To know what to buy for them. Yeah, exactly. It goes back to the stereotypes of whether pink or blue, which is stupid. Well, and I wouldn't really say stupid, but that we're already kind of nailing them into one category and then, so, and then another funny question I have is, you know, we, I mean, can you imagine Hillary Clinton in a suit? Can you imagine Donald Trump in a dress? Almost. So, well, okay, well maybe, but there's some interesting elements too, and that women are now about to be a little bit more masculine without necessarily having to do anything as far as changing their sex. But you know what I think, going back to Clinton is, I think she has the social pressure of feeling like she has to wear a suit to be in a man's position. I mean, that's another issue. But you know, I posted a link on my Facebook page. Did you see this YouTube clip of this little girl that interviewed, I don't forget which European country, but she was criticizing the shopping why the girls section had these t-shirts that said, oh, cute or something, and the boy said adventure. And she challenged it, it was brilliant. I saw that too, like it had 2.3 million hits or something. Yeah. So what do you think? I mean, do we need to change our whole concept of what gender means and why we put things into different categories? I think it starts at home. And once we work with that at home, then we bring it, you know, into the school. I mean, it has to kind of work on multiple levels, I think, for it to really affect a change. But if a child is born and then they're taught from the very beginning that they can do anything or that, you know, there aren't limitations, then they don't grow up with that idea that they have to change themselves on the outside, that they can find it inside and then they're able to go out and do whatever it is that they feel connected to. Absolutely, I totally agree. And also, you know, there's that famous kind of a premise well, on the woman side is Simone de Beauvoir. She said that one is not born a woman. She becomes one. Yeah. So it is, it's beautiful. And it's a huge concept. Because if we take that and we take it to the transgender level, if we're not born transgender, we become it. So is it society-based? You know, yeah, where is it coming from? I have anthropological training too. So I'm an anthropologist in addition to being a therapist. And I do believe that it is primarily nurture. So I, you know, I think that when a child is born, everything that they're born into, I mean, from that moment on, they experience and becomes part of them. So there's, you know, there's the genetic thing too. And I think there's something to be said for that. But I do think that everything that a child experiences from day one has an effect over who they become and how they become and so forth. And all the young kids who are watching all these shows now, do you know what I watched in the news recently is Modern Family? Yeah. This is a new transgender kid character in it. I mean, come on, put an extra thing on the plate in your face to discuss these issues. Do you think that's overkill? Or do you think that's actually reflecting the reality of situations? I think it's a little bit of both. I think that, like anything else, I think for us to start presenting these in media, we have to back it up with a lot more just research. We have to show the truth of what people are actually experiencing because so many of these people go through so much trauma. The suicide rate alone is 30% for people that feel like they are something that can't be that. That is very high. And I remember interviewing a transgender in Hong Kong and that's so shunned on and she did take her life. It was very sad. In fact, I tried to get a guess on today who is transgender and because of some social injustice issues that he was caught up with that he felt conflicted. So there's a lot of baggage with transgender psychology. How do you even go to talk to them and have them talk about their identity issues? Well, you start from where they are. And it's just like in any session that we sit down with somebody in psychotherapy, we start with where they are. We empathize. We find a way to connect with them on the very basic levels. And then the trust that has to be gained, I think that's probably the most important thing. And unfortunately, what we're seeing in a lot of families is that there's such a lack of communication between parents and their kids. And it's not on purpose. It's just we're all going a thousand miles an hour. We have so much social media that kids are, you know, kids are glued to their phones and parents are glued to their whatever, their iPads. You think more so than our generation growing up? The kid? You know, we used to always slam our door and keep ourselves away. But do you think nowadays the new generation are even more distanced from parents? Of course, of course. But that being said, there's also benefits because then they can connect with other people that would get them, you know, if the parents aren't gonna understand them. But I think it's really up to parents to find ways to connect with their kids and to help them feel safe being who they are in home and just feeling safe to tell them what's going on. And you create that dynamic. My daughter, we just, we sit down, we call it counter-session. But at night, after we have dinner and we get ready to have our snack, we sit down across from each other and we literally talk about every single thing that's happened during the day. The good, the bad, the ugly, we just, we feel like it's our time. And if we don't do it, we miss it, you know? So it's just, but I feel like she's gonna be safe in the world because she knows that she can come home to me and we can talk about anything. But what if there's something that she brought up that you're not really comfortable with and you don't really approve it, but you want her to share it with you? How do you? Well, she, we have that, again, we have that trust already built in. So I think that even if she has something like that, she would, she would tell me. But we also have an agreement that if there is something that she doesn't feel like she can tell me, that she'll find a way to talk with someone about it and to find somebody that she can. She's done that before, but she usually comes back to me afterward and tells me anyway. Oh, that's good. You obviously have a strong relationship with your daughter. But going back to your daughter's friends in school who have gone through the process or going through the process, again, it must take a lot of time and you set trust to open up that relationship. But what about the parents? Every situation is unique, just like every child is unique. And so I think what initially happens, and this is pretty much universal across the board, parents right off the bat are like, no, this isn't happening, this isn't my daughter, this isn't my son, denial. And then there's the anger. I mean, there's the stages of grief because they're losing something they thought they had and this person is merging into someone that they are having to learn about. But that's a great topic. The idea, are you in fact losing your daughter if she's gonna turn into a man? I was driving and I listened to a very in-depth interview about this mother who felt she was mourning for the loss of her daughter because of the transition, but in the end she felt like it wasn't a loss. It wasn't, there's so much beauty in supporting the transformation and having them realize who they really are. So again, they're both sides. This is the heavy thought again. So why don't we take a quick break and we'll come back and we'll continue talking about transgenders, particularly with teenagers and trying to source out who we are and whether we do know or not who we are. All right, so don't go away. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. 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Welcome again. So again, we left off talking about the transitions that teens and their parents have to support through the process if they are, in fact, going to decide on changing sex. Now, Zuri, again, I'm going to welcome you to join our conversation today because, you know, again, just being a youth out there in Hawaii, wanting to know what the community thinks about gender issues, particularly here, and your thoughts on it. Zuri, what do you think? Hi, Crystal. Welcome. You know, I'm just really interested in this today's Trends Gender Spotlight. I call it a spotlight because I feel like a third gender or a spectrum of genders has been around forever. Yes. And so I'm wondering if you want to focus a little more on what are the ramifications of making that physical change when you're really not ready. You know, you just follow the trend. Yeah, see, that's what I was trying to get at, too. Thank you for that, Zuri. Ramifications of doing that change when you're not really ready, because there are so many mental, physical, spiritual, energy levels that you need to really be ready for. Yes, absolutely. So I think we go back to the age and when we can look on the internet right now and just see these, there's countless situations where we have these really small children and the parents are, for any child anyway, it's normal and natural for a child to want to explore both genders. I mean, it's healthy actually to want to express. I want to wear blue, or I have a cousin and he wears a tutu when he wants to play with it. Right, right, right. So those things are normal and I think what happens with parents now, they're so terrified that their child, if they're gonna play with something of what we would consider the opposite sex toys that they're gonna wind up transgender. But so that's normal. When we get into an age like teenagers, it's natural and normal to struggle with identity. And so like we were saying earlier, I think that now that there's this transgender thing, it can be a trendy thing. And yet, if they get caught up in it and then feel like it's really part of their identity and they start making these changes before they're psychologically even sure, ramifications are terrible. I mean, and we find in the research that there are people that decide to go through the whole process and then afterward terribly regret it and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't go backwards. What happens usually in cases like that? If they feel like that wasn't what they were. Some try to go back and live without having the, they can't go back and have the sex change back the other direction. So they go back and they try to live as they would have with the other, as the other gender. So let's say if a female transitions to a male and then decides later on that he doesn't want to live as a male, he can go back to live as a female but not necessarily have any of the sex changes because they can't really reverse it back. Right, you can't wait. So, well, I don't know. I mean, just, I don't know. Help me out here. For a sex change, so if you're going from a woman to a man, you can attach a penis. Is that right? Well, they use a lot of their tissues. Your own tissue, yeah. Okay, so they recreate with what you have. But if you wanted to go backwards, you cannot take that away? From what? No, from what I'm, no, not the same way. So the sensations wouldn't be there. So for example, like, yeah, just everything would be in a different place. I guess anatomically you could do it but physiologically and how you would actually feel it wouldn't be the same. But the idea you can go and switch your identity from male to female to female back to male. Can you do that legally? It all depends on when they start the process. So if they're starting hormone blockers at a certain age and then they're taking the hormones afterwards. So again, if we went from female to male, they block their hormones so they haven't developed any of the really secondary sex characteristics that they would need in order to, let's say, they wanna have a baby down the road. It's not gonna happen because none of those things have been developed. So that's why it's such a critical, it's a very critical decision making time. And so what a lot of folks are saying is that it's probably wiser for people to wait until after some of their secondary sex characteristics have already developed so that they do have some of these things that can freeze their eggs or their sperm if they decide then later that they wanna be able to do that because once you've done it, you cannot have children. I mean, you can't like, if that makes sense. You don't think there should be an age limit on this? Is it legal to have that sex change as a minor? They have had them, yes. Wow. But I don't, again, this is from my perspective from my own psychological experience. I don't think that people should be able to do it until they're adults. I tend to agree with you. Zuri, what do you think? Do you feel like Hawaii or just your surroundings, do you see more transgender issues around you or do you feel that a greater acceptance for gender boundary breaking now as you would have a few years ago? I feel like as transgendered people become more empowered, the idea of being a third gender becomes disempowered. Like you have to choose a team now. It's like being bisexual, you know, pick a team. No, I'm both. Wow. Why can't people be both? Why can't you be both? Yeah, she's saying that you have to pick a team. I mean, basically the way it is labeled now, right? And you know, no, you don't have to. And that's what's so beautiful about learning about all of this is that no, you don't have to pick one. So you're born with a particular biological sex or not because there's some, like I said, there's some that are born male, some that are born female, and then there's some that are actually born intersex. And so the way that they've handled that just traditionally is that that person can choose whether or not they want to express the female side or the male side or both. And so they're finding more and more that these people that are born with intersex characteristics will express both as opposed to choosing one side or the other. Well, we talked about being the minimum age. Is there an age limit to these transformations? I mean, obviously if you're older and you've gone through all these reproductive processes and you've had kids and so forth, I actually think it's actually a safer bet because you've already had this experience of living as a certain way and then you decided a later age and they found that the happiness scale has just skyrocketed for people that do it, like let's say after age 50. Really? I guess because you've been there done that everything and so you're really kind of sure of what you wanna do. But with the minimum though, what do you think is the comfort zone of when you really should and go beyond to do it? Go beyond? Or to go above? What's the minimum age you think? Or minimum age you mean as far as doing the sex change and stuff? I mean 18, but again, because it's a legal adult age. I still think 18 year olds don't know much about themselves, honestly. It is pretty young. But again, if we're trying to force people to not do it then I think there's more rebellion and just other things that go on that probably could cause more problems. Well, those are good questions. Thank you, Zary for your participation. Carrying back onto the gender issue and going with the cultural influence, I wanna talk about how pop culture influences the kids nowadays because that's huge. It is so huge. So interestingly, and I don't know if you're into fashion and so forth, there's so many now transgender models. And so what is interesting is that we're finding that women are looking at men that have become women and that there's a lot of competition among the two and that a lot of these transgender women are getting the jobs, right? They're wearing the clothes. They're beautiful. And now women have even more to deal with because if they're trying to look like someone, does that mean, so it's just, it's really interesting to see what's happening in the fashion industry. So like two decades ago, it was, androgyny was like a cool thing, but that wasn't a sex change. Now it's like you crossed the border and now what, right? If you Google transgender models, I mean, I'm not kidding you. These are the type of pinups that you would think of your old boyfriends putting on their ceilings, you know, because they're beautiful, their bodies are contoured. But again, they've had sometimes eight, nine plastic surgeries. Of course. And going back to cultural influences too, because there's so many differences with where your culture comes from. So if you're in Asia, let's say Thailand, it's funny that there is such a strong amount of gender identity blurring in that place, whereas you go to the Middle East and you're shunned and you've got to cover everything up. Or in China, there is a very interesting matriarchal ethnic tribe that still exists, I believe, and the women run their society. So there are so many different concepts of where you place in the family, that how much does culture, how much should we respect that? You were bringing up, I'll just bring this up quickly, but in Iran, they don't allow any kind of same-sex relationships that's considered evil and they'll be executed or whatever. They do, however, promote transgender sex change operations. So they have many, many, many clinics that people go to. But the terrible thing about that though is that someone can be in love with someone of their same sex and not be able to have that relationship. They're forced into having them the sex change and they don't necessarily want that. So, but there's a lot of the sex change operations going on just so that people can have validity for their relationship. That's crazy. I mean, that, you know, we just opened up a little bit of awareness. We can't really complete. And unfortunately, we're running out of time. So in this short time left, do you have some words of advice or just directional perspective on how we can embrace this new issue and how parents of concerned teenagers can work with what they have and bring them in the right path? I think number one is just be curious as opposed to being judgmental or even fearful. And by being curious, we ask questions. We want to find out more about what is going on in our children's minds without jumping to conclusions. And just to remember that these children, our children are exploring who they are and there's just another way to do it now. There's a new way to do it. And so I think it's just accepting to whatever it is that they say without judging, but also not jumping into something right off the bat just because you want to fix it or because you want to make it better. So it's about just taking the time to really reflect. It just goes back to basic communication with your kids. Communication, all right? And that's what we're doing here at Think Tech. So thank you so much for communicating with us and continue communicating with your loved ones and enjoy the rest of your day. And thank you for tuning in. Thank you so much. Thank you.