I grieve for my princess-loving daughter who doesn’t want to be a girl any more: One mother’s fearlessly honest account of how she and her husband struggled to accept their beloved teenager is non-binary
- According to research published in the American journal Pediatrics last year, almost 10 per cent of teenagers now identify as ‘gender diverse’
- One mother speaks about when her 12-year-old daughter questioned her gender
- She says that it breaks her heart seeing how unhappy her child is in their body
Mum, this is really difficult for me to say,’ the WhatsApp message from my 12-year-old daughter began. ‘… I don’t feel like a girl, but I don’t feel like a boy.’
Staring at my phone in shock and disbelief, I replied that we’d talk about it when she got home. Later, in our living room, Lizzie told me she wanted to be referred to with they/them pronouns.
She wanted everyone to call her Zack, to swap her skirts and pink tops for curve-concealing hoodies and obliterate nearly every aspect of her former life. She had been too nervous to tell me in person that she was non-binary, yet now she looked as determined as she did scared.
I, meanwhile, felt like I had been kicked in the face. Lizzie was the name I’d chosen for my daughter, the name I’d painted in pink on her bedroom wall, to suit the princess-loving little girl I adored. Surely this must be a mistake. A phase. A way of fitting in.
Tell child looks like a 12 year old girl to me, ma’am, aside from feelings.