By - An Anonymous Teacher
"Miss, miss! I just walked into the toilets, and there was blood everywhere! A girl, I think it’s a girl, you know, the girl who says she’s a boy? She cut her arm really deep, and there was blood all up the wall.”
I knew the student, the girl who thinks she’s a boy. She cuts her arms; her cuts are deep, raw-looking wounds, red, scarred, bloated, festered that criss cross up her arm at odd angles, breaking skin, externalising her 'inner' pain and torture.
I see this a lot, the girls that change their names. The girls who say that they have been born in the wrong body—they are cutting.
Cutting up their arms, legs, ripping skin from bone, sinew, scarring their young bodies for life.
Why?
When you tell a child that they are born in the wrong body, they seem intent on breaking their body to find themselves.
After changing their name and affirmation of their new, imagined gender, they are cutting, looking for that part of themselves that applauds their new identity and pronouns.
Their friends are all doing it: cutting, pronoun changing. The deeper the cut, the more '“you’re finding the bean,” the larger your pain, the bigger your need to transition to live as your authentic self'.
Don’t they realize that once they start their ‘transition,’ all they are doing to their body—the cutting and breaking of it—they will carry with them for life! They aren’t suddenly going to wake up in a new body, with perfect peaks and all their cut marks gone. No, after surgery, they will just have more scars to add to the old scars that run up their arms and thighs. But the new scars are from the surgeon's steel, these “professionals” that make them believe that if they cut deeper, get rid of their breasts, they will find themselves.
In a class just the other day, a student suddenly started punching the student next to her. She struck her face, eye, shoulders, and arms. I intervened. Stopped the abuse. The aggressor told me that it was the other’s fault for writing something in her book. I couldn’t see what was written because the aggressor had already scratched it out.
I spoke to her, the punching student, tried to really understand her justification for slamming, punching, hitting, and yelling at the sweet, red-haired student who was sitting innocently next to her in my classroom.
Her reasoning was insanity; the kid is insane. There is no other way to explain it. I was staring into the eyes of an insane child. Insane because she believed that she was gender fluid, insane because she believes that an imagined furry whispers into her ear every moment of the day to tell her not to commit suicide.
Her justification for striking the red-haired student next to her, “she wrote on my page, the page where I have drawn my furry. My furry is the only thing that is keeping me alive. Now that she has drawn on my page, I’m going to try to kill myself again tonight; it will be my 5th attempt at suicide.”
This student, this trans-identifying student, and all these trans-identifying students are not okay.
And we did this! My generation of parents. We are creating a generation of unwell, insane, out-of-touch youth.
The kids are cutting, and they are not going to find happiness on the other side of a knife.
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