I always knew there was something different about Ava. But she started off easy. She was much easier than Jonah. Less intense. She stayed put, a bum shuffler: later to walk and talk. She was passive, preferred sitting on my knee, sucking her thumb than getting into the thick of it with others.
Like Jonah, she never really played with her toys, but the two of them had a lovely relationship. She bore witness to her brother’s chaos, a merry, easy going sidekick to his highs and lows. I didn’t worry about her till school, and even then, she made close friends with one or two- the shyer, sweeter boys who looked up to her; where she could play big sister for a change.
Something unusual really started to happen, when, in quick succession, when these boys upped and left London, around year four. By then, we’d had her autism confirmed – a diagnosis that left me sad rather than relieved as had her brother’s, at six, had.
For a while she seemed content to be alone, and I worried about her, drifting around at playtimes on her own, collecting stones. The school, who wouldn’t engage much with me about her diagnosis, assured me she was fine, but she never had a close friend, especially not with another girl. But then she did – Shamima, the daughter of a recent arrival not just to the school, but through her parents, the country. I encouraged this friendship, two, slightly disenfranchised girls helping one another in a world they both found strange.
It was only later, I began to worry about their friendships. When Ava came out, by paper aeroplane, I was surprised but not shocked. I felt it answered a question I’d had about her since childhood, when she tried to get into the toy pram we bought her rather than push her dolly around in it.
By then, the friendship had matured a little. The two of them had survived puberty but now seemed a little off, as Ava became more secretive, and began to retreat, leaving her room little over Covid, I bought her a cat to bring her out of her shell. She confessed she wanted to be one, and spent hours drawing human hybrids. I even bought her a fursuit in the hope her shyness could be cured by wearing something else’s skin.
Then the flags started. Her drawings were stamped with then, the rainbow insignia of the ‘out and proud’ movement. Then, they became increasingly militant, and the spectrum seems to shrink to just the pink and blue of the T part of LTGB as she was sucked into its insidious vortex.
Online, I wondered about where she was getting her information. Her friendship, characterised by infrequent playdates, was now more like a teenage relationship. But it never seemed quite healthy. I noticed Shamima was often angry. Angry about her gender in a culture where women were seen as “less than”, with expectations of service and sacrifice and limitations. Angry that her sexuality, whatever it may be, was seen as wrong. I didn’t blame her, or her mum, a lovely woman who like all of us, is really just doing her best.
The stew of hormones revealed some similarities between the girls. Hairy legs, a tendency to spots, downy upper lips, long legs. Shamima even had a pronounced Adam’s apple. Adolescent androgen insensitivity, I guessed, that in my youth I had myself been treated by Dianette. But any mention of periods was off limits with Ava, who didn’t even let on to me that she’d started them, to my sadness and dismay.
I sympathised with their feelings of not fitting in. But unlike myself at their age, neither of them seemed to want to.
Ava’s drawings started to feature cartoonised scar marks in her animal hybrids where a furry bosom might have been, like those awful digital catsuits in the movie of the musical, the disconcerting sexiness of Taylor Swift’s fluffy breasts.
As with Jonah, when he started his gun obsession, I played it cool, but it bothered me. I enabled her interests, rainbow bombed her when she came out, but this I could not get behind with such gusto. What happened to the narrative of learning to be happy in your own skin? This movement was about mutilation, becoming someone – something – else and didn’t like it.
Was she happy? It was hard to tell. I questioned the idea, as she asked us to ‘they/ them’ her; talked about changing the name that, even as a toddler, to my horror, she had told me she didn’t like. I baulked. Spoke to Shamima’s mother about what they girls were looking at online, and checking the school wasn’t facilitating some sort of social transition against my will that might be hard for her to extricate herself from.
At 14, Ava has largely reconciled herself to her femaleness- to her periods, breasts, and mane of hair which thankfully, like her wrists, she never saw the need to cut – not yet at least. I saw plenty of that at Goldsmiths, when I did a creative writing masters on maternity leave with Lana, with a cohort mostly at least a decade younger. The Tavistock victims of indeterminable gender, whose arms bore the flesh tattoos of the deeply uncomfortable in their own skin.
She assures me she’s happy, but honestly it’s hard to tell. She hasn’t succumbed to an eating disorder, OCD (my own bugbear) or any of the many comorbitites of autism. But she’s still cagey on questions of her gender, refusing most outward displays of femininity – she may wear a pink hoody, but her legs remain distinctly fuzzy.
This week, another parent of the sweet band of oddballs she’s now collected as her friends, messaged to ask me to meet her. To discuss what I can only anticipate must be her daughter’s conversion to the trans movement. This year’s bell bottom jeans, I quipped in my Facebook message to check she knew what was going on. At least this time the parent is more westernised, for all she is of East Asian descent. She acknowledged my gambit but didn’t elaborate. When I brought it up with Ava later, she told me her friend had been grounded.
I took the bait and met this mum for coffee – a nice lady who had run the local Vietnamese restaurant some years ago. She told me her concerns, that the WhatsApp group the girls shared seemed rather toxic, that Ava and Shamima were the most vocal. That they were starting to be viewed as outsiders, extreme- weirdos. That her daughter had told her she wanted a chest binder since Ava had one.
I tried to explain about my policy of enablement. Much like Angelina Joeli , I feel it will all blow over if there’s no taboo. When Ava wouldn’t wear the bras I’d bought her, I got her a binder to wear in the hope the discomfort would make her change her mind.
As the meeting continued, I found myself growing furious. Furious with the movement for its insidious grip on young girls, that they should always want to change themselves, and not learn to be happy with themselves as they are . Like Anorexia, Autism takes an idea, that one is somehow not enough as they are, and runs with it to a toxic extreme. I left as soon as I could, desperate to ask Ava what the hell was going on with her friends.
Blood boiling, I quizzed her if she was still wearing the binder. No, she said, not for months. It was too small, she said. Gradually my tension unfurled as she told me she really wasn’t talking much about gender with her friends. That it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, that she has good relationships with her peers, and that she wasn’t being coercive about this brave new scene, which I felt was the subtext of the mother’s chat.
She cried and I did. I assured Ava I love her, and that no one was curtailing her, that her gender doesn’t limit her; but being clear what I know to be true. She has two xx chromosomes and always will. That she may have hormonal imbalances that make her feel less feminine. That none of this is wrong and that the idea that she was somehow less than as a result dangerous.
All women want to change themselves in some way- to have slimmer thighs, bigger breasts, straighter hair or longer limbs. I’m not immune from such projections. And preoccupations. But I also know that accepting yourself is part of the solution, for all I may occasionally succumb to the lure of self “improvement”. I know that I’m basically ok as I am. That’s what I want Ava and her friends to learn- that changing themselves won’t make them happy. But finding a likeminded bunch of outcasts can make all the difference to how you feel, so long as they aren’t egging each other in to be different; rather supporting each other to be themselves.
Either way, we have to ride it, patiently, hoping the wave of navel gazing will pass without causing too much harm, or paying it, crucially, too much attention, or finger pointing at other members of the outgroup, because, as all mothers know, teenage girls may like to virtue signal, but are themselves among the worst for being unkind to others, and most particularly to themselves.
Follow me on YouTube, X and Tumblr and @Reprobatemum on Facebook and Insta
Discover more from Looking at the little picture
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
