Nobody likes to be told they’re “just going through a phase”. It’s a phrase that seems, at best, patronising and dismissive — whatever you’re feeling, it’s too transient to matter — or, at worst, aggressive and controlling — you don’t know yourself as well as I know you. 

Many of us associate it with being told we’re immature, deluded, too foolish to distinguish between passing fancies and the things that really matter. For us to be taken seriously, we tell ourselves, others must trust we are not unreliable, fickle narrators of our own lives. 

In recent weeks there have been headlines claiming that most children who believe themselves to be transgender are “going through a phase”. It’s an inference based on the Cass Review interim report and the NHS England consultation into gender dysphoria services, which suggests that “in most cases gender incongruence [in pre-pubertal children] does not persist into adolescence”. 

The headlines have provoked outrage, and I can understand why. Many lesbian and gay people see parallels with being told they would “grow out of” experiencing same-sex attraction. Those experiencing gender dysphoria may feel they are being told they do not know their own minds, or that their distress is inauthentic.

I’ve come to think phases are what life’s all about

For my own part I’m reminded of hearing people describe my own experience of teenage anorexia as “attention seeking” or “adolescent vanity”. When people talk of “phases”, it can feel as though others are taking your deepest desires and writing them off as pure performance. 

This is unfortunate, because phases matter. As a mother of teenagers, myself on the cusp of menopause, I’ve come to think phases — some of them deeply uncomfortable — are what life’s all about. How we conceive of ourselves in relation to our bodies is constantly shifting as we pass through different life stages. There’s something incredibly fearful and restrictive about denying this state of flux.

The concept of gender identity, as currently applied to children and adolescents, relies on an idea of “knowing the self” irrespective not just of environmental influences but changes to one’s own body. As such, it is profoundly rigid. A recent study into Dutch adolescents who took puberty suppressing medication has found that most went on to take cross-sex hormones. This has been celebrated as “proof” that being trans is not a phase. 

Yet the study featured no comparator group of dysphoric teens who did not take medication. It could not tease out the degree to which being locked into a particular course of action — involving both social and physical reinforcement — creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. It has been used to “prove” something that no study ever can: that if you do not allow people to grow, you thereby demonstrate that they were never meant to grow in the first place. 

Trans activism, a movement which claims to be in favour of fluidity, is desperate to fix young people at one point in time. Witness, for instance, the recent acquisition by Macmillan of the YA graphic novel Homebody. It tells the story of a young person seeking to find the right body for their one true self, and includes a cartoon of a young person smiling blissfully post-mastectomy with the caption “the day I will call this house home”. This is not how bodies or life cycles work. Puberty is a maelstrom; the hate we can feel for our flesh is visceral, the disidentification sharp. This does not mean you can know how you will feel in years to come. Your body story is constantly being written. You don’t know the ending. 

As adults — YA publishers included — we owe it to young people to distinguish between recognising their feelings are real and matter, and insisting such feelings can never change. We should not be denying the most basic truths about human development. After all, whose needs are we really prioritising: those of children themselves, or of adults who hate the idea of a child who is not yet “fully formed”?

You cannot opt out of a relationship with your own sexed body

Current responses to the “just a phase” narrative do not distinguish between gender non-conformity, sexual orientation and disidentification from one’s sexed body. All are treated as exactly the same type of thing: knowing that you will never be in a heterosexual relationship or that you will never be a walking stereotype of femininity are placed in the same category as believing that you are in the wrong body, or that going through puberty will destroy you. These things are not the same, though. You can opt out of mixed-sex relationships or wearing dresses your whole life through. You cannot opt out of a relationship with your own sexed body. Your only choices are to be in constant flight or to take the relationship for what it is: unpredictable, sometimes distressing, deeply personal but also political. To be a body that is not fixed in time — a body that you cannot pin down with the declaration “there! That is me, now and forever!” — is to be human. 

As someone who hated her teenage self, I find parenting my own teenagers terrifying. I do not like having to sit back and watch as they test the waters of who they are and who they might wish to become. I would like to speed them through the difficult parts. If I could, I’d do those parts for them. 

To allow them to go through phases feels incredibly risky. It is easier to wage war on what’s outside them — the bigots, the bullies — than to contend with the unpredictability of their inner lives. Watching your children grow can be agonising. Pinning them down in the here and now would be worse. I have to let mine take their own false turns; what I will not do is close off all routes back. 

I want my children to know they have a whole lifetime in which to discover their different selves. I am not going to lie to them and say that the person you think you are at fourteen or fifteen — the understanding you have of your life and body at that age — is complete. I am nearing fifty, and it’s still not there. 

My relationship with my own body remains volatile. Different life stages — early adulthood, pregnancy, breastfeeding, motherhood — have thrown me off balance again and again. With the approach of menopause I find myself obsessing over running, as though I might outrun the ageing process itself. 

I know this is not true, though. However fast I run, I will never escape my own flesh. Nor will I ever feel I have reached the point at which my body is a dream home, the perfect house for the self I want to be. Even if that were to happen, how long would it last? A day? A minute? Any longer, and one might as well be a statue. Discomfort is part of the deal of being alive. 

We need to reframe the narrative of “going through a phase”. It is not a shameful thing, a sign of weakness or the absence of self-knowledge. Feelings that are transient are no less valid for it. 

To feel deeply and strongly, whilst also acknowledging uncertainty and the possibility of change, is brave. We should not be shaming young people into committing to a self they will one day leave behind.