About Aotearoa Support

Over the past few months a group of New Zealand parents who are concerned about children and young people’s decisions to transition have been meeting to work out how to create a support network for themselves and many other parents suddenly faced with this difficult situation.

The result of these conversations is Aotearoa Support. Aotearoa Support has been supported by a sister organisation. Bayswater Support in the UK was founded in late 2019.

Seeing young people being directed into the medical system when previously most would have matured out of their belief is a travesty of medicine. Parents know intuitively, and often explicitly, that there are other pressures, stresses, experiences and situations that their child is facing that need support, counselling and a perspective of open enquiry. Being met, even ambushed on occasion, by counsellors and clinicians who speak in transactivist tropes and who cite a child’s ‘lived reality’ as the reason for needing a gender transition is a deeply shocking experience for parents. The lack of even a diagnosis in favour of this means that medicine’s principal ethic of ‘first do no harm’ is being subverted. The headlong rush to see confusion about gender as equating to actually ‘being transgender’ is very poor (and dangerous) medicine.

In most cases parents discover that the health services that they can access to support their children are affirmative only.

Meaning that the children MUST BE encouraged in their belief that their issues which they perceive as being in the wrong body MUST mean that they have a transgender identity.

Parents are told they MUST support their child’s newly adopted identity. Sometimes they are ambushed into attending meetings, in New Zealand as well as other countries, where they are told, without warning, that their child is trans.

Our response to this parental nightmare is to create a website and a parent-led service to support parents.

Providing information and a way for parents to connect and discuss their predicament is a vital step. Parents are often the best support for other parents, rather than professionals or well-meaning others. The others involved in this effort will not be part of the core group,- but will take a supporting role. They are people who have a different and less intense relationship with the issue and includes relatives of children and young people captured by gender issues, as well as concerned feminists and lesbians who believe we may have been sitting targets for a trans identity if we were young today.

Resources

Explore the issues from a more critical perspective.

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