If you’ve found yourself reading this page then you’re probably trying to find out a little more about our family story – so let me help.
Who Are We?
My name is Hayley – I’m a 44 year old mother of 3 children, originally from Liverpool in England. I’m a late-diagnosed Autistic person, and I started this blog 13 years ago because I have always had a huge passion for writing and story-telling.
My partner of 15 years is Jon – a Geordie who I met at work here in Devon, where we now live with our 3 children. Jon is also a late-diagnosed neurodivergent person who found out that he has ADHD at the age of 48.
All 3 of our children are neurodivergent, which of course makes absolute sense now that we know that we are too! Our youngest two children are gender diverse – which I’ll explain some more about.
Our middle child, who was assigned male at birth, told us VERY clearly at the age of 4 that they were in fact a girl. When most people hear this, they’re suspicious – it’s still somewhat of an unusual concept for people to accept that a child as young as 4 can possibly know who they are. And believe me, it shocked us too. When this happened, neither myself or my partner had ever actually met or known a transgender person. We were familiar with the term but we knew next to nothing about it, and we too were baffled – thinking that surely this must just be a phase or a case of confusion. So for a while, we tried to tell our child that they were in fact a boy. They had always chosen to play with dolls and wear Princess costumes for their entire life so we thought perhaps this was what was making them confused – perhaps they thought that because they liked stereotypically feminine things that it meant they must be a girl. So we kept trying to correct them – to tell them they were a boy and that clothes and toys have no gender.
But things continued to progress – our child started to become more and more distressed when presented with boys clothing, until eventually we decided to just allow them to choose their own clothing. And they always chose dresses and skirts. “Ok” we thought…”No problem, this is what they prefer”. But then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, our child stopped us in our tracks when – now age 5 – they SCREAMED at us that they were a girl and that we weren’t listening to them. That was when we involved our GP – who advised us that at this age it was best to allow for a period of watchful waiting before considering anything else. So we did.
A year went by and our child continued to refer themselves as female and to ask us to do the same. We decided to follow their lead and use the pronouns they were asking for. After that year had passed, our GP put our child on to the waiting list for Childrens Gender Services – little did we know at the time but that waiting list would be 6 years long!
During that 6 year wait, we received absolutely zero contact from anybody within the NHS. No advice, not so much as a leaflet with information on. But luckily, we didn’t really need it – as now that our child was using female pronouns and was free to live their best life in the way that made her happy, she didn’t have any issues at all. She was happy and we were happy. And that brings us up to date – she is now 11 years old, and she hasn’t once wavered in her gender identity.
Unfortunately, during that 6 year period a lot has changed with regards to how transgender people are treated in society and this has also led to changes to Youth gender services too. We recently made it off the waiting list and had our first appointment, but sadly due to the NHS’ hands being tied by current government legislation – they are able to offer little to no real support. So we’re currently in limbo – waiting for puberty to arrive, hoping that we’ll be able to find our way through it all without any support from our countries healthcare system.
Over the last couple of years, our youngest child has also shown some gender fluidity. But their journey has been very different – they have a much less binary presentation of gender, and it’s something that they express differently at different times. As we do with all of our children – we’re allowing them to express themselves however they choose to, respecting their requests for how they’d like to be treated and just rolling with it and seeing what happens.
Although there is lots I will keep private out of respect for my children, we decided to share some of our experiences publicly as we have found it very difficult to find anybody else with lived experience to relate to during our journey and we know how valuable that can be for other families.
We also know that the media have a tendency to fill the publics minds with an awful lot of misleading nonsense about transgender youth, and we feel that we have an opportunity to use our platform to show people what it’s really like and what really happens.
Why The Disney Stuff?
As well as sharing our experiences of raising gender diverse and neurodivergent children, we also like to share some of the things that bring us joy as a family too – because that is so very important in helping us deal with the harder moments.
We have a lot of shared Autistic special interests as a family, and one of them is a shared love of Disney parks. I grew up as a working class kid dreaming of being able to go to Disney World one day. I never thought it was something that was within my reach, even as an adult – and so when I finally got to take my family there in 2022 at the age of 40, it was a real dream come true. Since then I’ve found little tricks and hacks to make trips there more affordable and so I love to share our hacks with other people, so that they can enjoy the magic too.
I understand that Disney as a company can be problematic in some areas and I understand that not everybody will like it, but we need to allow ourselves some glimmers of joy to help us survive the hard stuff on this journey. And Disney is our glimmer of joy.
Why We Share Our Story
My aim with my blog and social media pages is to educate people about transgender issues, connect with other families on similar journeys and signpost other parents to the help they may need. I also hope to inspire and encourage more kindness and inclusivity so that kids like mine can be just as accepted as any other child…because it would be so lovely not to have to feel constantly terrified about how the world is going to treat my precious babies.
Where To Find Us
If you’d like to read more of my posts on this subject, you can find them HERE.
You can also buy me a virtual coffee via Ko-Fi at www.ko-fi.com/sparklesandstretchmarks – all donations received to Ko-Fi are put straight into our gender care pot for my children to use for any private gender care they may need now or in their futures.