Another expert trying to explain why they think I am wrong…. What makes you think we didn’t have difficult conversations? We had many of them. I work in HR. Difficult conversations are part of my everyday professional life, sometimes extraordinarily difficult ones. I’m certainly not frightened of having them with my own children when they’re necessary. And I didn’t simply accept what my daughter told me without question. I arranged several appointments with psychiatrists because I wanted her mental health explored properly. I wanted to understand what she was experiencing, whether anything else might be contributing to how she felt, and to make sure the decisions we made were informed by appropriate professional advice. We talked. We questioned. We explored. We sought specialist help. And we gave her time. Supporting my daughter was not the absence of scrutiny, quite the opposite. The easy option would have been to shut the conversation down and simply tell her who she was allowed to be. You may disagree with the decisions we eventually made. That’s your right. But please don’t mistake acceptance for avoidance or assume that you know what happened within our family. After all the conversations, questions and professional input, she was still telling me the same thing: “Mum, I’m a girl.” Eventually, I realised my job wasn’t to win an argument with my child. It was to make the most considered decisions I could as her parent, and to listen to her.