Content note: ageism, mention of sexual and other violence, transphobia

Other people have written extensively about the dangerous, unscientific nonsense that is the Cass report, but I wanted to focus in on something that’s often being overlooked in the assault on the rights and care and autonomy of young trans people, and that’s the underlying ageism in the narratives. So, this blog is not, in fact, about trans people at all, but about ageism itself.

Ageism towards young people is pervasive in our culture, but like a lot of oppressive discourse, it is on the rise, becoming more blatant and discriminatory. Because ageism towards the elderly also exists, it’s possible people miss the fact that ageism towards the young is even possible. We accrue age status as we grow through life, but it begins to fall off due to the ableism attached to assumptions about ageing and becoming frail. This also intersects with other oppressions – for example, women get sidelined more early than men, and “old woman” remains a term of derision.

But this blog is about ageism at the other end of the age spectrum.

The risk that comes with ageism

As someone who has worked with young people throughout their career, I have seen the risk that ageism brings to young people, particularly marginalised young people, who face increased levels of violence, increased homelessness, and often struggle to be heard by services.

Looking back over the many social care referrals I have made in my life, rarely have I found an incidence where a teenager’s concerns have been taken seriously or believed. We see this particularly when teenagers are subject to sexual assaults, abuse and grooming – for example, for all racists might have wanted to believe the Rochdale grooming scandal was ignored by police due to racial sensitivity, I can’t remember a time in my long career working with survivors that a teenager was listened to by police or social care.

We just don’t listen to young people enough.

“But their brains are undeveloped”

Much has been made of the greater ability to grow and increased neuroplasticity of young people’s brains. The debunked argument that young people’s brains aren’t “fully developed” has been used to deny young trans people life-saving healthcare, based on demonstrably false notions that there’s a significant chance they will “grow out of” being trans. It’s also been used to disenfranchise young voters – not only to push back against the right for 16-year-olds to vote, but to promote the idea that the voting age should be raised.

Now, it would be all too easy to turn around this argument and say that people over 25 are less capable of adapting and learning, that younger people are better at taking on new information and changing their minds in the face of it.

In fact, the evidence would seem to be in support of this. Young people tend to be more politically progressive, to adopt newer and more correct information, for example that climate change is real, or that racist language is harmful. I remember having conflict with my elders over their use of the n word when I was a teenager and I believe history shows I was on the right side of that conflict. Chances are, whatever the concerns of younger people now are, history will show that on average their concerns are valid, however much they might seem now like, as my elders said back then, “political correctness gone mad” or “the pendulum swinging too far the other way”, or in the terms of today, “woke nonsense”.

I don’t actually believe it’s adaptive brains but disenfranchisement that allows young people to more easily challenge the status quo, but still, an argument could just as easily be made against the abilities of older brains as for.

Why do we believe age confers wisdom?

I hear this idea a lot – that life experience somehow accumulates wisdom and helps us know more than young people about the world, but I do not think there is much evidence to support this. In my experience, we do not accumulate wisdom, we forget as much as we’ve learned, we tend to look for information that supports our biases, and our beliefs about the world tend to be changeable and relevant to our current contexts.

As someone who has been a therapist for over 20 years now, I realise this gives me a “seniority” and there are occasions when I feel a sense of entitlement to be taken seriously and seen as wise. But is longevity enough to confer wisdom?

In fact I believe any wisdom I have comes from listening to marginalised voices including those of young people. What we thought we knew 20 years ago and how we were taught has been superseded and it is far more important for me to be able to take on board new information and new ways of looking at things than it is for me to have accumulated knowledge built on a foundation of what I learned over two decades ago. A good example of this is how I was taught to understand neurodiversity: I was trained to believe that neurodiversity was a symptom of abuse and alas a lot of older practitioners and even well-known writers still believe this to be true, enabled by the lack of understanding of the direction of causality in this case: abusers target neurodivergent people, so we naturally see a lot of trauma and neurodiversity overlap and can draw incorrect conclusions. Experience told me that autistic people I worked with invariably had a trauma history, but learning to think in new ways helped me look beyond the obvious but incorrect conclusion.

It’s an abhorrent idea – the notion that natural differences between people are down to pathology and injury rather than simple diversity. Neurodiversity is not pathology, and newer thinking understands this. It did me no good at all to lean on what I already knew or consider myself wise or experienced when faced with this new information: what I needed, was the ability to adapt to new information and take it on board.

A quick internet search on great scientific discoveries highlights two things: the accompanying pictures are almost always of someone older, but the discoveries themselves more often happened in the scientist’s youth: for example, Isaac Newton’s great life works all originated in his early 20s. Einstein was just 26 when he published his great breakthroughs, on photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, his special theory of relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy. We have an image of these scientists as grey-haired and wise, but it was young brains that soared so high in advancing scientific knowledge. And again, I could say that young brains are superior at learning, but it might also be that older scientists are more established in the status quo and liable to push themselves less hard. That thinking ourselves wise and experienced might quite naturally make us complacent.

Young people seen as a marginalised group

There is a word for seeing a group of people as intrinsically inferior: the word is supremacy. There are clear signs that a narrative of biological inferiority is being established about young people, and that is very dangerous. I don’t think young trans people will be the only group disenfranchised, potentially fatally, by this unchallenged rhetoric.

Young people are not inferior, their brains are not inadequate or less skilled than our own. I’m not actually suggesting they are more skilled either – I think the atrophy and mediocrity that can happen as we age has far more to do with privilege and complacency than any inherent inferiority in our ability to reflect and learn. Arguably, if there are differences at all in ability and capability, these very much go both ways, but it is probably inconceivable to us to imagine saying that a political leader should not be over the age of 25 because their brain is less capable of adapting and learning.

And yet if we listen, young people have a lot to teach us about how the world is changing and how we need to adapt to those changes.

But we rarely do listen, finding it easy to dismiss young voices and maintain the status quo, even when the status quo – inequality, oppression, climate change, runaway neoliberalism – is actively harming all of us.

Young people tend to be on the right side of history where justice is concerned, that’s a consistent factor across centuries. I don’t believe that’s a sign of an increased ability or intelligence on young people’s part, it’s just generally easier for marginalised folks to see what’s wrong with the status quo, because they are not in some ways benefiting from the status quo. Easier to dismantle something bad if you have no investment in it and nothing to lose.

Our position in the hierarchy

As older people, it is not the fault of our brains that we are more likely to vote for Donald Trump and Brexit and not be vocal about climate change or racism or trans rights. It is because this unequal system benefits us increasingly as we age – we generally accumulate security, status, money and power as a direct result of the inequality between us and young people. For example, we might be surprised to find a 25-year-old in the top tier of academia and doubtful of their ability, even though a 25 year old may be more likely to be an Einstein or a Newton at their prime academic force than a 45 year old. The assumption, that something must be accumulated over time to make you worthy of the higher echelons, is not necessarily an evidenced one.

I noticed this hierarchy starkly when I transitioned, because I went from being read as an older woman to be perceived as a younger man, and suddenly I was experiencing myself being talked down to, patronised, lectured and even shouted at. One particularly memorable occasion early on in my transition saw me sitting down at the bus stop, exhausted from my walk there as a mobility impaired person. A man was standing up. He was on crutches, and when he saw me sit he started shouting at me for sitting down. It was scary, and I was unable to speak up as he berated me, thinking I was a young man not observing some masculine code of stoicism, as he was. It was an astonishing manifestation of assumed social hierarchy. It’s possible that I had been talked to like that by older people when I was a young person, but it hadn’t happened in years, and it certainly hadn’t happened over something as benign as sitting down at an otherwise empty bus stop. It unravelled my somewhat uncomfortable expectation that I would gain in social privilege as I started to be read as a man. I had completely not factored in being read as much younger than I am. My instinct was to correct the man: how dare you talk to me that way when I’m in my 40s, rather than how dare you talk to anyone that way.

We are often aware of certain inequalities that exist in the world but there are some that society does not even register as inequality. We do not see the chaos and challenge of being a teenager as a symptom of oppression but a symptom of teenage brains. If teenagers are struggling with housing and unemployment, we see them as feckless, even though these are issues that challenge most marginalised groups of people. If they are using drugs and alcohol in harmful ways, we assume that’s their risk-taking teenage minds, rather than a symptom of the additional stress they are under, even though problematic substance use is now understood to be triggered by social stresses. We do not understand teenage violence in the context of teenage unsafety, and we do not understand teenage unsafety in the context of lack of care, protection and resource, or being subject to higher levels of exploitation and violence.

In fact, the social problems inherent in our young population are very similar to the problems you would see in any group of people oppressed by supremacist values and socially and economically marginalised. Young people are kept in poverty, beholden to families who may or may not be supportive – they experience little autonomy and low status. They are broadly exploited, and more often than not disregarded as anything other than a source of problems. And in the current rhetoric about brains under 25 being undeveloped, they are being increasingly disenfranchised, up to and including their right to vote being threatened.

What can we do differently?

The first thing we can do as therapists is let go of any belief that we know better than our clients or supervisees, that our “older and wiser” perspective means we have greater insight into how a young person should live. We probably know and hold this value strongly for other clients and yet it can slip when we work with young people. We are not in that young person’s context, we do not have greater insight into their world. I would also argue that if we look down on our younger selves that is just as likely to be from internalised oppression as from any accurate judgement of the people we used to be.

If we are calmer and more steady now, that is likely because we are far more privileged. People are more likely to listen to us as we grow older, and respect our views. We have likely attained more status in our families and communities. We are probably more financially stable, and we’re not universally vilified and put down purely based on our age. We may not be wiser, simply more established. And this means as therapists we owe our young clients more effort to show them respect, and to grant them autonomy. If we are person centred in particular, we need to be aware of and ready to address the power differential between us and our young clients rather than utilising it covertly to exert undue control or influence.

As a supervisor, I can’t count the number of times supervisees have seen themselves in a mentoring or paternalistic role with young clients. This is such a strong and pervasive structure in our culture that it is very easy to fall into, and I have done it myself, but it undermines an ethical, person centred approach to doing therapy.

In other words, what we most need to learn to do, as with all marginalised folks, is listen harder, believe more, dismantle power imbalances and not think we know better.

And we need to stop throwing around pseudoscientific ideas of underdeveloped brains before we find ourselves in a world where under 25s have even less status and autonomy than they do now.