To be transgender and nearly exclude the overarching health needs of Trans youth, especially at the stages of puberty and early puberty, is fraught with challenges to changing the BC health care system. Trans youth are already dealing with immense amounts of changes and cisgender and transgender youth are all battling with the stresses of everyday life (homework, parents, peers, bullies, stigma, shame). As a transgender student, I know we have to fight to be seen in a world that does not want us to begin with. The mental health of trans youth should be taken into serious consideration within these articles we are reading. Suicidal ideation is incredibly high among transgender people. Often youth are left alone with a mountain of questions about their gender/sexual identity but within the classrooms or textbooks little is reached on how we can work to properly support trans youth going through puberty, going through changes, going through these challenges nearly alone. I also agreed with Dewey in part by being influenced through Darwinian theory to some extent, especially the theories that pointed to the ādevelopment result[ing] from the interaction of an active organism with the environmentā (Dewey, 1916). My interactions with Indigenous youth and families over the years lead me to a window of witnessing myself growing up with restricted access to cultural and language-based activities. LGBTQ+ Indigenous youth, once ostracized from our own communities because of colonialism, are learning the minimum necessities just to survive and salvage their mental health needs. Placing restricted interactions within a natural environment, as Dewey talked about, leads Indigenous children, youth, adults, families, without active environments that are culturally sensitive to the realities of colonialism and is a world of inactive organisms around them. However, Coast Salish communities and their youth are witnessing the resurgence of language programs, and more immersion with culturally based activities, i.e., drumming, singing, dancing, ceremonies, and canoe journeys to name a few. However, with the influences of western medical practices, Indigenous LGBTQ+ peoples are further restricted to health care access and often have doctors unaware of our unique health care needs. Especially ones rooted to our ancestral knowledges of land, health, food, and communal practices. To the identities of how transgender people, pre-colonization, interacted with our communities in benefit of our overall health and cultural based needs. Without cultural immersions of these queer identities, LGBTQ+ youth are left exposed to hardships that can easily be avoided through a decolonial lens of gender identity; otherwise, youth in the LGBTQ+ communities are oppressed continually by āstructural inequalities that reinforce traditional [more stereotypical based] gender rolesā and in Canada educational platforms base knowledge of adolescent health entirely on āthe reification of gender norms and the essentializing[SIC] of gender differencesā (Downing, J. B., and Goldberg, A. E., 2010). In western society, we are held prisoner to western beauty standards and wayward gender roles, and what is taxing the mental health of youth is teaching youth how to be either a boy or girl, or either a man or woman, and not stray from these concepts of westernized socially constructed gender binary roles. Today, I recognize breaking these stereotypical norms is slowly being discussed as social determinants of health among queer and Trans youth. What society is not properly teaching youth and adults is to find āliberation from the combined aspects of class oppression and patriarchyā
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2087
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