When I come back from San Francisco, I package parts of my identity away. I present as a female. I don’t talk about my girlfriend, change my lockscreen from our picture together to an inoffensive sunset. And while I’m religious, I know my church choir wouldn’t let me teach their kids anymore if I was open about who I am. That’s what it’s been like since I was fourteen.

Until recently.

The moms of the kids in my choir are notorious for gossiping, so amid hushed whispers I heard that one of my kids was “confused—wants to be a boy instead of a girl—wants to take medication to turn herself into one.”

It hit a chord with me, because I remembered the first days I was teaching the kids in the choir—remembered how I struggled with gender that whole year, how growing older only brought more dysphoria, more stress, more pain. I wanted so badly to reach out to this kid without outing myself because I knew how deeply I needed another trans person to help guide me when I was his age. I was finally able to in my last few days of summer and we talked about a lot of things: Fire Emblem, school, his band, his classes. When we finally got to talk about him being trans, he told me he wanted to go on hormones and get surgery. He’d been discouraged by his parents, but his gender dysphoria was intense and his mental health was in a decline because of it.

A lot of cisgender people’s kneejerk reaction is to discourage as well, saying things like “Think about your body! You’ll ruin it! What if you change your mind?” And there is a perfectly logical explanation for them thinking those things—it’s that they’ve never thought about their gender.

There is a misconception that trans people who transition do it on a whim. That there is no thought that goes into “deciding if you are a boy or a girl” (which completely erases non-binary trans people.) In fact, transgender people have mulled over their gender and its relationship to their body more than you have as an outsider. And ultimately, if trans people do change their minds or decide not to transition, it doesn’t invalidate the fact that they experienced dysphoria and may have wanted to transition at one point in their lives.

But outside of those typical reactions, cisgender people often criticize the age of transgender people and when they decide to transition. My choir kid’s parents said he was too young to consider transitioning. And while I recognize medical concerns, what with puberty and hormones, I also think that this is a far larger problem—because those very same parents criticized Caitlyn Jenner for being too old to transition. (While I have my criticisms of Caitlyn Jenner’s representation of the transgender experience, I’ll save that for another time.)

Contrary to popular cisgender belief, there are a lot of older transgender people. Those people deserve the right to transition. But so many are discouraged from gender-reaffirming treatment because they feel it is “too late” for them and have the sense that no matter the hormones or surgery they receive, they will never be able to reconcile their body and their gender identity. This is simply untrue—but the social stigma of older people transitioning has been perpetuated by cisgender people and needs to stop.

In the same vein, stigmatizing young transgender people as “confused” and calling their struggles a phase that they will grow out of is harmful as well. Expecting someone to “grow out” of an identity is ultimately just shoving your discomfort onto them and telling them you don’t believe in who they are or the things they tell you about yourself.

Both stigmas exist at the same time and both are transphobic—when you push stigmatization of age that one transitions at, you flip from “You’re too young to decide for yourself” to “You’re too old to transition.” By perpetuating this, you say “There is no right age for you to transition because I don’t want you to transition.”

Cisgender people, understand this: it is not your right to decide what transgender people do with their bodies or when they do it. What you can do is support your transgender friends and help them with resources—regardless of age. If you’re actually concerned about medical effects, then offer to help them research safety in taking hormones, binding, or tucking. Don’t write them off because of age—support your transgender friends regardless of if they decide to transition or not.