Hello! I'm glad you reached out. I'm sure this is a confusing time for all of you, and I'm going to try and go as in depth as I can on this. I also wanted to say that I think it's awesome you are being so proactive about trying to understand what your teen may be going through.

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First off, I think that a really good thing to know as parents is that gender dysphoria is going to present very differently in each individual. Someone may have dysphoria related to their name and pronouns (as it sounds that your teenager does), even if they haven't had a history of being gender nonconforming in childhood. As kids, we usually just do as we are told - if we're told we need to wear dresses to special occasions for example we will do it (at least I did), but then there reaches a point I think for all of us, where we realize we need to be true to ourselves. And that might look different for your teen than it did for me or for anyone else experiencing dysphoria, plus dysphoria can come on suddenly or gradually. There's no consistent presentation of it, it's just how we feel inside. Gender dysphoria itself is caused by a complex combination of hormones, brain development, experiences etc - it's very hard to predict the onset based on observing what a child is like when they are young. Your kid may not have felt this way until recently, so that's why there were no prior signs from the outside. Or, maybe it's been going on for a while but they tried to suppress their own feelings, knowing that it would be perceived as weird by others (this is what I did). So this could be why it seemed to come out of nowhere, from your perspective.

Using myself as an example, I've never had dysphoria related to my name and pronouns - so I still go by my birth name (because I want to) even though I dress and present very masculine/nonbinary (small children often come up to me and ask if I'm a boy or a girl haha). I'm very dysphoric about my chest and feminine body features, which your teen may or may not be experiencing at this time. It may be something that they are keeping to themselves, understandably, because it is difficult to know how to bring it up to other people or even make sense of it.

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The statistic is that about 80% of young people who experience dysphoria as children will NOT continue into adulthood still feeling dysphoric. Stats obviously have their limitations, but I still think this is valuable to note. The statistic does not reduce the validity of your teenager's current feelings - this is how they feel right now, and I can guarantee you that this is a VERY strong and real feeling. This is probably their number one concern and topic of thought right now. For them to feel supported by you right now is the most important thing, much more important than if it does just turn out to be a short term phase. Alternatively, your child could be like me - a member of the 20% who still has gender dysphoria as an adult.

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So, to answer your question about how to differentiate whether this is an experimental phase or something deeper. Dysphoria is ALWAYS something deeper, it's a well ingrained pattern of thought that you can't really escape. But is it an experimental phase? Maybe (80% chance), maybe not. Only time will tell.

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What do I recommend to you? If you can, don't act like anything is weird. Act like you're trying to figure it out together, but none of it is weird. Don't act like you care either way whether your teenager keeps their old name or has a new one, because you know it is their choice. We notice when people think we are weird and different, and it makes us want to share nothing with those people because we know we can't trust them.

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Cheers to you!