To think we’ve got it wrong about gender identity in children

@mnhq I've thought really carefully about my wording here. Especially as there are believers in/supporters of gender identity on this thread.
If I have overstepped the guidelines for this board that was not my intention. If my post needs to be deleted I will contact you to understand how I could approach it again in a different way. Thanks.

Yes.

Some of them are motivated by feelings of sexual desire, some genuinely do believe that they are "in the wrong body". Either way, they are living "as a woman" from an outside in viewpoint. They've never had to navigate life as an adolesent girl, facing the reality of periods and boys/men starting to see them through the lens of sex objectification etc etc.

The latter are similar in many ways to the girls who are identifying out of girlhood: many will be autistic and/or likely to grow up gay and are confused and distressed about what "being a girl/woman" or "being a boy/man" means. If feelings of sexuality come in to it, it's more likely to be a desire to repress an emerging same-sex attraction because they are scared that this is "not normal" (i.e. an internalised homophobia). The prevalent use of "gay" as a slur in primary and secondary schools perpetuates this. Some will have experienced some kind of trauma (bullying, sexual assault) or mental health issues relating to trauma which mean that identifying as something new or different is an attractive proposition. Particularly if their new identity is celebrated by others.

The former are completely different and probably not a topic for this MN board.

I'm part way through the film Wrong Bodies, which is linked on this thread.
It's a great exploration of everything that falls under the "trans umbrella" and the power of belief. Unfortunately some will say that it's hateful propaganda but IMO, it's important to be open-minded and look at this from lots of different angles, so that society can support and safeguard those who do believe in gender identity and those who don't.

I totally get where you’re coming from. I don’t really understand gender fluidity myself (have no problem with anyone who is trans, fluid etc), I just don’t understand why you have to identify as a different gender depending on whether one day you want to wear dresses and do ‘girly’ things and other days trousers and ‘boy’ things

This is a great thread OP, thank you to you and almost all the other posters.

I see that #OperationLetThemSpeak have also weighed in with their sermons lectures deep and clearly well-thought out words of wisdom that definitely don't consist entirely of scripted thought-terminating cliches, gross twisting of definitions and nasty emotional blackmail <sarcasm>.

We seem to have gotten to a point where unless you outwardly cheer things on, participate In everything and anything and wear some kind of badge or band or whatever that makes you a bigot/phobe of some kind.

Absolutely - principles of toleration and freedom of conscience emerged precisely as a way of living together is a divided society after years of religious persecution and war. We seem to have forgotten this - and dissent has been rebadged as "hate".

Part of it must be that so many groups live in self-selecting - often but not exclusively online - bubbles and those wider community anchors, which exposed people to different viewpoints and experiences are easier to avoid.

I mean when it comes to homophobia there’s a difference between saying ‘being gay isn’t for me’ (obviously, if you’re straight) and saying you ‘disagree’ with homosexuality in general, however quietly you believe you do so. Sexuality, unlike gender, isn’t a lifestyle choice or difference in beliefs - no one is expecting you to ‘participate’ in some way if you’re not gay or bisexual.

I think we actually need to re define what these phobias and tolerance actually are.

It used to be ok to quietly disagree with some thing and just co exist without incidence. It's ok to think something is just not for you.

Not ok obviously to bully, make someone's life miserable , yell insults and physically hurt people over something.

We seem to have gotten to a point where unless you outwardly cheer things on, participate In everything and anything and wear some kind of badge or band or whatever that makes you a bigot/phobe of some kind.

What people (trans identifying males) are truly conflicting is not that they’re ‘identifying as a girl’, they’re wanting to live by a male idealisation of what it is to be a girl. What it is to be female and what it is to be a man’s idea of being female are chasms apart.

Quite!

I never identified as a girl.

I refused to wear pink (or black!) after age 8.
I wouldn't wear dresses.
I liked football.
I didn't do makeup.

Still didn't stop me BEING a girl though did it?

But what is "identifying as a girl"? I work in an environment where I encounter more trans people than most. Those "identifying as a girl" have longer hair than me, wear skirts more often than I do, wear more floral fabrics, wear more make-up than I ever have. Does that make me less of a girl?

Those who have transitioned, or are in the process of transitioning still have many problems. Why do people say "wrong body"? Is it not "wrong feelings"? Is that not something to work on instead?

I was born in the 1940s, brought up mostly in the 1950s. I played with boys, ran about incessantly, played football, climbed trees and found dolls boring. My Dad bought me a huge second-hand meccano set (5 shillings, I think). No-one ever suggested that I should "identify" as a boy - it just wasn't an issue then - and it never occurred to me that I was anything other than a girl. I've lived happily ever since as a wife, mother and grandmother, with a career in science - mainly a male world when I joined it with a PhD in 1971, but now very much also a female world.

Stereotypes have always existed, of course. I have my father to thank for encouraging me to go to university; certainly many of my contemporaries also did, but there was still the expectation in many quarters that girls would marry, have children, and therefore would not/should not commit seriously to a career. It was certainly more difficult then to be a working mother than it is now for my daughter-in-law, for example.

It's interesting that women have less difficulty and opposition now than my contemporaries did to achieving senior roles in business, law, academia, science, medicine etc, yet have to deal with this absurd misogynistic, stereotype-obsessed gender ideology, which is doing so much harm to women and children.

Schools are teaching how we shouldn't be sexist on the one hand, then teaching entrenched sexism as an identity which should be imposed on everyone.

Ditto homophobia and religious tolerance.

I do think greed is driving a lot of this. The drug companies, the organisations being bankrolled to promote these messages - it's big business. No-one can make money when children and families are left alone to work it out for themselves.

As a related aside, there will be some parents here who may not be aware that a consultation on whether gender identity should be taught in primary and secondary schools (in RHSE lessons) closed at midnight last night. It was opened by the Tories and... strangely... the new Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, forgot to mention it.

Even more strangely, lots of organisations have signed an open letter, published on the day that the consultation closed, asking the new Labour government to scrap the guidance and start again. There is a thread about it here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5117718-100-organisations-ask-labour-to-abandon-tory-revised-guidelines-on-rshe

The bulk of the concerns are around age-limits for when to teach children specific subjects within sex education. Personally I thought the proposed age limits were sensible and well thought through but the bigger concern would be, that by starting again, we bring in the risk that gender identity belief will continue to be taught in schools as if it's factually true.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, this is what had been proposed by the DfE under the Tory-initiated consultation for teaching in schools:

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/05/16/new-rshe-guidance-what-it-means-for-sex-education-lessons-in-schools/

I feel for you, OP. My dd1 was never remotely into any girly things as a child, e.g. never liked dolls or any typically girls’ activities - hated ever having to wear a dress. (We were living abroad where she was allowed to wear shorts.) She enjoyed anything active, rough and tumble. She was what used to be called a tomboy.

She eventually turned into a very female teen and woman, married with 3 children, but if she’d been born a few decades later I’m sure someone - probably at school - would have tried to convince her that she’d been born in the wrong body.

My DS has learnt it from peers.

Just be mindful that there are people in this world who DO have transkids and remember the first rule of life - Be Kind. It's really tough because they know how hard it's going to be for their child in terms of acceptance.

There are people in this world who believe that they have trans kids. And yes, being kind is indeed one of the most important things. But it's not unkind if people don't share the belief that "we all have a gender identity." Another important thing is safeguarding. Another is evidence-based medical care. Another is fairness: is it fair for a (transwo)man who says that they are a woman to demand access to women's sports and spaces, when not everyone shares their (asserted) belief?

I would happily be wrong. Just as I would happily be wrong in my atheist position that there is no god. In fact I would be delighted to be wrong, because tens of thousands of children and young people worldwide have irrevocably changed their bodies to match their perception of their gender identity.

It's clear that people have believed in variations of gender identity for centuries. The Two Spirit belief of a transcendent soul that is a mixture of "masculine" and "feminine" and the Indian hirja are examples of this. But people who had these beliefs in history weren't changing their endochrine systems or chopping off body parts. In many cases, having a "third gender" was/is a convenient way to mask an intolerance for homosexuality in men, where some (but obviously not all) gay men prefer clothing and hobbies that are more stereotypically associated with women. If anyone hasn't read it, Helen Joyce's book "Trans" is a great way to understand more about this side of things.

Unfortunately, parents are being coerced in to believing that if they don't support their child's transgender identity, their child will kill themselves. There is an example of this kind of rhetoric on this thread.

It's sad seeing facts (that we all have one body and it's ours forever, that there is no single way to "be" a boy or a girl) being called hateful.

Unfortunately books like Helen Joyce's (and also the brilliant My "Body is Me!" by Rachel Rooney) are branded as hateful simply because they build on understanding the self from a premise of biological reality.

The publishing industry has been gagged for several years on this topic but thankfully, that's changing. Hopefully we'll see more books that help people to make up their own minds about what they believe and that help parents support their children through childhood and adolesence.

Even though I'm a non-believer, I fully support those that do believe having access to evidence-based care. What does that look like? The Cass Report is a great baseline for all ages: a) it comes from a position of belief (it has a whole section on gender identity) b) it advocates exploratory therapy to unpick why someone might be experiencing distress about their body, setting aside a focus on gender identity belief as a start point (i.e
exploration without bias) and c) it makes recommendations that any medical interventions need to be properly researched with a full understanding of long term outcomes.

The fact that we don't have adequate long-term research in to irreversible medical interventions that have been done to thousands of children and young people is of huge concern, whether you're a believer in the concept of gender identity or not.

How do boys learn that they can “identify” as girls? Why is this idea being taught rather than the idea that boys can be feminine but still be boys? Gender stereotyping has regressed terribly in the past 10 years.

It's impossible to change sex because it is in every cell of the body. I'm a girl. My dad taught me to repair my bike, put stickasoles on my shoes to make them last longer, and complete a tax return. My favourite hobby was sciencey things including botany, chemistry, and reading science fiction books and horror comics . I shudder to think what the gender fascists would have made of me.

I went to an all-girls school, where we were just girls learning, no bias, no boys stealing the limelight and hogging the bunsen burners in Chemistry lessons.

Had 2 children, both nursed by me so fulfilled my womanly duties. Daughter is the same and took up a 'male' career.

And here I am, a successful career in IT behind me, still working in science, and gaming on my PS5 whenever I get a minute.

Perhaps give your girl the confidence to do what she finds interesting and engaging. We need more women scientists and engineers, in some respects she is in a privileged position as she can break the fetters of what society expects of females. There are some wonderful female role models out there. Florence Nightingale (nursing, statistics), Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 - the men got the Nobel prize!, Ada Lovelace Mathematician and programmer, Marie Curie, physicist and chemist and many more. Hundreds of us women changing the world. There is no need to be a boy.

Good luck.

I think the schools are being hugely damaging to the children by foisting this on them at such a young and impressionable age. How can they possibly make a decision about the rest of their lives when they’ve barely hit puberty! I think it’s disgusting to be honest. Children should be children. If they want to play with boys toys and mix with boys, That’s absolutely fine, I was the same but I’m very feminine now and my sexuality and gender never came into question. I have very recently however been diagnosed with ADHD which may have contributed to my behaviour as a youngster. I think you are approaching this absolutely fantastically by encouraging her to see the value in women undertaking roles that predominantly and historically have been male dominated. I wish you all the best.

It sounds like you’re a really supportive parent OP. I wouldn’t be supportive of those kinds of messages being taught to my child and would also opt out. I think there is a big problem with glossing over the fact that many (though not all) individuals that experience gender dysmorphia are neurodivergent, and end up gravitating towards trans ideology as means of being accepted for being ‘different’.

https://www.transgendertrend.com/the-suicide-myth/

An article on the oft repeated assertion 'better a happy child than a dead one ', with a look at the evidence it relies on.

It's grotesque to use this argument, and highly irresponsible.

Vulnerable children deserve better. The 'affirm everything or they'll kill themselves' argument is again, appalling.

Yes, I agree but how can we do that for our boys that want to identify as girls?

Absolutely correct. Those of us over 50 actually thought this sexist crap had been thrown out years ago, only to find it returning with a dreadful vengeance this century.