Poor kid

Puberty blockers will stop his breasts growing, which to a child like Gabriel would be very disturbing.

Roughly 80% of GNC kids who don't go on blockers become reconciled to their bodies during puberty.

But practically all kids who go onto blockers then move onto cross-sex hormones, which means they're left with the genitals of children & therefore infertile. And that's before you even get onto the side effects of Lupron or the number of young women who realise in their late teens / early 20s that they made a mistake. But by that time it's too late to reverse the effects of the testosterone.

That's really sad. I was a 'tomboy' (for want of a better word) and I'd have hated being forced into taking the hormone blockers etc, somebody needs to tell this mother that they don't have to go down this route - her child can live as a boy without all that added treatment until they are old enough to make a decision.

There is nothing wrong with being a tree climbing, mountain bike riding, den building girl just like there is nothing wrong with being a boy who likes my little ponies, make up and so on and it makes me mad when people think there is.

The only difference between boys and girls cycles were girls didn't have that pointless bar.

Not pointless - in my street it was important so you could stand on it (or your saddle) to show off your 'tricks' - we watched a lot of kickstart and tricks were important, along with ramp building.

Why ? What on earth is "tomboyish" about having a bicycle?

like Yambabe - it's not the bike, it's the type of bike. Girls in my village had the ones with the dropped cross bar (is that a 'shopper' - the ones where you have to pedal backwards to brake) - or as I got older and mountain bikes came in, they had mountain bikes with a dropped cross bar - generally in white/purple/pale colours (racers were old hat by then - it was the number of gears you had on your mountain bike that was important!)

My first bike was a black and red BMX, followed by a black and red mountain bike when I out grew it. I got some grief for that (especially when I parked it up for my cycling proficiency).

And yeah.. the crushing embarrassment of growing breasts, of starting my periods and having to sort out bleeding every month, getting hairy.. hell? Not exactly, tough, and something that it took me a long time to come to terms with.

What LaSqrrl said.

If I’d been able to not have periods I would have done.

If I’d been able to escape the world of beauty, fashion and other people trying to make you look pretty I would have done.

If I’d been able to enjoy the same freedoms as my brother I would have done.

It sounds like this mother has given her child the idea that not wanting to have your hair braided or make up applied means you’re not a true girl.

That’s the crap you need to get rid of.

I had a look at mum's FB. I agree with the posters who said there don't seem to be too many IQ points going round. It is a shame that such people are vulnerable to this sort of ideology.

Also the subject of this article has only very recently done this - she appears in quite recent photos with long hair, etc. It seems like dubious journalistic ethics to report on this sort of stuff if it's still at the 'reversible' stage.

"It's a newspaper article. In The Daily Mail. Have a little think about that."

It's actually in the Hull Daily Mail. This is part of the Mirror group, and has nothing to do with The Daily Mail.

www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/boy-12-changes-name-charlotte-1682446

The Daily Mail had nothing to do with it, aside from moving Hessle 50 miles west from Hull to Leeds.

Another article full of stereotypes of how boys and girls are meant to look and behave, but being trans is apparently nothing to do with stereotypes 🤷‍♀️ someone should tell this child’s mum before the blockers are prescribed

I will make it clear from the outset of my comment that I am not talking about the child in the article - I have seen these types of threads go to swiss cheese.

For many of us, raised as girls, we can go through phases. Perhaps the idea of being dressed up like a doll (forced femininity) makes a girl reject this most strongly - I know I hated being dressed like a doll for weddings, when male cousins were not restricted in play by their clothing. Also what Transplants said, about being singled out for femininity treatment, in a sex-imbalanced family unit.

And the biggie, for many girls, the looming puberty ("what do you mean I am going to start bleeding down there?").

For some girls, it can be early realisation of being a lesbian. For others, even just the feminist awakening of "how come the boys can do that and I can't?"

And sadly for some, it is an attempt to escape being the victim of CSA. Particularly if the abuser says "how pretty" the victim is, you can bet your bippy the girl will do anything she can to make herself "look not pretty".

Many of us on this thread that we went through our stages, for however long, without 'gender intervention' by some clinic. Otherwise, if it were now, off to the GI Clinic we would go.

I disagree with all the photos being in that article. How horrible for the child later on.

I didn't say that.

Point was that we were expected to have different bicycles. No drop handlebars. No gears. Girls bikes were upright, sedate, practical. Boys bikes were rugged, fast, tough.

Your different childhood doesn't invalidate mine, in the same way that mine doesn't invalidate yours

Not saying it did. I was querying the over-egging of the "I was such a tomboy, I had a bicycle" posts. No one actually says girls should not have bicycles.

I am 5 years younger than you Lass. My childhood was spent partly in a seaside holiday town (Whitby), partly in a big urban city (Durham) and then finally for my teenage years in a naice village in the Cheshire commuter belt.

I can assure you that although your lived experience differs from mine, what I experienced actually happened and was not unusual in all those places. Your different childhood doesn't invalidate mine, in the same way that mine doesn't invalidate yours.

Hi Lass. When I was a child (70s mostly)

I was born in 1959 and grew up in rural Scotland. I don't recognise anything of what you describe as being the norm for girls and boys. I remember Raleigh chopper bikes. I thought they looked ridiculous but boys and girls had them. The only difference between boys and girls cycles were girls didn't have that pointless bar.

Lass: when girls are put in impractical clothes that get caught in chains and wheels so that they can't ride a bike

That is not true. You can look around any street in any city and see plenty of girls and women on bikes wearing skirts. I'm always struck when I'm in Amsterdam just how elegant many of the young women look. Copenhagen is the same.

My primary 7 class did their cycling proficiency test at school - all the girls were in school uniform skirts.

I lived on a farm and climbed trees. Girl children born in the late 1950s weren't routinely wearing trousers.

I would imagine that, living on a farm, you weren't given white socks or patent shoes, and weren't clad in an outfit to exactly match the one your sister was wearing? I would imagine that farmers have a more pragmatic approach to clothing getting damaged or dirty. Growing up in an urban environment in the 80s would be rather different. Luckily, I didn't see too much of my grandmother and my mum didn't inflict the same shit on me. But my grandmother's treatment of me, coupled with observations of the other girls at school, informed me that my mother was an anomaly in letting me play with chemistry sets and lego and wear trousers most of the time.

mary jane shoes

Patent mary janes at that, so if you scuffed them, they were ruined. I swear she thought I was some kind of doll.

I wore dresses and skirts. I lived on a farm and climbed trees. Girl children born in the late 1950s weren't routinely wearing trousers.

Climbing trees as an activity doesn't have much going for it really- my brother wasn't interested.

Lass: when girls are put in impractical clothes that get caught in chains and wheels so that they can't ride a bike, it's pretty clear that their parents/grandparents are more concerned about the girl looking girly than about her riding a bike. The attitude that bikes are mostly a boy/man thing persists, despite starting 100 years ago. When is the women's TdF? There isn't one! I've never met a man who can't ride a bike, but I've met plenty of women who can't. Bearing in mind that learning to cycle is a skill usually learned in childhood, that's pretty telling about their parents attitude to cycling in girls.

*was not were

Hi Lass. When I was a child (70s mostly) boys had racer bikes and girls had shopping bikes. Racers had big wheels, skinny tyres, drop handlebars and at least 5 gears. Shopping bikes had small wheels, fat tyres, 3 or sometimes no gears and a basket on the front. The disapproval when I rode my 10-gear Eddie Mercx racer to school were palpable.

The ultimate prize was the Raleigh Chopper, and they were definitely Not For Girls.

Having my bike was one of my first "fuck you"s to what I considered to be the Establishment. It may not be relevant now, iyt very much was back then.

Also re climbing trees. Girls were not expected to engage in activities that would get them dirty or dishevelled, even then. We had tea sets and dollies to play with. The idea of us running about climbing trees etc was very unladylike and was what classed us as tomboys. These days we would probably qualify as GNC at the very least, back then we just wanted the freedom to play that our brothers had.

HTH

Lass: Where do you (collective you) get this notion that society frowns on this [tree climbing in girls] or that it is bucking gender stereotypes?

Hmm, I dunno. Perhaps it was my grandmother's insistence on cladding me in skirts, mary jane shoes, and white socks so that I couldn't climb trees?

This goes right back to the suffragettes and rational dress movement. Men, not wanting women to move around freely with their newly-acquired bicycles, declared cycling to be unfeminine

I am assuming that no one banging on here about how gender non conforming they were as a child was a child 100 years ago. It is absurd. No one thinks riding a bike isn't for girls.

Lass: this idea that growing up as a girl is some sort of hell to get through is no better.

Except that for many of us, growing up as a girl was hell. Sexually assaulted before I left primary school, early puberty so having to manage menstruation at primary school, bullying, violence, boys telling me that lego was not for girls or only letting me use the pink crayon, wolf-whistled at in school uniform at 13. Yes, a walk in the park, that was

Climbed trees

And this one is the gold standard of being a gender non conforming little girl. Why ? It is bizarre. Where do you (collective you) get this notion that society frowns on this or that it is bucking gender stereotypes?

Lass: Why ? What on earth is "tomboyish" about having a bicycle?

This goes right back to the suffragettes and rational dress movement. Men, not wanting women to move around freely with their newly-acquired bicycles, declared cycling to be unfeminine.