Theresa Thorn, "When my eldest child, who I had thought was a boy, began expressing that she felt like a girl at age 5, I sought out picture books to help facilitate conversations in our house about gender and different forms of gender expression. I found several excellent picture books that helped a lot, most of them with a narrative about a child who felt different, faced some adversity, and was ultimately accepted by their community or family. The best part about the books for us was the examples of different kinds of children feeling a variety of different ways about their gender. My daughter was able to say, “That’s like me! That’s how I feel!” when she read about some of these other children."
Dr Katie Alcock (Senior Lecturer Developmental Psychology, Lancaster University) describes the well-established process by which children learn to categorise sex as part of language acquisition.
May 2019
'Young children, reality, sex and gender'
(extract)
"it takes children some time to work out both whether they themselves are a girl or a boy, and that both they and others cannot change sex. Working out which they are themselves happens earlier, and is based in all the studies that have been done on physical appearance and stereotypes. Have a look at what James, aged 3, has to say on the matter:
James is firm that having short hair makes him a boy, and that it also makes other people (and dolls) into boys. My own child aged four was convinced a teenager we knew must be a boy because she had short hair.
Now these days we are all anti-stereotyping and we are convinced we have not raised our children to know what sex stereotypes are. If the only influences on children were things people said directly to them, and especially things we as parents said directly to them, this might work out. But children don’t grow up in a vacuum — they see the other children at nursery, they see toys that other children play with, obviously they hear what other adults than their parents say but most of what children take in is not from people talking to them, but from what they see.
Making generalisations is a very useful skill for a baby or child — if they couldn’t make generalisations, they would never be able to work out that a new cat they saw was in fact a cat, or a new apple was just as good to eat as the last one, or a new car is likely also to go places. Children can work out at a very young age that there are men and women, boys and girls, in the world — it’s probably quite useful for them to work this out in the general scheme of things².
So when they see all the girls at nursery wearing pink and having long hair, well, that’s what girls do! And they also realise, from what people are saying, and from how their parents dress them, what toys they are given, and what toys other children who look like them (same clothes, same hair) what they are supposed to like and do based on what sex they are"
So, based on the idea that girls have long hair and boys have short hair, James is also age-perfect in thinking that when appearance changes, sex changes too. Until the age of about 7 (yes, 7 — in some children it’s older) children think that when something changes its appearance, its underlying reality changes too. This doesn’t just apply to sex, it applies to pretty much everything." (continues)
www.transgendertrend.com/young-children/
Its a great shame that some parents don't seek out evidence-based child development books.