Was anyone else teaching or working with children in the decade 2000-2010?

The young person I knew had siblings and someone has recently mentioned that one of Felicity/Nick’s siblings now themselves has a child dx with ASD. So there is a definite ASD nexus in that family which may be relevant.

I played with lego as a child, my mum always mentions that I never liked dollies and would play with cars!!!!

Im a boy, Im a boy! (Some like it Hot)

I never wore skirts or dresses once out of primary school, have never been particularly girly, but not really a tomboy either, too unfit lazy and clumsy!!

It never occured to me to confuse what I liked and how I like to dress and what Im into, with my sex.

I'm talking about primary, which was completely different. I had an older DD who would have been 15 when you were in 6th form and she was very emo and had been for a couple of years - but her younger sister was experiencing the pressure of expectations in KS1 and KS2 from the early 2000s onwards (it was largely ignored in Nursery other than trainers were all white and pink for girls and black or blue for boys, started being a thing in KS1, really ramped up by KS2 from 2005/6 until the force of expectations was fully embedded by 2008/9).

They then needed to reach mid teens - just at the point where it became an internet thing. Add on a couple of years for the cohorts just a bit younger to have a full cultural expectation of gender presentation from the moment they were old enough to have consciousness and throughout school, then those born around 2003 were reaching puberty with all its questions about 'who am I?' just as it all appeared on the internet and use of phones and laptops became something everybody did.

Just to say as well the diagnosis for kids back in the late 90s and early 00s was gender dysphoria.

I came across one young person with gender disphoria pre 2000. This young person would have been born around 1984/5 and they were like Georgina in the Famous Five books. Tomboy who refused ever to wear skirts, very short haircut, refused to answer to their own very feminine first name let’s say Felicity (it wasn’t) and would introduce themselves as a boy - “I’m Alison’s brother, Nick”. I’ve made up these names obviously.

I havent read the whole thread, Ive been working with children (and their parents) in social services since 96 across a number of authorities. I did come across it before, but really only a handful, always girls in terms of the children and they had been presenting as boys since very very early years.

In terms of parents or adults around the children there were a few transexual male parents (men who had gone through transition to become women) who had all the medical and surgical interventions but there werent huge numbers either.

The last few years this has really increased and now has the pronoun and misgendering thing alongside it which I wasnt working with before. Most are still girls, there are a few boys but not as many as girls. The pattern with the girls is still that predominately its a recent thing in their lives, they havent been presenting as boys since their early years. A few have but the majority havent. They nearly all have ASD or other disorders and the majority have also suffered sexual abuse by males.

There are an awful lot of us on this board who have given birth to babies who have grown up and currently identify as trans.

Can you help us understand which of them are actually trans (because GIDS certainly cannot)?

@Twizbe i don’t think that’s right about Lego. I was born in the very late 70s, my dbro and dsis in very early 80s. We were all given Lego and most girls we knew played with it. None of the sets were overtly packaged as gendered. Maybe it depended on area, social background, age and occupation of parents?

Have you ever actually met a trans person, WarriorN? Rather than just reading about them? Perhaps they're fictional?

It rarely takes long for a poster to display their real motivation with an attempted gotcha like this?

I think on this thread many of us have met trans people, especially as it's a thread asking for experiences from posters who work in schools. Schools today mostly have girls who wish to be boys rather than the other way around, and it's not hard to see why a girl might feel that way.

ChristabelHolloway homosexuality is obviously a matter of which sex an individual is sexually attracted to, so to "believe" people are homosexual requires a belief in the existence of sexual attraction.

The question of whether an individual is inherently transgender requires a belief in gender.

If a person believes that the difference between males and females is their sexed bodies and that gender is a social construct around biological sex, then it is clear why it's logically consistent to believe that individuals are "born" homosexual but not "born" trans.

This is an excellent post. Thank you scaredoff

Those of us who've worked in education for decades and are adults who children chose to confide in, all know that this was not a thing. It doesn't make us transphobic or hateful or anti trans to acknowledge the levels of social contagion that currently exist or to challenge the motivations of those adults and groups pushing this at children.

Have you ever actually met a trans person, WarriorN? Rather than just reading about them? Perhaps they're fictional.

Also, is there anyone who hasn't had an early experience of sexism?

Sorry, my last message was for DameMaud. Apologies. I don't yet know how to edit here - I'll go and learn!

@ChristabelHolloway how, in their minds, did wearing dresses make you ‘feel like a girl’? Just curious.

Thanks again, BadSkiingMum.

Yes, I'll try. It's quite a while ago but I retain the gist :)

The older boy, a very academic university student, was a pretty conventional male 19 year old in terms of his appearance and presentation, though he had long hair (not uncommon then). He very much wanted to experience what it was to be a girl. He had always felt closer to girls than to boys in terms of interests, emotional responses, attitudes and so on. He found other boys boorish, emotionally stunted and boring. Since he was clear-thinking and articulate he was able to express all this very well, though he was still embarrassed and somewhat ashamed to talk about it.

He came from an utterly unremarkable middle-class background and had a straight younger brother. I always encouraged clients to spend some time considering how their family might have influenced them, but as far as I could see there was nothing here that would have "caused" him to feel this way.

His sexual orientation was very much straight, and he'd had girlfriends, including sex. He had never told them about his trans leanings and was understandably very worried about what it would mean for his relationships and sex life if he did.

He wore dresses and makeup in private, and told me about the freedom he felt when he wore a skirt. He envied girls their curves, their breasts and so on, and disliked his straight-up-and-down frame. He had a female online identity which he kept secret as well as a public male one.

What he wanted was to be able to present himself as a girl in society but to be able to continue to have romantic and sexual relationships with females - straight females, not lesbians. And he was more than aware of all the problems that posed.

We didn't get past the exploration stage in our counselling sessions (it was not long-term counselling) but he did express relief at being able to talk about this to someone who didn't judge him.

The other boy was much younger and less able to express himself. Again, I couldn't see anything obvious in his background that "caused" him to want to be a girl. He was at an age where other boys were beginning to discover girls and he was attracted to them too. He just wished he was a girl.

I think part of the difficulty for most of us is that it's quite clear what homosexuality is - you are attracted to your own sex rather than the opposite sex (in reality it may not always be that straightforward but it's a valid working assumption). But understanding how a trans person feels and thinks is much more challenging. My counselling style was always very much about trying to empathise with clients and see things from their point of view, so I heard what these boys said without necessarily fully "understanding". I just knew that it was so, for them.

I hope this is helpful, and if there's anything you'd like me to clarify, please ask.

I think it probably moved in a wave that started with toddler toys and primary school children’s clothes and then moved up through the school years so wouldn’t have been particularly visible in 6th form until around 2015?
Which was also around the time when the smartphone and social media likes became a reinforcing factor in teen behaviour.

My eldest is presumably the same age as Mooncup’s but is a boy, so I’m more of an observer of the girlification of childhood than someone who was forced to bash up against it.
I clearly remember setting out to buy my then pre-school little boy a set of home role play toys circa 2003-4, dolly, pram, dustpan and brush, tea set etc and having to search far and wide to get them in realistic colours, ie shrunken versions of real world items, rather than Barbie fuchsia.
The advent of actual Barbie pink prams for newborn humans must’ve been not long after - I think they were pretty much all beige, black and navy when my son was born! I did manage to get a cow print car seat but that might’ve been the next baby (big age gap, menopause brain)

There have always been kids who were more uncomfortable than most with accepted gender roles. If they were girls they were called tomboys, if they were boys they were called sissies.

To the extent that those terms are pejorative and indicate a problem, you've then got two options. You can conclude that the gender roles are unnecessarily and harmfully restrictive and work to enlarge, erode or abandon them. Or you can conclude that there's something wrong with the child's body because it doesn't fit their mind and work to change that.

Decades and decades of feminism and associated disciplines attempted the first, with some considerable success but still a way to go. Unfortunately, somewhere in the mid-2010s, the dominant social discourse and approach to dealing with it switched to the second. Despite the fact that it's obviously completely insane.

I don't think kids have changed particularly. What's changed is the concepts we lay before them and invite them to make sense of life and express themselves within.

@NeverDropYourMooncup I was starting sixth form in 2007, I don’t really remember what you’re describing - hoodies and jeans were your basic girls outfit for a long time, or skinny jeans and a fairly plain top with converses. If you watch the inbetweeners - set around that year - the ‘hot girls’ are just wearing skinny jeans, have straightened hair and a little make up but nothing pornstar-like or OTT girly.

I wasn’t working with children but I was an older teen at secondary school/sixth form. I cannot think of a single time that ‘gender identity’ was raised, or even hinted at with a lack of ‘official’ terminology. There was one girl out of a year of 120 who was a quirky dresser, wore a suit to our prom, and was very popular (in the ‘cool’ crowd). Also your usual tomboys, or ‘butch’ lesbians. All with plenty of friends and no bullying etc as far as I am aware.

Our subculture back then was ‘emo’ which was quite a ‘gender fluid’ (ugh) way of dressing - boys with long hair and eyeliner, girls in jeans and studded belts, all wearing black and red and band t-shirts. I was part of this fad and hung out a lot on MySpace and with various other non-conforming kids. Again, not once was gender or transsexualism ever mentioned. Not once.

My belief is that when emo left nothing took its place - we haven’t had a defined subculture for years, so ‘gender identity’ and the niche sexual identities filled this gap. And it will follow the same pattern, generally burning out as the kids reach their older teens or early 20s at the latest. It’s just how much harm is caused by then.

It was a time when Girls' Clothes and Boys' Clothes became very noticeably gendered - it took real effort to find a coat for a girl aged 4-10 that wasn't mauve or pink and it was very likely that any child who was wearing a different colour was told by other children and the parent judged by other parents that they were wearing a Boys' Coat and that it was cruel to make the child stand out in that way - despite the fact that spotting your errant daughter in her red hooded coat amongst 258 pink and mauve ones was a definite advantage at kicking out time. Girls' shoes were also no longer mostly Clarks/Startrite flats with buckles, velcro or laces - it was all slip on pumps, things with flowers and sparkles and at most, a little cross bar Dolly number.

Toys had become all bright Barbie pink for the 'girls' version' whilst the boys had every other colour. My childhood bike was a girls style (much to my disgust when I wanted a red or yellow and black BMX), but it was blue - by 2002, it was necessary to go to a section labelled 'Boys' to get anything but pink or purple.

Having long hair became the only style for girls with bows, sparkly clips, beads, hairbands and suchlike - a girl with a bob, never mind anything shorter, stood out against all the long haired children.

So as the definition of what was acceptable for girls to wear and to own narrowed, how they looked narrowed and, along with that, expectations of behaviour became more entrenched in the 'girls don't behave like yours do, look at yours, she's off playing with the boys again'.

I'd been on the receiving end of 'You're not a girl' back in the 1980s, but it was still not as strong a pressure as it was by the 2000s even when it also came from my bloody mother with her Girls Don't Want Computers For Christmas You Get A Hair Curler And You Will Like It. I resisted it as a parent, always encouraging DD to choose clothes and toys that she liked the colour of/actually wanted, rather than buying exactly the same glittery pink stuff that everybody else seemed to be choosing.

But the pressure became so strong that by 2007, my daughter was beside herself that she'd be laughed at for wearing her longsleeved green t-shirt with a rabbit on it because 'Green is a Boys' colour' and she had to wear a skirt and watch the boys playing because 'they'll see my knickers if I join in'. And it was a disaster if the shoes that fitted in Clarks' were even near to the boys' shoes section unless they were a) shit in terms of support and grip or b) covered in flowers and stitching and preferably had some glitter or bows - without that visual shorthand, a sensible pair of school shoes 'had' to be meant for boys.

Once those attitudes were so entrenched, it would make sense that girls who weren't comfortable with pink everything, didn't like scratchy, frilly clothes, restrictive skirts and shoes, liked superheroes, cars, bikes, football and climbing trees and were getting bullied for not conforming were then looking for reasons why they weren't like the other girls. And as they got older, the internet started providing an answer - well, you're clearly not a girl! You can get medication and surgery to fix that!

I'm under no illusion that had I been born thirty years later, rather than it being an irritation in my life to a) be told I was a boy and b) that none of the girls wanted to be friends with me because I wasn't like them and c) to be very unhappy when menarche and physical changes meant I wasn't able to ignore that shit anymore, I'd have been transitioned. And I'd have gone along with it, because from what I had seen of girls' things, expected behaviour and the bloody male predatory attention from 10, I knew I didn't want anything to do with any of that.

Thank fuck it wasn't a thing when I was 4 - 16 is all I can say. And that it wasn't children who started this on the internet.

I have been reading this thread with great interest and admit to knowing far less than lots of pp. Just a thought that could the prevalence of gender identity questioning come from the very binary juxtaposition set up between male and female whereas in reality most things are continuums rather than than binary oppositions? Those who feel uncomfortable trying to fit themselves into one box or the other now have the language and the role models to describe themselves. In some ways non binary identification is similar to identifying as human and disregarding divisions of race or gender.

We aren't born blank slates. We all have personality traits from being tiny.

The experiences and nurture we have thereafter can help or hinder how those facets of our personality develop.

I remember a very specific shift to sexualise merchandise aimed at children - the playboy pencil-case being the one I remember best. Googling suggests it was around 2008.

www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/msps-to-probe-sexy-kids-ads-992563?utm_source=sharebar&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=sharebar

And this lies at the heart of many of the posts on here - and it's fundamentally transphobic, in my view. Would you say this about someone who is homosexual? And if not, why not?? This is a real question - if you believe that some people are born homosexual, but nobody is born trans, then please explain the basis for that belief.

I genuinely want to know why you compare people with gender dysphoria with homosexuality?

Why not compare with anorexia or another body dysmorphia?

From the little I've gleaned from neurological "brain scans" there are more similarities for those with GD as with the brains of anorexic and dyspmorphic patients.

Secondly, are yp who develop anorexia or another body dysmorphia born with the condition?