If you're GC, what should trans people actually do?

https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/preschool/Pages/Developmental-Milestones-3-to-4-Year-Olds.aspx

Yep.

It may be useful, OP, to read up on the Cass Review.

Many children go through a period of 'gender confusion' or 'gender questioning'. If left alone, almost all of them will come through this - many will turn out to be same-sex attracted.

Many of the children being treated for 'gender' issues have comorbidities. A startlingly high number, in fact.

Obviously there is a differencecbetween believeing a person's account of their own feelings; and actually believing that what they feel is an accurate reflection of reality. The job of counselling or psychotherapy is usually to hold that space and permit the person to explore the meanings that lie beneath their feelings.

To be honest most people do not really have any memory before the age of four years old; and those earlier memories that do tend to stick are just momen tary feelings or small visual snapshots of life encapsulated in time.

A child of 3 years old has no concept of male or female or of what is considered 'appropriate' gendered behaviour unless it is consistently pushed by the parents or care givers. Children are operating at the level of nouns and verbs and being responsive in realtionships with others.

@AmaListening why are you ok with denying natal women and girls the status of elite athletes when they are the beset there is for their sex? Why is it fair that they be denied their sports success because natal men will always be bigger, stronger, have greater lung capacity?

Why are you ok with changing things such that natal women like my DD will be put at risk of actual physical harm due to the presence of natal men on the supposedly female squads?

Can you please answer this. Thank you.

Now I am getting old I’m starting to think that pre teen girls wanting to be boys is actually commonplace and probably a reaction to the world they are trying to navigate through.

There are many women here who as kids dressed in boys clothes, wanted a boys name, had their hair cut into boys styles etc. I was a kid in the 70s, we were explicitly told what girl and boys could and couldn’t do. Right down to school subjects. By the 80s my Home Ec class had one boy in it and people found that odd. Because cooking was for girls. Times have changed.

So wanting to be a boy, feeling you weren’t a girl, thinking there must be something wrong with you seems an understandable reaction from a girl who can’t be clean, quiet, demure whatever the definition of “girl” is in a sexist world.
and that’s before you get to the kids with trauma, SEN diagnosis, burgeoning same sex attraction..

i believe there are some who will continue to feel this way into adulthood , but others will begin to accept themselves, this seems like a part of growing up. But no-one wants to let this play out anymore. It’s affirm, medicalise, celebrate… And that’s not necessarily the right answer.

And even those who persist with their dysphoric feelings are still the sex they are born as. Changes can only be cosmetic. Not everyone is going to see you as you wish to be seen. No one is endangering Elliot Paige by seeing EP as a woman, many in fact are sympathetic. Most aren’t that interested. But (and I can’t stress this enough) no one wishes harm and if anyone thinks they’re unsafe because someone disagrees that is worrying.

So when someone else born with XX chromosomes and a vagina writes that they've always felt like a boy, that's fascinating to me and I "believe" them because they're telling me their experience.

Have you never interrogated whether it actually makes sense? How does she know what being a boy would feel like?

Elliot identified at age 3 that he felt male. ... I doubt by the time he's 30 he'll still be saying the same thing. I guess that's the difference?

Then Elliott is reviewing the past with the benefit of a lot of hindsight. It's not even clear what it means for a girl to "feel male" at the age of three. Children go through different developmental phases and the chances that a girl will continue to "feel male" consistently through all those phases up to adulthood are very slim especially if no adults start cementing it in their minds as them having a gender problem which the nice doctors can fix for them when they get older. And [[https://pitt.substack.com/p/true-believer is an alternative perspective from a parent who did that.

Should Elliot not have had top surgery?

Why the trivialising words "top surgery"? I suppose you mean a double radical mastectomy which is major surgery with long term health and physical effects. A few women have this as elective surgery if they are at very high risk of breast cancer due to the BRCA genes and they do not call it "top surgery". They take it as seriously as it deserves.

But what is ‘feeling like a girl’?

I’ve always known I was a biological female. I disagree with patriarchy that says I am ‘less than’ males, that I was wrong, that I ‘argue like a man’, that I should accept being treated in a certain way because I have breasts and a vagina, that I should like certain things because of my physicality. So do I ‘feel like a man’ because I believe I should be treated with respect and have agency over my life and my choices? Because that’s how males are socialised.

I’ve always known that if I’d been born male, with the same personality, my life would have been much easier. That doesn’t mean that I am a man in the ‘wrong body’, it means that society is screwed when it comes to gender norms. And it means that things put in place to level the playing field are so important and can’t be ‘got round’ by simply identifying into a more disadvantaged group.

What do you think her 'experience' is? A girl can't possibly know what it's like to be a boy. She hasn't had any more experience of being a boy than you have.

All anyone can do is imagine what it might be like to be the opposite sex, and imagine that they would prefer to be the opposite sex, but it's not possible to 'feel like' something you have no experience of being.

No 3 year old should be looking in a mirror daily and analysing their self image. Whether that's to lament not being a tractor or not being female. It's not healthy all round, and perhaps a symptom of our superficial surface obsessed society. At age 3 there should be no noticeable differences in how a boy or girl is treated. If you've managed to create an environment where there is, then it's the adults failure not a medical issue with the child.

If a child of mine persisted in saying they were not the sex they were born as, first I'd facilitate the child in the behaviour that made them comfortable, and wait for them to grow out of it. If they didn't grow out of it, then my next thought would be therapy, not surgery.

Safeguarding of biological women is just cast to one side though in all this as something which is a privilege we, as biological women, have enjoyed. If you want to see the effects of rape on young girls watch the iplayer series about Gaia Hope - a death on dancing ledge, learn about the toxic male behaviour which biological women have to contend with daily and it will become clear why we are so defensive on your safe sex spaces. By making traditionally safe spaces for women unisex, the risk just escalates. And with the police not always particularly interested in protecting biological women it just makes us very vulnerable.

No. I don’t think so.

I remember telling my mother clearly at 12 that I wanted to be a boy. She gently told me it was simply impossible and gave me a hug.

And no… I never did change sex.

Recreational sport needs to be segregated by sex too. My ds went to a very sporty school, and he was good but by no means elite. By year 9 he could beat several of the girl's records easily. Imagine how damaging if he'd actually been able to compete against them.

of course EP is going to write they felt male for oooooh forever. Look at what they’ve sadly done to themselves

its bollocks of course. At 3 my niece thought she was owl & spent a lot of time trying to fly. A 3 year old has literally no idea about sex let alone gender

I think it’s far more likely EP wanted to feel male to get away from all the appalling things that happened to Then. Things that happened entirely because of their female biology

Paige is clearly a person in need of a huge amount of support & love and if they feel better identifying as a man to cope then that’s up to them

they’re not male though & they never will be.

No - recreational sport should be the same as competition. Are you seriously suggesting that females play rugby with transwomen at any level?

I imagine it would be very similar to the experience of many women who post on this very board. From a young age, many of us 'felt male' and 'wanted to be boys'. It didn't 'make' us male though.

I would expect that Page has written their history with the framing of their current status. Would you believe your 3 year old son if they told you they were a cat? What is the difference in your mind? Why would you give credence to a 3 year old's view on what sex they were then, vs what they as an adult who may or may not have received appropriate therapy about their belief that they are the opposite sex (equally as impossible as being a cat because not one person on this earth can change sex).

Doesn't mean that Page is not a female person with gender dysphoria and that they felt that they needed to make irreversible modifications to their body.

Elliot identified at age 3 that he felt male.

And you take that seriously? Bearing in mind this:

I have a 3 year old son so I'm imagining what that must have been like for Elliot.

How can anyone, at any age but especially not 3 years old when they have enough trouble identifying what day of the bloody week it is, feel they are/should be the opposite sex? It is just risible fucking nonsense.

The psychologist who wrote this article is interesting and well informed on little children and 'gender identity'. A quick read but a good one.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4868763-article-about-childhood-transition

I mean, what is it to 'feel male'? And how can a female know?