Teacher upset with my child questioning about trans child

The answer is that we don't yet fully understand how gender identity develops in the brain. What we do know is that children develop a sense of themselves as boys or girls from a very early age, and that for a minority of children, this doesn't correspond with their anatomy/ birth sex.

That is the experience I'm describing. A child may recognise their physical anatomy and understand what others are telling them - that they are a boy -, yet their experience tells them otherwise. And it can become deeply distressing and disorienting when their experience is denied and dismissed, because whatever others may think or believe about it, that experience is real to the child. They're the one living it.

I understand why people might find this counterintuitive, but as I've explained previously, it's entirely compatible with what we know from neuroscience about how the brain works.

We're still developing our scientific understanding of the brain, but what we do know is that our perception and experience of our bodies and ourselves are constructed through complex neural processes. They aren't simply passive, automatic reflections of our physical anatomy.

In other words, a person can accurately recognise their physical anatomy while simultaneously experiencing a discrepancy between those physical characteristics and the way their brain internally represents and interprets their body. There is nothing inherently neurologically impossible or contradictory about that.

This doesn't mean we've established precisely why gender incongruence occurs. But the assumption that our internal experience of ourselves must always correspond perfectly with our physical characteristics is not supported by what we know about the brain.

I'd be furious about the Jazz book - they had no right to read that to your DD and I really question why a book like that is even in a Reception class. To be honest I'd be questioning whether this is the right school for your daughter ...

On a side note how sad for the "trans girl" in the class, who will never get to experience a normal childhood if his parents/carers keep feeding this delusional behaviour.

How sad for the trans girl in the class that she’s constantly faced with questioning from her peers about who she is.

But then that child needs therapy to help them, not affirmation. What long term benefit will affirming do?

How sad for the trans girl in the class that she’s constantly faced with questioning from her peers about who she is.

Why can’t you see that? Norms, behaviours and social roles associated with sex are all examples of the recognition and meaning we give to sexual differences. That’s exactly what they are! One definition is providing examples of the very phenomenon I’m describing.

You say that recognising sex means understanding that people are male and female and that their bodies differ. That’s entirely correct. But that understanding is itself a cognitive representation of physical reality, produced through the brain and shaped by psychology, culture and society. It isn’t the physical fact itself, but our representation of that fact.

We inevitably perceive, categorise and interpret what we encounter. Sexual differences are real, but our recognition and understanding of them are cognitive processes. The meaning and interpretation we give to those differences — that is gender - which gives rise to the specific norms , stereotypes , social roles and behaviours associated with sex. We can change how we interpret and given meaning sex (eg challenge the idea that girls like pink), what we can't do is strip sex of all social meaning altogether (that is utopian).

There's no evidence that it's the type of neurocognitive experience that can be resolved through "therapy".

Two further comments. You are correct to use "we" in "... the recognition and meaning we give ...". People don't develop their cognitive functioning in a vacuum. They do it in relationship with other people, in society. I remember a feeling that my brain was expanding (that's the best description I have come up with) when I was exposed to new and challenging concepts at university. We are exposed to belief systems and concepts that other people have developed. If we are surrounded by ideas of 'gender identity', some of us will use that concept as we try to make sense of our place in society, or to carve out a reasonably comfortable niche for ourselves. But is it a disordered coping mechanism? My observation leads me to the conclusion that it is.

And "what we can't do is strip sex of all social meaning altogether (that is utopian)". No, it is dystopian. And queer theory leads there.

So lying to the child and setting him up for trauma and upset is better? Why?

I understand what you're getting at — that ideas about gender identity can spread through social and cultural influences. And I certainly think we're seeing a phenomenon in which some adolescents are exploring and experimenting with different identities, partly in response to changing social and cultural understandings. That's not particularly surprising; adolescence has always been a period of exploration and identity formation.

But I think explaining gender incongruence primarily as a product of ideology or social influence is woefully inadequate, particularly when we're talking about people who experience a profound, persistent and sometimes debilitating incongruence between their physical sex characteristics and their internal experience, often accompanied by significant distress and a sustained desire for physical changes to their bodies.

The concepts and language available to us inevitably shape how we understand and describe our experiences. But that doesn't mean those experiences are simply produced by the concepts themselves. Our perception and experience of our bodies also involve complex neurological processes, whose development and underlying mechanisms we are still working to understand. We cannot simply assume that a profound psychological/ neuro-cognitive experience is socially caused because the language through which we understand and describe it is socially acquired.

This is the revealing answer. A total inability to appreciate the vulnerability of childhood. Everyone knows that children are developmentally unable to process / understand adult beliefs at the age of 5 - except transactivists who are dependent on that immaturity to push their niche beliefs to young children.

Re expertise - the only qualification for trans experts appears to be self interest. It's usually visible from appearance - evidently on social media that can be obscured. But to date, all the activist groups who've targeted children are all trans. They're pushing their world view and are supremely disinterested in children's wellbeing and safety.

All the flim flam in the world can't obscure the fact that this thread about a 5 year old has morphed into a cynical attempt to get posters to agree that 5 year olds can be born in the wrong body and a sex change is the positive option for them.

When people promote dangerous to children ideas, they need to be told NO.

@Lacksie if the child persistently and sincerely claimed to be an adult, would you still recommend affirmation? If they were saying child claimed to be a fireman, and persistently insisted it was so, would you tell the child he was not? If so, why?

There's no evidence that it's the type of neurocognitive experience that can be resolved through "therapy".

A child claiming to be an adult, a child pretending to have a particular occupation, and a child experiencing persistent gender incongruence are entirely different phenomena. Why would you assume they must have the same explanation or warrant the same response?

We have to understand different human experiences on their own terms, informed by the relevant developmental and clinical evidence. You can't establish that one experience is invalid simply by inventing hypothetical examples of entirely different experiences.

I dread to think how hungry I’d become in Lacksie’s house - I ask L what we’re having for dinner and I’d be deluged by an incoherent, cobbled together collection of nouns, adjectives, verbs all wearing pseudo-intellectual diacritics, when I want to know if it’s roast chicken or not.

I also want to acknowledge @RapidOnsetGenderCritic calmness and grace in not responding to @Lacksie astonishingly rude insistence in carrying out an unrequested analysis of ROGC character and motivations. That @Lacksie was clearly typing away at speed to answer back and reframe ROGC trauma was, in a crowded field, breathtakingly self centred and highly obnoxious. There was no space in L’s world to contemplate and respect a personal insight rather than seize upon it as a teaching opportunity with a condescending offer of counselling

It really is a revealing answer.

Because it all comes down to language again, all while some people are simultaneously denying and asserting the importance of language while attempting to deny doing so.

It really does lay out for viewing the contradictory nature of that ideological view.

But this child is claiming to be a girl though he is male, so why can he not claim to be an allot even though he is a child? I mean, a lot of people believe in reincarnation and “old souls”, so what is the difference between that and “born in the wrong body”? Why can this child not identify as an adult if that is what he sincerely believes?

Call me incoherent, pseudo-intellectual, rude, breathtakingly self-centred and highly obnoxious, and make whatever judgements you like about my character. Par for the course in the Mumsnet playground.

None of it constitutes an argument about what gender is, or why it matters.

The answer is that we don't yet fully understand how gender identity develops in the brain. What we do know is that children develop a sense of themselves as boys or girls from a very early age, and that for a minority of children, this doesn't correspond with their anatomy/ birth sex.

That is the experience I'm describing. A child may recognise their physical anatomy and understand what others are telling them - that they are a boy -, yet their experience tells them otherwise. And it can become deeply distressing and disorienting when their experience is denied and dismissed, because whatever others may think or believe about it, that experience is real to the child. They're the one living it.

I understand why people might find this counterintuitive, but as I've explained previously, it's entirely compatible with what we know from neuroscience about how the brain works.

We're still developing our scientific understanding of the brain, but what we do know is that our perception and experience of our bodies and ourselves are constructed through complex neural processes. They aren't simply passive, automatic reflections of our physical anatomy.

In other words, a person can accurately recognise their physical anatomy while simultaneously experiencing a discrepancy between those physical characteristics and the way their brain internally represents and interprets their body. There is nothing inherently neurologically impossible or contradictory about that.

This doesn't mean we've established precisely why gender incongruence occurs. But the assumption that our internal experience of ourselves must always correspond perfectly with our physical characteristics is not supported by what we know about the brain.

Because they aren't the same things? Gender incongruence, chronological age, religious beliefs about reincarnation and occupational identities are entirely different phenomena.

The fact that you can frame them all as someone "identifying as" something doesn't make them equivalent. They have different meanings, different developmental and psychological foundations, and different implications.

You can't establish that one human experience is impossible or invalid simply by constructing increasingly elaborate analogies with entirely different experiences. That's not an argument.

We have to understand different human experiences on their own terms, informed by the relevant developmental and clinical evidence. You can't establish that one experience is invalid simply by inventing hypothetical examples of entirely different experiences.

But you haven’t explained why gender should trump sex, or what importance should be placed on someone’s internal feelings of themselves that would constitute compelling others to affirm those internal beliefs? Why should someone’s “feelings” trump the facts of their biological sex?

A child may recognise their physical anatomy and understand what others are telling them - that they are a boy -, yet their experience tells them otherwise.

How would this happen? 'Boy' is simply the word for a child with a male body. The boy will know this. That's all it means. It says nothing about his thoughts, experiences, likes and dislikes or who his friends might be. What could possibly make him think that he's not a boy if he understands that his body is a boy's body? Or does he think the word 'boy' means something other than a child with a male body?

I dread to think how hungry I’d become in Lacksie’s house - I ask L what we’re having for dinner and I’d be deluged by an incoherent, cobbled together collection of nouns, adjectives, verbs all wearing pseudo-intellectual diacritics, when I want to know if it’s roast chicken or not.

I also want to acknowledge @RapidOnsetGenderCritic calmness and grace in not responding to @Lacksie astonishingly rude insistence in carrying out an unrequested analysis of ROGC character and motivations. That @Lacksie was clearly typing away at speed to answer back and reframe ROGC trauma was, in a crowded field, breathtakingly self centred and highly obnoxious. There was no space in L’s world to contemplate and respect a personal insight rather than seize upon it as a teaching opportunity with a condescending offer of counselling