Teacher upset with my child questioning about trans child

No, he's been told he's a boy by the adults around him since birth. Being referred to as a boy has been his entire life experience. It's hardly going to come as a surprise to him.

The point is that, despite this, he understands and experiences himself differently. That's precisely the phenomenon I've been trying to explain.

No. one. is. lying. We've been over this repeatedly, but you keep returning to the same assumptions rather than engaging with the actual arguments I've made in response.

What on earth is the point?

The point is that, despite this, he understands and experiences himself differently. That's precisely the phenomenon I've been trying to explain.

Trying to explain. But nobody else understands your so-called explanation. What exactly does he 'understand and experience' that leads him to think that he's not a boy, even though he knows 'boy' is just the word which describes a child with the sort of body he has?

If a 5 year old can understand this, surely you can explain this to us.

You asked this exact question a few minutes ago and I provided a response.

Here it is again,

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

”He experiences himself differently”. He has no concept of how girls experience life (or other boys, come to that). How does a 5 year old come to the conclusion that feeling a sense of discomfort suggests he’s actually a girl?

What on earth is the point, indeed.

As a DSL in a resource base, (Hopefully I qualify as an 'informed voice') I can confidently tell you that your views are extremely concerning and are categorically NOT in line with how gender incongruence should be dealt with in schools.
If think that agreeing with an infant that they are the opposite sex is telling them the truth, and is abiding by KCSIE, I do hope you don't work with children.
Terrifying.

So he knows he’s a boy but also knows he is a girl? Really? So why are other children being told to refer to hin as a girl? If he knows he is a boy, why are adults agreeing with him when he says he’s a girl? Either he knows he is a not, but just wants to wear “girls clothes, which is fine, or he “knows” he’s a girl. He can’t know he’s a boy and a girl. He’s 5 FFS.

It doesn't matter how often you post the same meaningless waffle. It's still meaningless waffle. I responded to this post earlier (at 10:22), but you didn't reply, so I said much the same thing again 10 minutes later. You haven't explained why a boy (who knows he's a boy because he knows that's the word for a child with the sort of body he has) thinks he's not a boy.

Because this seems totally incoherent.

He knows he has a penis, and therefore other people see him as a boy. However, this directly contradicts his own experience of himself.

people are being told to call him a girl because doing so corresponds to his own experience of who he is. On the other hand repeatedly denying, dismissing , contradicting his experience can be profoundly distressing and disorienting for the child , because whatever anyone else thinks, that is the reality of his experience, and he is the one living it.

He has no experience of himself as anything other than what he is. Please explain why he’d assume that is actually a girl?

I see we have again cycled around to the ‘we don’t know yet, but we will know in the future’, in the meantime the world needs to accept that a group of people’s subjective belief about themselves is material reality and society must support this subjective reality as if it is material reality.

As I said, we have had this point used as supposedly credible evidence to support these arguments before. The poster (a general use of ‘poster’) who uses those arguments never can provide any evidence to support their arguments. And then the looping continues.

And it revolves around language usage. Because the language used to describe biological sex categories was reused for gender identity purposes. Meaning that every time the words ‘woman, girl, boy or man’ is used, the words are in effect meaningless.

All while then being gaslighted that the language has not been made meaningless.

He knows he has a penis, and therefore other people see him as a boy. However, this directly contradicts his own experience of himself.

What sort of experience of himself would result in him thinking he doesn't have a penis when he knows he does?

I explained this to you as far as the science enables it. You have dismissed it as incoherent waffle without explaining what it is you find incoherent or precisely are objecting to.

Ok. There's not really anywhere to go from there. certainly no use is repeating the same assumptions and questions over and over again. But perhaps that serves your rhetorical/ advocacy purposes?

He is 5. He has no experience of who he is. 5 year olds have no clue. He should have been told from the start “ you are a boy”. That is it. You cannot be a girl. You can wear dresses, you can do and play with whatever you like but you are a boy, will always be a boy and that cannot change. That wiuld be the kindest thing to do.

What that boy describes as his own experience being that of ‘girl’ is materially his experience of him being a ‘boy’. That boy has no valid reference point to describe himself as a girl and the word girl refers to a group of female people who are children.

That boy could be experiencing anything and just because he describes it as being a ‘girl’ experience doesn’t make it the experience of a female child. It is and only ever was that of a male child.

He is being transed by his parents & teachers, He knows he is a boy. He tells other children he is a boy. His parents & teachers tell him he is a girl. This is child abuse

I see we have again cycled around to the ‘we don’t know yet, but we will know in the future’, in the meantime the world needs to accept that a group of people’s subjective belief about themselves is material reality and society must support this subjective reality as if it is material reality.

Not only that, but a 5 year old, with a child's immature understanding of the world, somehow (instinctively?) understands more about this than adults are able to, even when it's been so succinctly and patiently explained to us over and over again by experts like @Lacksie.

I dealt with a child in an Infant school who was female but everyone used male pronouns for her. So it absolutely can be a thing with misguided parents and teachers of a child at this age. I felt sorriest for her younger brother who was being told at the age of 4 to refer to his 'brother' instead of 'sister' and kept getting muddled.

When she was a bit older, a 9 year old in the group asked her to confirm if she had a penis or a vagina. Although I told her we don't need to talk about that during our class, I thought it was very telling. She could tell the child was really a girl and she knew what the difference is between boys and girls. (Clue, it isn't to do with their haircut, clothing or favourite colour)

OP I would also be furious about this. Teaching your child to ignore their own innate understanding of biological sex is at best confusing, at worst dangerous.

Of course a five-year-old has experience of who they are! An enormous amount of cognitive, social and neurological development has already taken place by that age, including the development of an understanding of sex and gender.

Telling a child "you're a boy, that's it, and you can never be anything else", regardless of how they understand and experience themselves, is neither enlightened nor necessarily "kind". For a child experiencing persistent gender incongruence, having their own experience repeatedly dismissed and contradicted can be profoundly distressing and disorienting.

You seem to assume that simply insisting on a particular classification will somehow resolve the discrepancy. But that's not how gender incongruence generally works. Repeating "you're a boy" doesn't necessarily make the child's experience disappear, it may simply drive them to despair.

people are being told to call him a girl because doing so corresponds to his own experience of who he is.

What experience could he possibly have had that would make him think he's a girl?

Telling a child "you're a boy, that's it, and you can never be anything else", regardless of how they understand and experience themselves, is neither enlightened nor necessarily "kind".

What do you mean by 'experience themselves' in this sentence?

Well so will being told at 8 that “you’re actually a boy so have to use boys spaces and play on boys teams and you have to change in the boys changing rooms”. How is that kinder?

I'd remove my DC rather than have the teacher lie to her everyday telling her the boy is a girl.

The child recognises himself as a girl/female, despite knowing that he has a penis and that, as far as others are concerned, this makes him a boy/male. That recognition/ awareness/ understanding of self as a girl/ female, is his experience.

I understand that you believe this experience to be impossible, or at least nothing more than "delusion" or external influence. But you have no basis for these assumptions and judgements- you just keep asserting them, over and over again, without engaging with the alternative arguments/ explanations.

The experience of gender incongruence is widely documented empirically, and again - again - it is entirely compatible with what we know about how the brain works. Our experience and perception of our bodies are constructed through complex neurological processes. They aren't simply passive, automatic reflections of our physical anatomy.

A person can experience a rubber hand as belonging to their own body, despite knowing perfectly well that it's made of rubber. Someone who has lost a limb can continue to experience it as present, painful or itching, despite knowing it no longer exists. Conversely, someone can experience a physically intact limb as not belonging to them. People can even experience their bodies as dramatically larger or smaller than they actually are.

These are well-established neurological phenomena demonstrating that conscious knowledge of our physical anatomy and the brain's internal representation and experience of the body don't necessarily correspond.

I'm not suggesting that these phenomena are directly the same as or explain gender incongruence . We don't yet fully understand the underlying mechanisms of how and why gender incongruence develops. But what these examples demonstrate is that your assumption - that our internal experience must necessarily correspond with our physical characteristics - is scientifically completely unjustified.

You can't simply declare a human experience impossible because it seems counterintuitive to you.

How far would you take this? If he was convinced that he was a dog - truly believed that that was his inner identity and personal reality - would you accept this? I don't mean just stubborn imaginative play, which is common at that age - where young ones will insist that they are Fireman Sam, Peppa Pig or whatever, rather than acknowledge that they are playing - but actually permanently think they ARE a dog? I mean, everybody has arrogantly assumed from his birth that he was human, and has constantly conveyed this message to him and treated him as such; but how can they possibly know that their assumptions were right, if he informs them otherwise?

If he demanded to not go to school, not wear any clothes, eat from a bowl on the floor, refused to speak, started sniffing other children's bottoms, cocked his leg or pooed on the pavement whenever he needed to - because these are all normal, acceptable parts of his 'reality' in being a dog, would you be insisting that he must be right and everybody else must be wrong? If you wouldn't allow this, would you accept and 'own' your inherent bigotry, hatefulness and disregard of science?