should I apologize? (warning trans thread!)

[startrek90]

I have come to AIBU because people don't hold back.

The other day I posted on fb asking if anyone could recommend where I could get a toy kitchen cheap for my little boy. A friend and I were talking in the comments and I mentioned that my ds loves playing in the house at kindergarten and he apparently spends lots of time there. His teachers joked that they knew when I was weaning his brother because he was 'weaning' the baby doll at nursery. My friend and I were doing a general aww thing and then another acquaintance who was female but is now 'trans masculine gender queer' (I still have no idea what that is exactly, I assumed transgender) commented that my 2 year old was obviously identifying as a girl and sent me a link to mermaids?

I disagreed and just said he is a two year old and playing out what he sees. Since then I have benn inundated with stuff talking about trans children and their high risk of suicide.

We are talking everyday there was something else sent to me, I was tagged in etc..

I'll be honest I got pissed off with this as I don't believe in gender anyway so sent a pm very politely saying to stop it. My son is not trans he is 2.

Then there was a very public fb status about ignorant parents and how their kids will grow up to hate them. I know I should have ignored it but I commented again laying out my opinion about gender. I got accused of being a terf, that I was transphobic and my 'daughter' would grow up and either kill himself because of me or cut me out.

I admit I lost it and told this person to do one and fuck off. I blocked them (should have done it straight away) but now I have a mutual friend (who is also transgender but not so political with it) who contaced me in private saying how upset and worried our mutual acquaintance is and that I should unblock them, apologize for telling them to fuck off and make things up.

I don't think I should but was I out of order?

There are definitely some groups that are so pushy with their views and if someone has a different opinion they are accused of being ignorant, phobic or the race card is used.

Ignore.

I have seen very young boys pretend to breastfeed dolls. Always when their mums are breastfeeding their younger sibling. Kids copy what their parents do. So my nephew pretended to much spread, because that is what his father a farmer did in the fields.

My sister had a friend who was sexually abused as a child. The friend saw all adult/child interaction through the prism of abuse. Everyone had all the compassion and understanding in the world for this poor woman's position but no one with children could interact with her for any length of time.

You're not being unreasonable and if you do apologise you're opening the door to more of this...speculation/labelling/whatever you want to call it.

Do not apologize, and let your child play with whatever toys he enjoys playing with

"...having me being so blind to his true identity."
Batshit. Preposterous and incredibly rude and disrespectful.This trans activist or whatever he is massively projecting. I do feel sorry for him but it is fucked up and so dangerous that policy now seems designed to stroke these people's egos and impose their confusion onto the rest of us.

DS1 is 11 and from a young age loved dolls and kitchens. He had a pram he'd cart about and try to put the cat in, when DS2 came along he tried to breastfeed a doll and he's always just been one of those kids who doesn't care about "girls toys" versus "boys toys". As a result DS2 has followed in his footsteps and has a toy kitchen, shop and at Christmas asked for a Beauty and the Beast tea trolley complete with Mrs Potts and singing Lumiere. These things are a signal of nothing but the fact that children have no preconceived ideas about what they should and shouldn't enjoy; they just do what they love.

It's insane to imagine that DS1's my little ponies from 8 years ago are an indication of who he'll grow up to be. I'm hopeful that there are more important factors that'll influence him.

It's fucked up that anyone would look at the behaviour of a two year old and see anything but the joy that they're allowed to be who they are. Your friend is absolutely out of order and - actually - not a friend at all. You have nothing to apologise for and nothing to regret.

My daughter must be a boy, totally, she was helping her daddy build a shed from scratch last week. I should cut her hair short pronto.

And I am obviously a man. I dislike housework, I dressed up as a cowboy rather than a princess when I was younger and loved playing with my playmobil train. I wanted to be George from famous five because Anne seemed meek. I must have totally imagined pushing out my dc and bf them and enjoying parenting them.

I do feel sorry for people who feel that the way they would like to dress or behave is not in accordance with gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes need to be challenged or we will be plunged head first into the dark ages as regards to women's rights.

My young DS used to hammer & bash away at his toy workbench, then yell "Builder's Lunchtime" & rustle up some plastic food in his toy kitchen.

Poor little chap was clearly confused & struggling...

I cannot believe that anyone thinks it's acceptable to tell someone else that their child is going to have severe mental health issues with no medical qualifications and when they haven't even met the child in question

Really, that is lunacy

Archery thank you for mentioning 'Suicide contagion' I was thinking of it but not sure how to phrase it.

I am full up to pussy's bow with gender stereotypes. All this trans trend seems to do is to make the boxes ever more rigid and insist we all must choose one.

All this trans trend seems to do is to make the boxes ever more rigid and insist we all must choose one.

Only that, as women, we may get to opt out of motherhood (at the steep price of taking life-shortening testosterone), but we sure as hell don't get to opt to of male violence, the pay gap, and basically all the oppressions that can be done to us even if we are infertile.

In this shitty new world, where many countries legalize transgenderism before they legalize abortion, or even ensure access to normal sterilization for adult women, it seems our best bet at escaping all the shit is to undergo dangerous and damaging surgery that allows us the sterilization we would otherwise be refused, and removes the danger of being forced to give birth.

And when the last girl has opted to take puberty blockers, the last young woman has surgically transitioned and the last old woman has reached menopause, they will realize that males cannot give birth, and mankind is doomed to go extinct.
And mankind will have deserved it.

Vestal Standing ovation

Vestal this is going to sound super weird but in my darker moments I do sometimes wonder if this is the plant fighting back and limiting human reproduction. The most successful (numerically) species on earth disappearing up its own naval!

What a narrow minded eejit. My son went through a brief phase aged 3 of wanting his nails painted and his hair put in bunches. We once went to the shop with him wearing an old dress of mine and it was all very silly and funny. He's now a hairy rugby playing 21 year old with a girlfriend, but even if he wasn't, I would never have seen that brief phase as anything more than just a child trying on roles and costumes.I despair at the po-faced nonsense I see around me.

Just for the record my son, aged 3 wore a lovely pink princess dress and aged about 4 he was carrying a doll stuffed down his top like a baby carrier.

Now at 6 I cannot get him to go in the women's loos with me, he wants to go in the men's, because he is a boy, he says, and off he scuttles. He wants to play with boys, he prefers boys because he is a boy. I smile and say one day maybe he will be much more interested in the girls, he looks skeptical.

He is 6, that is, I guess, all I really need to know!

It's so scary, last decade we were trying to get rid of gender stereotypes, now we are using gender stereotypes to identify children who need transing then medicating them accordingly.

Is mutual 'friend' harassing the aggressor for an apology?
Tell 'friend' that you will consider opening lines of communication with the aggressor after they have profusely apologised for saying such revolting, disgusting and sexist things to you.

Ignorant, sexist, thoughtless bollocks. That tells you everything you need to know about whether YWBU, doesn't it? You weren't. And as she is ignorant, sexist and spouts thoughtless bollocks, you have no need of her in your life. Though she could probably do with someone like you in hers; she might learn something.

Someone tell Gordon Ramsay he's a girl.

Of course YANBU, the person was being ridiculous.

As someone trans, I can honestly say that YANBU. As you say, he is 2 and is playing with a toy, toys are not gender specific and do not indicate whether or not someone is trans. He could only wear pink dresses and play with dolls and that would have literally no bearing on his gender identity, the idea that anyone would believe that this made a child trans is ridiculous and scary tbh.

I think you've shown remarkable restraint, more than I could have done.

It's more about them than anything else, and so like a fire needs oxygen so does this attention seeker. Snuff them out i.e. Just block them and don't respond to anything else they send you.

My little boy is three and loves playing with toy kitchens and his baby sister's dolls. She loves playing with his trains and cars. I'm not having an existentialist crisis about their gender issues and nor I suspect are most of the millions of other parents who see this in their children.

It is scary Htdef I hope that normal transpeople like you and non transpeople together will stop some of the crazy fuckwittery that is going on at the moment with kids transing.
I have no experience in this area, but the decision to make the effort and soul searching and consequences of puberty blockers or hormones and surgery should surely only be made by an adult for themselves. I hate the idea of transing someone else or allowing the transing of another person without that person being able to fully understand the consequences. It really is frightening.

Wonder how the friend would feel if some 'concerned' person suggested to them what they should and shouldn't do, as a 'man'. Suggested that their behaviour was somehow indicative of a 'problem'.

Exactly it is as offensive as seeing a trans woman in trousers one day and insisting that she can't really want to be a woman and that she should identify as a man because she likes wearing trousers. Ridiculous.