I just want to add my plea for this topic not to be stifled, dismissed or confined to a specific topic. Many of you have no idea how very important this issue is unless it directly influences your life.
6 months ago I deregged my account after many years here because I felt distressed at what I believed to be a culture of transphobia on MN. It upset me personally because my 11 year old DD at that time identified as a boy. She had already announced the year before that she liked girls, and she's always been repelled by anything "girly". She had made some attempts to swallow battery acid because "she hated herself and would never fit in" so naturally when she expressed her desire to "be a boy" I clung to the hope that this was how I could help her be herself and be happy.
I commented on one or two threads here at the beginning but as the trans thing exploded I felt overwhelmed and attacked. So I left.
I remembered the discussions though, and it provoked in me a desire to prove that this wasn't down to my DD being damaged by the patriarchal view of women or gendered norms. So alongside consulting the GP, Ed Psych, a psychiatric referral and a referral to a gender clinic, I set out working hard to establish with her that her biological sex had no influence over how masculine or feminine she could be or whether she liked boys or girls. I showed her examples of very feminine men and masculine women. Eventually it became clear that her desire to be a boy was because she felt she didn't conform to 'girl', because she felt girls would like her more if she was a boy and because she felt that boys get a better deal in general.
I felt sick to my stomach that the consultant was discussing hormone blockers at the time I discovered that my child was not suffering from dysphoria, she was suffering from getting a shitty deal as a female person who wasn't straight and wasn't feminine but was too young to realise that she wasn't alone and wasn't 'wrong'. I had genuinely thought my children were immune to it as I have always considered myself a feminist and thought my parenting reflected that.
DD is now a girl who is growing breasts and is fine with that. She wears boxer shorts and boys clothes and cropped hair and is often mistaken for a boy which she finds hilarious.
If it weren't for the threads I read here my child at 11, would have been on hormone blockers and in therapy working towards transition. At 11. It took the women here to help me figure out that my daughter didn't want a penis, she wanted to stop being made to feel weird because she wasn't feminine. I can never ever thank you all enough and I just want you all to know that what you are doing here matters.