Transgender kids article in today's Guardian

[TerraNovice]

Did anyone see this article about Louis Theroux's documentary that airs tonight? www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/05/transgender-kids-children-change-sex-families

Admittedly I have some issues with it. Is it really good to give kids hormone blockers from childhood? And I do find one of the mothers' statement problematic where she says she felt like she had a little girl because her son liked her shoes and "feminine" things and wasn't interested if you put a truck in front of him. I find these ideas of gender really reductive. A child who is uninterested in traditional masculine or feminine toys etc may not necessarily be transgender, they could be an effeminate boy or a butch girl. Why pump them full of hormones when they are very little?

Any thoughts?

Have you got links to the research on that AFG? I would be interested to see it. As I said upthread, I'm broadly in sympathy with the rad fem take on this, while disturbed that this appears to also make me agree with some far right nut jobs . I'm a scientist so have been looking at the scientific evidence for the causes of TG. This is an interesting site, the author is a MtF TG, a computer scientist, who writes very well I think and is causing me to do a lot of deeper digging.

The waters have been seriously muddied, for me, by the actions of some trans activists alongside the strengthening of gender stereotyping leading to much stricter "gender norms". I want to challenge these, not appropriate intervention when a genuine medical condition has been identified.

Link fail!
ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TS.html#anchor107763

"I want to challenge these, not appropriate intervention when a genuine medical condition has been identified."

But what makes a genuine medical condition? That seems very blurred nowadays. What used to be called being unhappy due to bad circumstances, or grief, etc is now called depression and is often doctored with medication. It is indeed muddy waters.

Yes I am her still and reading with interest, trying to take in all the different view points while trying not to get angry!

Almond my son is now 18 but this all started when he was 16 so was then a child. At every step of the way I have offered my support and opinions when asked, and respected his wishes.

It was a battle to get any support initially & he deferred to me as a HCP used to table thumping with the NHS, particularly while he was so depressed and confused in the early stages & I just wanted to seek some specialist advice. Subsequently when attending any medical appointments if he needed moral support I would go with him, but always sitting to the side & so he could conduct the sessions only offering thoughts if asked.

He now goes to his gender clinic appointments alone or sometimes with either myself or his sister for company but we don't see his doctor with him unless its a family session. We are all having family and individual counselling to hep us through this minefield.

I accept that to many of you on here it seems like mutilation, to see your child (and he is still my child however old he gets!!) voluntarily go for a double mastectomy, but rather that than the alternative. Many FTM trans teens don't go for bottom surgery, for many years if at all. That side of the surgery is less advanced than MTF reconstruction field apparently.

If I could persuade him to accept his body as it is I would in a heartbeat, and I (initially) hoped it was a phase as all mothers do I am sure at the outset, but when you see the anguish they are going through and the certainty in their minds you can't help but see they are genuine.

One of the phrases I keep hearing from the medics and was used on the Theroux interviews was " the child must be Consistant, Insistent and Persistent" to convince their psychiatrists they truly are dysphoric, before they even START to diagnose the condition.

Lots of people are consistant, insistent and persistant about things they are ' wrong' about - Anorexia springs to mind to really fit the above criteria.

Your point being Reddragon? Are you comparing anorexia to dysphoria?

The point is obvious surely?

Not to me Ehric no. The phrase I quoted was jut one I had heard before and it was interesting it was used by the american psychotherapist on the programme.

Obviously the diagnosis and treatment of anorexia is very different as it is dysmorphic in origin.

"If I could persuade him to accept his body as it is I would in a heartbeat, and I (initially) hoped it was a phase as all mothers do I am sure at the outset, but when you see the anguish they are going through and the certainty in their minds you can't help but see they are genuine. "

Is this not the same for parents of anorexics?

Gender is a social construct a penis is not. And yes i think Trans feelings and anorexia come from similar complex places.

So do I.

Anorexia is based in body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria is a totally different diagnosis although I agree they are both similarly complex places.

Smirnoff I was not intimating that anorexics are not genuine, no one would want their child to remain anorexic.

May I ask then if I am so wrong, what would you do?? What would you do if your child came to you in complete mental turmoil and asked for help as they were feeling suicidal?

It's all very well having these theoretical arguments but these children (not just mine) come to their parents with a plea for help, some of them far too young to understand what they are experiencing or why they are in such turmoil.

Should we say it's Ok dear off you go & play you;ll grow out of it,its only society putting this pressure on you ???

Parents of trans kids go to hell and back ( as I'm sure parents of anorexics or any other MH illness do) questioning myself and my child's course of actions. I come on any thread about trans kids to see if there is any new advice or suggestions to ease the situation, and possible resolve the turmoil without resorting to the plans he has for his poor body.

Sorry if arguing about social bloody constructs doesn't seem the most supportive of answers to the here & now.

I don't know any transgender people (not that I'm aware of) As I said I'm a bit sceptical of the assumptions the parents of the younger children in the Theroux documentary made that not liking traditional "boys things" means their child was a girl , not a boy.

My experience of transgendered people is therefore limited to those who are publicly in the media. At the one extreme I see the type of transactivists who post on sites like Stavvers' blog and at the other gentle, creative people like Antony Hegarty, whom I admire a lot and whose experiences I cannot take other than at face value.

It does not seem Floundering's daughter was pigeonholed at an early age in the way some of the children in the Theroux documentary were.

Sorry ,I mean your son.

Can I ask those of you who are sure all gender differences are just social constructs why there is such a huge disparity in the rates of violent crime committed by men and women? Or drunk driving and speeding offences?

I have seen comments on this forum frequently about women and girls being told they need to be compliant and good. Do you really think women don't engage in these activities just because of that? I don't.

Floundering - no one is saying that their 'angst' and mental pain is not real or not incrediably traumatic for the parent but pain in its self does not validate it as a 'real' thing like being gay or mean thecrest of who are 'cis' are lucky to have the right brain in the right body .
And what would i do as a parent ? Treat it like the MH problem it is. Therapy, therapy and therapy.

Another one who as a child preferred boy's toys and thought that boys had the best fun. If I had been given the option of changing into a boy at that stage, in my innocence I would have been delighted. I also hated puberty and breasts.

But since then I have been perfectly happy as a woman, a mother and a grandmother.

I really appreciate a lot of the points made here as I have never been happy about people doing such drastic things to perfectly healthy bodies. We really are heading back to the nineteen fifties now, with such stereotyped gender roles.

Still, the short answer is yes - but you don't fully appreciate the depth and temporal length involved in that socialization. It isn't just 'being told we need to be compliant and good', it's being raised in that expectation since birth and having other behaviours disapproved of. It takes 15 - 18 years to raise a human and much of our brains are grown and formed outside the womb, not in it: plenty of time to softwire cultural norms in. Similarly men are more violent because they are raised in a culture that expects and even approves of men who express their emotions violently. How else do you account for different cultural gender norms? Even in the west Britain has a serious problem with violent behaviour. Even in Britain we didn't have such strong gender stereotyping 20, 30 years ago.

That said, catsrus' article was aninteresting reminder - I have come across what the chap called 'intersex' people before. Our science hardly knows everything yet, and I know about a tiny proportion of that. How and where biology intersects with sociology and even psychology is something that will continue to be investigated...

Sorry if arguing about social bloody constructs doesn't seem the most supportive of answers to the here & now.

The problem then is that since this is a feminist discussion place you will find that the posters who come here do so to discuss social constructs.

As far as suicidal ideation in a teenager goes, I think it'd be counseling for me, too, rather than agreeing that their situation/body is responsible for how they feel and that's the thing that must be changed. I understand that where you are today, you see suicidial ideation because someone thinks they're in the wrong body as substantially different to a teen who is suicidal for any other reason, but I'm not sure it is.

" much of our brains are grown and formed outside the womb" Quoting myself just to remind you to take a good look at the difference in size between your baby's head and your own: that's the influence socialisation has on human brains. Simplistic, but it gets the point across!

Perhaps there is a pre disposition at birth for blue eyed people to take more risks than brown eyed people, but because it is not enforced and grown by any socialisation, it withers away.

Or perhaps it's there in the stats somewhere but because no one gathers eye colour on a speed camera or crime report, we have no idea about it.

Yes the interactions and reinforcement mechanisms will be varied, complex and probably highly individual.

Just to add I have a friend who has an AIS female - XY chromosomes - she only found out when she was in her early 30s. She thinks her parents were told when she hit puberty and her cancerous gonads were removed - but the way it was phrased to her in her 30s was "as you know you're XY normal" and the notes indicated the patents had been told. Well if my uneducated WC parents had been told I was "XY normal" I doubt they would have had a clue - they would just had done latched onto the word normal.

My friend has female genitals, has been raised female, has never experienced menstruation, cannot have children, identifies as a lesbian. I am in no doubt that she is female, nor has she. I had assumed that was pretty much down to socialisation but I do wonder about the impact of hormones on the developing feotus.

Because I don't conform to gender stereotype, nor does one of my dds, and because I SEE the appalling stereotyping going on ATM, I personally tend towards rejecting any approach which does not take this seriously. Otoh there does seem to be some scientific evidence that for some individuals there is a biological basis (differences in some parts of the brain) for wanting to transition. I reject binaries, I reject biological binaries because biology is more complex, I reject gender binaries - I also reject theoretical binaries which say "if I'm correct then you must be wrong".

I am still appalled at some of what I saw on the film - I think the case of Cole / Crystal was really interesting as this seemed to illustrate the problem that I, as a feminist, have with early transition. I am relieved he had the space and freedom to decide to remain Cole. Is that only because of his father's intransigence though?

I need to do more reading, but I think there is a complex mix in the trans community of people whose transitioning might have been for quite different reasons.

An olive branch icon might not go amiss on mumsnet... sorry for any upset I caused you Floundering . As I said there are a lot of difficult topics on here.

And Floundering - as well as therapy I would be teaching and showing my child that gender isnt binary but a continum the way that sexuality is.And im not a rad fam as i personally do belive that as well as ohysical differances between the sexes there are phychological ones some evolutionary ( ie cooperative social chatty women maybe had more children and violent dominant men also had proportionaly more kids) and some biological /hormonal ones. But the continuum is pretty oblious even in very very binary gender cultures. I am actually always quite amused b. How 'violent the language the militant binarlanguage use. Very ironic and if it makes me a terf so be it :)