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?

tibbysmum I was not "picking apart language ". There was no need for your snippy reply. I'm trying to understand but I really don't understand what ", he feels, behaves,thinks,responds as a boy/man" means.

yes, the thinks/feels/responds as a man is the issue for me - I do all of that, but I'm a woman, I spent years growing up having short hair, having body issues, having interests and strengths that were very traditional male, but it was just fairly normal teenage angst - I'm now a grown woman with kids, who has longer hair because it can be put in a pony tail, doesn't even own a dress and works in a male dominated profession, I'm the one that does the DIY, has the practical STEM skills in our family, but I'm still a woman.

This is what so many of us find difficult, what feeling/thinking like a woman means, when we can't describe it ourselves.

"ideology of gender which denies Trans peoples actual experience, or not."

I have opinions, not an ideology. And I don't deny transpeople's thoughts, feelings, and experiences. I just don't believe the optimum solution to the problem of someone having a psychological issue with a perfectly normal and functional body part is cutting it off, be it a leg or a penis.

And I don't believe the solution to a small child's problem with gender roles or feelings of unease with his body is to block puberty.

Would anyone care to comment on the link I provided and everyone ignores that shows a lifetime FtM now feels OK with being female after taking birth control pills and wonders if her previous feelings were because her body was just low on oestrogen?

"This is what so many of us find difficult, what feeling/thinking like a woman means, when we can't describe it ourselves."

Exactly. Also, how someone who has been born male and socialized as a man all his life would know what "feeling like a woman" would feel like, even if there was such a thing.

Interesting blog post that encapsulates the issues well I think giaqualia.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/doctor-christian/

A few years ago I was a wispy washy liberal feminist who had no idea about the deeper implications of the trans movements attempts to redefine me. Through encountering this on FWR in MN I have read more widely and am horrified at the unintended consequences - not only of accepting transwomen as women but of the catch all definition of what it is to be a transwomen.

Cats that's a great letter. I used to be wishy washy about this too until I got my thoughts straight and ironically it's the trans activists who have pushed this process with a lot of feminists.

Ditto - it's the transactivists behaviour that has shocked me into thinking this through more clearly. Here's another blog post from Gia (who turns out to be Brian Coxs wife - so Brian Cox is evidently now being labelled as TERF by some trans activists because he's married to her - bonkers) giaqualia.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/controversy/

She also came to awareness about this by seeing trans activists attack friends online ....

No it isn't picking apart language to ask what feeling and behaving like a man means.
Talking about girls acting and thinking "like boys" just seem sexist to me.
What sort of feelings and behaviours makes you a man?

Law and order svu is about trans teens today. It'll be interesting to see what approach such a mainstream programme takes, albeit one that i find sometimes engages in quite an interesting way with the subjects it deals with.

Ok I wasn't going to come back for another pasting but here goes. I am not as well read in feminist ideology as clearly many of you are, but I do consider myself a feminist, but in addition I am someone who tries hard to see others points of view and agree to disagree if I can't accept it.

My son feels just that he is my son, it is not just the physical differences, it is the dysphoria, the constant use of female prounouns, the lack of self esteem as a female (for him) the feeling wrong all the time, the constant reminder of a good set of boobs that increased his self loathing that no amount of counselling would help him cope with .

You all seem obsessed with the surgical / medical aspect of this condition, as if he or any trans person would leap straight into this without major counselling & psycho analysis to make sure it is the right thing for them. If along the way up to that point he changes his mind no one would be happier than I, but it seems unlikely.

Just because you don't understand it why must you attack it? If a disabled, or gay person made choices you didn't understand or support and was harangued in the way trans people are on MN you'd be barred.

I respect your right to disagree with me but you have no right to pick apart so viciously my "wrong"(in your far from humble opinions) terminology, and treat me as an abusive mother who is virtually experimenting on her child.
Especially when I am using medically accepted terms used by experts in their field.

From what I understand of your posts, "My child feels like a man" doesn't mean that he is claiming knowledge of how men feel (or even whether that is a different feeling/existence than that of women). What he is saying is "I think I am a man". Please correct me if I'm wrong.

If the alternative is suicide, of course I understand your going along with whatever your child wants to do to remake his body in the image that his brain says it should be. That still doesn't make it right, imho. Mutilating the body to fit the brain's distorted perception of what it should be is wrong, whether it is someone saying "I want my left leg to be amputated because it shouldn't be there" or "I want my penis & testicles cut off because it shouldn't be there".

Mutilation to you, and I have to say me too initially Cote, but surely if it saves his life, then IF it gets to that point, a long way down the road, then its no different to any other plastic surgery.

You can't compare dysmorphia to dysphoria it is a completely different diagnosis, and psychiatric approach.

I agree with you Floundeing on this point. If a person is living in crisis they need make the decisions they can live with. It is important though to be careful about making sweeping statements that apply to everyone and not just the person in crisis.

I also agree that the crucial thing is to help a child in crisis deal with that, and gender reassignment might be the appropriate solution.

Where we differ, I think, is that some of us believe that crisis is being created by the way society views gendered behaviour as it relates to sex assigned at birth. We don't believe that a baby can be born in a male body with a female brain or vice versa because we don't think there is good scientific evidence for the whole 'female brain' notion. We would rather society accepted a range of behaviour as 'normal for that person' so that every child felt accepted.

The older I get the more subtle and insidious I see the "acceptable" gender divide to be. I'm 60 now, was involved in 70's and 80's feminism and think that the ACTUAL discrimination we faced then was the easy bit to tackle.

Floundering you are posting on a board filled with rape, abuse and harassment survivors. We can all be sympathetic to a girl approaching puberty and suddenly thinking omg I don't like the way this is going. It is not her that is the problem, it is the society which treats us like shit. Perhaps you could try telling her that, it might help her a little.

And then you will have to, as we all do, weigh up the pragmatic options very carefully. The pragmatic choice you eventually take will not make the society-level issues any less valid. The very best of luck to both you and your child.

For 'her', please read 'him'. Sorry, I do get confused with transgender vocabulary sometimes. And then carried away.

Flora thank you, yes I agree, I am not making sweeping statements, while I am (obviously) speaking from a personal perspective, I have tried to stick to facts and discuss the trans issue as regards children. What I have a problem with is that there are many of you who are so hide bound with words and meanings you miss the bigger picture, you make sweeping statements about what parents are doing as if we are all pushing our children through some sort of abusive surgical mill.

The whole point of this thread OP (as I see it, the poor thing has been cared off!!) was to discuss the programme & its subject as it was portrayed specifically not descend into a discussion about the wider trans issue.

There are PEOPLE at the basis of these problems, some very young and troubled and while as a wider issue yes I agree with you Gibbering society pushing kids into pigeon holes has a lot to answer for, that is an issue for long term change by feminists and when you are faced with the issue right here and now with a child you have to deal with the here & now..

Also rape, abuse and harrasment are not unfamiiar to me, sadly, that does not mean I will let my issues with that make me unsympathetic to another subject under discussion, and to say that survivors of any of these awful things are therefore anti-trans people is insulting really, although I can see it would make it more difficult to get your head around- it wasn't easy for me.

Please don't worry about the gender pronoun thing it is a minefield- but most don't mind a genuine slip up(I've had to unlearn 17 years of them!) its the deliberate misgendering that is the insulting thing as I understand it!

If your 'child' is over seventeen and transitioning, doesn't that make them an 'adult?'

Surely it is up to them to make their own decisions as an adult?

This was a thread about children.

Floundering - I'm fairly sure that cutting off perfectly normal and functional body parts is mutilation to everybody, not just to me.

"but surely if it saves his life, then IF it gets to that point, a long way down the road, then its no different to any other plastic surgery"

Plastic surgery by definition is changing the appearance of a body part, not cutting it off. Actually, I can't think of a single instance (aside from trans) where a real doctor will agree to cut off a body part because you ask it to be amputated.

I do understand where you are coming from and I sincerely hope that I will never have to make such decisions for my DC, but genital mutilation is not like plastic surgery because (1) you can't reverse an amputated penis, (2) you can't create a fully functional penis, and (2) there is a very high rate of dissatisfaction with the results of these permanent operations, with significantly high rates of depression and suicide in post-op transsexuals. The study quoted in that link says 1/5 regret the sex change and suicide attempt rates run at 18% (almost all of the 1/5 who regret the sex change).

Of course I hope that transitioning turns out to be a source of happiness for your DS, but the statistics are quite worrying.

I always wonder, given the research on how many girls displaying "cross-gender" behaviors and dysphoria have been sexually abused (a disproportionate number!), what exactly the real story is in some of these cases.

When girls are distraught at their breasts, it's often about what the attention they get for them means, about the fact that they may not like the attention of men in general and now they are subjected to it constantly, or they may even be abused by a man who is talking lewdly about their development. This is what happened to my friend who wanted to be called a "boy" name and cut her hair short. Developing breasts is terrifying when people are using them to objectify and dehumanize you.

Of course, not all dysphoria is related to sexual abuse. But I've seen studies showing that up to half of ftm transgender identified people have been victims of sexual abuse. That's too alarming. And the prescription is stopping their puberty, if it's "caught" early enough?

The horrors that will be visited on the next generation of abused children will make the torture suffered by abuse victims from my own generation, like myself, seem like petty slights.

Actually, I can't think of a single instance (aside from trans) where a real doctor will agree to cut off a body part because you ask it to be amputated

Elective mastectomy and elective hysterectomy. Removal of extra digits on hands and feet.

Whilst I am sceptical that an 18 month only baby is apparently capable of determining he or she has not been correctly assigned the correct gender and am equally sceptical of the motives of the "die cis scum brigade, I do not doubt there are people who genuinely and sincerely are transgender. And having said that if Floundering is still reading this I find the 2 posts immediately above mine very insensitive.

I wasn't aware of those studies on transgender and abuse but harassment was the reason why I viewed puberty with dread. That is what I was getting at yesterday and I therefore found Abortion's post interesting. Cote was a bit blunt perhaps. But this is the topic in hand, it is not an easy one. Most on these boards are not.