So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

[Garrick]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-girl-meet-twin-boy-6348318?

Summary: Twins Alfie and Logan, 4yo, are both boys. Logan has insisted on wearing girly clothes, doing girly things, and that he is a girl since the age of two. His mother, who sounds brilliant, reports him wishing his willy would fall off.

I'm somewhat flummoxed. When I were a lass, little boys like this were described as camp (behind their fathers' backs) and, as far as I know, mostly grew up to be camp and fulfilled their rightful destinies. Rather like Ugly Betty's brother.

But this is what some transwomen say they felt like as children, isn't it? And I have rubbished it because I find it hard to believe in gender as an innate feeling. I'm not sure whether I think little Logan proves me wrong

Lass: I don't mean a scientist precludes at all. Just that in the past it wasn't perceived as girly. The science college I attended had four men to every girl so we were in the minority.

For anyone interested this is the times article in transgender kids, its basically a reformulated press release with anecdotes.

Part 1
Transgender Kids
With a sharp rise in under-tens being treated for gender dysphoria in Britain, Ben Machell meets the transgender children who are taking hormone treatments before adolescence arrives
A few days before I am due to interview Jazz Jennings, the most high-profile transgender child on the planet, her publicist emails me a document entitled “Do’s and Don’ts”. It contains a list of questions I may and may not ask the activist and reality star, and a list of words I should and should not use, when speaking to Jennings in person or when writing about her afterwards.
The first thing I am instructed not to do (“do not” is written in bold block capitals) is say that Jennings was “born a boy”. Instead, it is considered “appropriate” to say either that Jennings was “assigned male at birth” or that people assumed she was male when she was born. This, in turn, means that Jennings should be “referred to with proper female pronouns”, even when describing her during the brief period before she started publicly identifying – “presenting” – herself as a girl, which she began to do at the age of five. Describing Jennings as “transgender”, as a “trans youth” or a “trans kid”, is fine. Using the collective noun “transgenders” is not. “Never say ‘tranny’?,” the instructions warn. It is, they explain, “a slur”.
Jennings has long brown hair, a deep tan – she lives with her family in south Florida – and ever so slightly sticky-out ears. In conversation, she is articulate, which must partly be down to practice: she was first interviewed on US national television at the age of 7 and today, at 14, is regularly invited to speak publicly about her life as a transgender child. She has her own YouTube channel, advertises Clean & Clear face wash (“See The Real Me”, runs the campaign’s slogan) and, last year, was listed as one of Time’s “25 Most Influential Teens of 2014”. In other words, she is making herself visible, a fact she concedes is kind of ironic.
“If you know who I am as a person, you’ll know that when I get a lot of attention, I don’t really feel comfortable,” she says. “I’m not self-centred. The truth is that I’m willing to put my story out there for other people. I’m doing it to help you understand.”
This is a sentiment echoed by 16-year-old Cameron, a transgender teenager from Westchester County, New York, who is featured in Susan Kuklin’s book Beyond Magenta, a collection of interviews with trans kids. “I tell people, ‘I’m a boy, call me “he”.’ My birth name is irrelevant.” Cameron was a “girlie kid”, but that began to change as the years passed. It was at the age of 14 that Cameron came out as transgender to school friends. But it was actually Cameron’s father – a fireman – who mooted the idea of a gender reassignment. Cameron’s mother came along for the first hormone injections. “I’ve always been pretty decent about trying to explain things,” says Cameron. “My parents did their internet research and I tried to answer their questions in a non-alienating way. I tried to help them understand how much more comfortable hormones would make me feel.”
From Cameron’s perspective, stereotypical ideas about gender don’t make sense. “Males float around somewhere, females float around somewhere else, and some people don’t float at all – they swim. What I mean is, swimmers control where they are going. The swimmers do their gender instead of be their gender.”
Cameron and Jennings are just two of a new generation of teenagers who are willing to speak publicly about gender dysphoria, a condition previously known as gender identity disorder – a mismatch between biological sex and the gender a person identifies with emotionally and psychologically. A 2012 survey suggested 1 per cent of the UK population may have gender dysphoria, although, perhaps unsurprisingly, solid figures are hard to come by, due to the number of people who will never seek treatment for how they feel.
What we do know, however, is that we are witnessing a sharp rise in the number of British children receiving treatment for gender dysphoria. The Tavistock and Portland NHS Trust treats gender issues for those under the age of 18, and over the past six years, the number of children aged ten or under being referred to them has quadrupled. In almost 50 of these cases, the children were aged 5 or younger. Two of them were three years old. Against this backdrop, the parent of any young child could do worse than listening to Jennings and understanding who she is and how she became the girl she is today.
I am told not to inquire about surgery or her sexuality, although, as it turns out, she addresses both: she says that she has not yet undergone any form of surgical gender reassignment and that she likes boys. She admits, with a gentle stoicism, that the feeling is rarely mutual. “There are a lot of boys who think associating themselves with a transgender individual is gross,” she says. “They think if they date someone like me, then they’ll be called ‘gay’. I’m waiting to find someone who can push aside those judgments and accept me for who I am.”?
Romance is just one of the challenges we see Jennings forced to negotiate in I Am Jazz, her new reality series. It is a remarkable piece of television, providing a window into the world of a teenager whose life is at once immediately familiar – she has friends round for sleepovers, she bickers with her older twin brothers – and yet almost incomprehensibly alien. Strangers threaten her with death online. She plays football for her school team, but only after her parents – Greg and Jeanette – fought a two-year legal battle to allow her to line up against girls rather than boys. She frets that the hormone pills she has been prescribed aren’t boosting her oestrogen levels enough, and that she won’t mature as quickly as her friends. It’s a complicated time – adolescence – somehow made about a million times more complicated.
Jennings was originally given the name Jaron, and began expressing the belief that she was in the wrong body when she was a toddler. In the first episode of I Am Jazz, her mother describes how a two-year-old Jennings asked, “When is the Good Fairy going to come with her magic wand and change my penis into a vagina?” She describes how she had nightmares in which beards and moustaches pursued her, threatening to attach themselves to her face. On her fifth birthday, she had a pool party and was permitted to wear a sparkly girl’s swimming costume for the first time. Soon after, her parents allowed her to present as a female, a process known as “social transitioning”. She chose the name “Jazz” after watching her older sister play Princess Jasmine in a school production of Aladdin.
“When I look back at photos of myself as a really young kid, I look into my eyes, and I just see a little girl,” she says today. “Maybe I was dressed as a boy, maybe I had short hair, but I was a little girl. I knew I was. People say, ‘How could you know?’ But they’re underestimating the intelligence of a two or three-year-old. At that age, you know the difference between genders. I liked Barbie dolls. I liked things that were pink and sparkly. That was just me. I knew what was going on in my brain.”

Part 2She emphasises that being transgender really has nothing to do with your anatomy. There are terms for individuals who have undergone sex reassignment surgery – “transexed”, for example – whereas to be transgender is simply to have the conviction that you are the opposite gender to the body you have been assigned. It’s a leap – partly intellectual, partly empathetic – she says many people still struggle to make, preferring to use the presence or absence of a penis as the gold-standard demarcation of gender. I get the feeling Jennings has had more people inquire about her genitalia than any 14-year-old should.
“People are always asking, ‘Did you get the surgery?’ And I always say, ‘It doesn’t matter what’s between my legs; it’s what’s between my ears that defines me,’?” she says. It’s a line she came up with a while ago and one, she admits, grinning, that she is proud of. “People need to understand that your body doesn’t decide who you are. Your brain does.”
Which isn’t to say that Jennings does not want a female body. She does. When she was 11, she began taking hormone blockers and, some time later, oestrogen pills. The use of these hormone treatments is central to Jennings’ story, but it is also one of the most contentious issues surrounding transgender children and the question of how best to support them.
The hormone blockers themselves do exactly what it says on the tin – blocking either the testosterone or oestrogen in a child’s body and preventing them from sliding into a potentially traumatic puberty. “I definitely didn’t want to develop as a male, that’s for sure. That was my worst nightmare. To get an Adam’s apple, to get hairier, to get a deep voice,” says Jennings. “I think that would be any girl’s nightmare.”
The blockers are reversible. If you stop taking them, puberty kicks in. The rationale is that they buy a transgender adolescent time, so they can think about what they want to do. The oestrogen pills, however, prompt more permanent changes, such as the development of breasts and a higher-pitched voice. If you are a transgender boy, taking testosterone can help you develop certain male features, such as facial hair. From a parent’s perspective, the introduction of these “cross-sex hormones” is a leap of faith. Do you allow your 14 or 15-year-old son or daughter to embark on this process knowing there really isn’t any way back? If the answer is yes, then, upon reaching adulthood, your child may decide to undergo gender reassignment surgery. In the Netherlands, where this hormone treatment was pioneered, this programme is sometimes known as “12-16-18”, a reference to the ages at which each step is taken: blockers, hormones, then surgery, the results of which, in many transgender women, have been known to fool gynaecologists.
In Britain, the most controversial thing about this type of hormone treatment is not that it is widely available for transgender children, but rather that it is not. In America, recent years have seen the opening of dozens of clinics – many US states boast several – in which social workers, psychologists and endocrinologists work together to treat trans kids as they enter puberty. In the UK, we have the Tavistock and Portland NHS Trust. And that’s it. And while they have begun prescribing hormone blockers in some cases, this is as far as they will go. Cross-sex hormones are not made available. In other words, if Jazz Jennings lived in this country, she would not have been able to become the Jazz Jennings we see today.
Many British parents believe that their children could and should have benefited from the kind of treatment that is available in the Netherlands and United States. Susan Green is the mother of a transgender daughter, Sasha (not her real name), who is now in her early twenties. Green, who lives in Leeds, “always knew” that Sasha was a girl. “I had a two-and-a-half year-old who wanted to wear Pocahontas pyjamas and be the pink Power Ranger. Who was obsessed with the Little Mermaid and wanted Barbies for Christmas.”
Sasha was referred to the Tavistock, where gender dysphoria was confirmed. She had socially transitioned during her final year at primary school, and was happier than she had been in a long time. When she moved to secondary school, though, she was “absolutely annihilated”, according to Green. “She took seven overdoses in a year because of the bullying she got. This was at 11, 12 years old.”
It was at this point that Green inquired about the possibility of Sasha receiving hormone blockers, and was told it was not something the Tavistock would provide. The best they could do, according to Green, was offer to support Sasha through a full male puberty. “I told them, ‘No, you won’t,’?” she says. “?‘Because she’ll be dead. She will not live through that. It would stigmatise her for the rest of her life because every time she walked into a room, you would know [that she was biologically male].’ Sasha said she would rather be dead than feel as though her body was going against who she was on the inside.”
The rates of self-harm and suicide among transgender youth are shockingly high. According to research carried out by mental health charity PACE, 59 per cent of transgender young people in the UK have attempted self-harm, that figure dropping to just 9 per cent of all 16 to 24-year-olds. In the US, data published this year revealed that 45 per cent of transgender 18 to 24-year-olds have attempted to kill themselves. It is, according to Jennings, the main motivation behind her decision to document her life. “It’s one thing to change someone’s perspective on the topic of being transgender,” she says. “But if I can share my story and prevent one of those losses, then that is so much more.”
As for Sasha, Green felt her only option was to take her for treatment in America, to a clinic in Boston, where she received hormone blockers in time to prevent a male puberty. Later, the clinic provided her with oestrogen and, at 16, Sasha travelled to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery. Three years later, she was a Miss England finalist. “She’s beautiful,” says Green. “She’s happy.”
One result of her experience is that Green is now heavily involved with a support group for transgender children and their families. Called Mermaids, it is a network that is vocal in calling for hormone treatment to be made available in the UK. Deborah, a health and social-care lawyer from the southwest of England, is also a member of Mermaids. (A quick note on the name: it turns out that many transgender children, particularly girls, develop a strong connection with mermaids. Jennings has her own line of wearable silicone mermaid tails.) Her child was assigned female at birth and, despite being “a real tomboy” in childhood, it wasn’t until puberty hit that James – not his real name – became deeply unhappy.
“It was when he realised that his body was developing the wrong way – as female – that’s when it hit him,” says Deborah. “That there was something much more profound going on in terms of how he felt about his body.”
Much of James’s story echoes Sasha’s. He became depressed, he dropped out of education and made “a serious attempt on his own life” prior to being seen by the Tavistock. As James had already entered female puberty, it was considered too late for hormone blockers; all the NHS could offer was psychological support until he was 18 and old enough to be referred to adult services. Like Green, Deborah was not convinced her child would live that long, and so took James to see the same paediatric endocrinologist in Boston. By the time James was seen, he had “developed a bust”, something Deborah feels could have been avoided if he’d had access to hormone blockers sooner. He will have “top surgery” – the removal of his breasts – next year. In the meantime, James uses tight binders to hide them, but is otherwise much happier than he had been prior to treatment. “He just did a week in Cornwall, and wore a binder under a wetsuit while he was having surf lessons,” says Deborah, chuckling with disbelief.
The doctor who treated both Sasha and James is Dr Norman Spack, who in 2007 founded the first American clinic to treat transgender children. Spack is a warm-hearted, enthusiastic 71-year-old. He says he has treated “around a dozen” British children since opening his clinic, and a TED talk he gave in 2013 about his work has been viewed online more than one million times. He says his motivation to work with transgender children is a result of having treated many transgender adults and finding the experience “extremely painful”, because so many of them had to live with the trauma of never having the chance to be the person they felt they were. “By the time puberty begins, the child who says they are in the wrong body is almost certain to be transgender and unlikely to change those feelings,” he says. “Not doing anything for them not only puts all of them at risk of suicide, but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society.”
But not everyone is so sure that giving trans children cross-sex hormones is the right thing to do. Dr Polly Carmichael is director of the Tavistock and Portman Gender Identity Service. “It’s complicated,” tends to be her unapologetic refrain when discussing her work. You get the feeling she is someone who has spent a lot of time patiently dealing with people who are outraged that her clinic is offering hormone blockers to 12-year-olds, and then a lot of time patiently dealing with parents who are outraged that her clinic is not offering cross-sex hormones to their transgender 15-year-olds. “There is not a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’,” she says. “There are no ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. There are just complex young people in the middle of all this who have a range of possible outcomes.”
When I ask why she won’t prescribe transgender teenagers under 16 cross-sex hormones, she says, “Because the NHS is an evidence-based service, and at this point in time there’s not enough evidence to support that.” In terms of treatment, what might seem like a no-brainer for individuals such as Jazz Jennings or Sasha Green – people who have had gender dysphoria all their lives – may not seem such a good idea when you’re faced with a teenager who has only just come to terms with the fact that they are transgender, but who desperately wants to do something about it. “Children are developing individuals. You have a young person who is exceedingly sure about their feelings and feels they definitely won’t change, and parents who understandably worry a lot about self-harm,” she says. “But someone can go from feeling that they want hormones and surgery to then deciding that they don’t.”
She also stresses that offering cross-sex hormone treatment as an off-the-shelf solution for trans kids doesn’t reflect what a complex and nuanced issue gender identity is. It’s not simply a question of being a girl trapped in a boy’s body or vice versa, which still represents a fairly traditional binary outlook on gender. Carmichael says that an increasing number of children and adolescents are placing themselves on a spectrum, using labels other than a trans binary identity to describe themselves, including “non-binary” and “gender queer”. These children don’t necessarily need hormone treatment so much as “the support to really explore their sense of self, their place in the world and who they want to be”. In other words, helping children to be happy with who they are doesn’t have to mean changing who they are.
“In the UK, we’re seeing much younger people socially transitioning,” says Carmichael. “But sometimes it then becomes almost impossible for them to think about the reality of their physical body. They are living totally the gender they feel they are, but of course their body doesn’t match that, and it becomes something that can’t be talked about or thought about. Clearly, it then becomes quite difficult in terms of keeping their options open and ensuring fully informed consent for any appropriate physical interventions.”
One thing everyone agrees on is that we, as a society, need to be a lot more understanding about the reality of life as a transgender child. Visibility is vital, which is why the existence of Jennings is such a big deal for many trans kids her own age. “I’ll see comments online from people who want me to die, or who want to kill all transgender people in general. When I see this, it just means I have to continue sharing my story until I am needed no more.”
In the meantime, we have to hope this slow shift towards normality continues. Deborah, the mother of James, describes how he and his 14-year-old brother lie on the sofa with their trousers rolled up, comparing leg hair. “When he began the hormone treatment, we said that this wasn’t going to make everything perfect. This is something that is going to help you be true to yourself and initiate some changes in your body. But sometimes life will still be crap. You’ll have exams to do and have rows with your friends, and that it wasn’t a panacea,” she says. “But living a lie and trying to be someone you’re not? That’s no life really, is it?”

Whether someone is British or not isn't decided by how they feel in their head. Whether you are British or not is a legal category defined by the Government, based on things such as residency, place of birth and descent.

And people who have British citizenship but have Welsh, English, Irish etc as their ethnicity generally do so for clear social and political reasons, and have an ethnicity based on residency, place of birth or descent, which is commonly understood.

If I say that I a Welsh despite having not been born there, not lived there and not having Welsh ancestry, then I am just being offensive if I say it is a Welsh feeling in my head. And I certainly shouldn't be included in a scientific (or other) study of Welsh healthcare, Welsh employment conditions or similar.

If someone wanted to do a scientific or other academic study of feeling British, and they wanted people to talk about cultural behaviour of 'British' people as in the Beach example, they would have to be explicit and ask 'how people who live in the UK behave' or similar, depending on the study.

But being British isn't something anyone can identify as and have that socially, politically or legally accepted. It had a specific shared meaning to do with the Britsh Isles, Great Britain and the UK.

What is a woman?

'This is interesting. I think feeling British might be similar (ish) subject to similar issues as gender identity...'

'So I think there is such a thing as feeling British but it is completely different for everyone. Because everyone's experience is unique.

Now I might argue that all of these things are geographical stereotypes but that doesn't mean we can use them in a discussion.'

The discussion, as had by person B, a feminist, or person C, a trans activist...

Person A: What is a Manx person?

Person B: A Manx person is a person descended from, born, or resident in the Isle of Man.

Person A: What is a Manx identity? What does feeling Manx mean?

Person B: It is the cultural and social identity shared by people born, resident or descended from the Isle of Man. I can give you a range of diverse examples of people from the Isle of Man describing it...

Or...

Person A: What is a Manx person?

Person C: Who is Manx is defined by a set of geographical stereotypes that are hard to define. It is unique for each Manx person. You can't define the feeling.

Person A: Geographical stereotypes? That kind of sounds like the Manx people might be from a particular location that you're not mentioning, and that these stereotypes can't be freely chosen by just anyone because they are based on prejudices about a group with a particular material experience or shared history. Those stereotypes, if imposed or perpetuated by others, might harm those people.

Person C: No. Being Manx is an indefinable feeling in your head. Are you denying that you know whether you are Manx or not?

Person A: I don't know. What does Manx mean?

jenny

I think we are talking about different things. I wasn't talking about what a British person actually is, I was talking about feeling British.

the xxed

Interesting reading, the death threats sound just awful.

But WhenSheWasBad we keep coming back to this same problem then - if you can't define what something is, then how do you identify something as being (or feeling) like it?

Apologies for the double post, but have just recognised a syntactic issue here too - if someone says they "feel like a woman", are they saying they feel like/in the same way as a woman feels, or that they feel that they are like a woman?

I think we are talking about different things. I wasn't talking about what a British person actually is, I was talking about feeling British

Derail but "feeling British" came up for discussion during the Scottish referendum.

The Yes side seemed to talk about "being/feeling Scottish" from the beginning. The No side (which I am on) initially kept to economic /political points but as the day approached, and it seemed at one point as if Yes could win, a number of posters (me included) were surprised to discover an emotional attachment to being British.

Yes, as Deianera says.

The question of what it is to feel British can be answered because we know what a British person is.

However any British person feels about their own culture, that is a way of feeling British.

The question of what it is to feel like a woman can't be answered because we don't know what a woman is.

we know what a British person is

Well yes I guess we do have a legal definition for a British person. But we also have a legal definition for woman and a transwoman can be a woman under the law.

Well in law the definition of woman would be:

People whose sex was female on their birth certificate and haven't objected to that fact.

People whose sex was male on their birth certificate, who have been diagnosed as having sex dysphoria and got a gender recognition certificate.

Which means the vast and overwhelming majority of people in the UK who are called women are called that based on their biological sex, and their legal status as women has nothing to do with them experiencing any form of gender identity.

But you seemed to be claiming some kind of scientific definition of woman based on people feeling like women, which is at odds with the legal definition, which is based on sex for over 99% of women.

During the Scottish /British debates many Yes voters were dismissive of the idea of being British because they saw it only as a legal construct.

"Scottish" (despite Scots law being different from English law) is not a legal construct but for many Yes voters "being Scottish/feeling Scottish" was more concrete and real than "being/feeling British"

Although I honestly don't know how that can be applied to what you are debating here.

jelly not every country uses the UK definition.

www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/ireland-transgender-law-gender-recognition-bill-passed

The legislation, which will be signed into law by the president shortly, contains a number of other innovative features, including permitting the recognition of a person’s gender of choice based on self-determination, making Ireland only the fourth country in the world to adopt this progressive approach.

What's "progressive" about that?

Yes, different countries in the world have different laws, and in some cultures there are more than two genders.

None of that changes the shared understanding in our culture (and most others) that a women are the people who has female reproductive organs, and that trans women are males who want to be seen as being part of that group.

That is not the same thing as gender identity, except for the trans women.

jenny
But you seemed to be claiming some kind of scientific definition of woman based on people feeling like women, which is at odds with the legal definition, which is based on sex for over 99% of women

We've been here before. Once again in my personal opinion. There is no clear definition for what constitutes a biological woman.
I've said it before but the Olympics committee don't have a clear definition of biological woman that works for everyone.

I'm not asking you to critique the concept of biological sex. Anyone can critique it because it is explicitly defined, complex and has a degree of variation. Part of the purpose of defining concepts is so that we can critique them and pay ethical attention to the consequences for people at the boundaries of any category.

I am simply asking you what a woman is in terms of gender identity.

Internal gender identity is not what legally defines most women as women, so you still haven't defined it by mentioning the law.

What's "progressive" about that?

You would need to ask the Guardian journalist who wrote the article. It's a quote from the article, not my opinion.

I am simply asking you what a woman is in terms of gender identity

Feeling that you are a woman/girl, would need to be consistent and long term.

The idea that there is not a clear definition of biological woman is ridiculous really. There is obviously at least a clear definition of biological female infant or our sex wouldn't be recorded on our birth certificates.

Sometimes that definition may be wrongly applied, or some people might not agree with it, but the definiton does exist.

Unlike the definition of what a woman is as a gender identity...

How can you feel like something if there is no explanation of what something is?

The idea that there is not a clear definition of biological woman is ridiculous really

Then take it up with the Olympics committee. Sorry but we have kind of covered this already.
You and I aren't going to agree on it, that's fine people have different opinions.

I find this topic quite interesting I find it interesting discussing it on mumsnet, but we are just going over old ground now.

This is a post from one of the blogs mentioned a while back. It's by the mother of a transgender child.

gendermom.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/the-binary-blues/

I'm finding this fascinating because it's just not what I expected to find. The impression that I get from trans activists or supporters is a very strong idea of what gender roles are, and yet this mother repeatedly talks about resisting that. Although equally she does seem to have a very clear idea herself of what things are "masculine" or "feminine" (even though she fully believes that men and boys can do or like feminine things and women and girls can do or like masculine things, she definitely ascribes activities, styles and items into these categories.)

I thought this post was interesting because it makes a very good point, that it does somehow seem more difficult now to cross things over. Some things have evolved and changed and that is good, like we don't tend to think of careers as being "for men" or "for women" any more, but in personal expression and likes and dislikes it does seem increasingly gendered, especially for children. Both genders can be interested in gardening, but flowers are "feminine" and vegetables are "masculine". Just to give one example. It feels like every time we identify a gender neutral activity it splits into a "girl" version and a "boy" version.