My Transgender Kid

[kua]

Anyone watching? Half way through, quite different kids, though gender stereotypes seem to be a quite strong theme.

Nick seems quite nice though

I was struck by the gender stereotyping too. Girl = pink and princesses, boy = blue and football, or whatever. It's distracting and I wonder if we lived in a world where gender stereotyping wasn't so entrenched whether these children wouldn't feel quite so "different". I don't know.

Ultimately, if it were my kids I would support them and help them to be the person they wanted to be, but I still believe there's a difference between born women and trans women, born men and trans men. The struggles and experiences we all face as gender groups are so strikingly different that we cannot be identified as a homogenous group. That said, if a person identifies as a woman and wants to live as a woman (or man), I fully support that and better it be identified and addressed early and prior to puberty. I can only imagine how horrifying puberty must be to a trans person.

It makes me wonder about different kids I knew who wanted to be the opposite gender when they were younger but stayed the gender they were born when they grew up.

I'm finding this very touching, it seems so obvious what gender these children really are and I'm impressed how hard the parents are trying to accept and encourage them, must been very hard at first.

And I agree it shows how rigid the gender stereotypes are.

I think George is allowed to rule the roost a bit too much.

Stereotypes all over at the moment. ( watching live)

Yes I feel sorry for his sister.

My son loved girlie stuff as a little kid and hated football. A small kids world is far more gender stereotyped than an adults. I felt the mothers were pushing the gender stereotyping. It would have been more useful for George to see a man straight or trams doing a traditionally feminine job to break the gender stereotypes. It usually seems to be boy equals blue and girl equals pink environments that encourage such a binary approach to sexuality. Where were the female firefighters?

I felt very sorry for George's sister.

2rebecca I thought the same when the firefighters were introduced. I had an incident recently when I had to call the fire service, one of the crew was a female, not the chief ( or the correct terminology ) however glad to see a female making her way in a male dominated career.

I found it very interesting. I felt sorry for all the kids and families, but I also felt George controlled things way too much and felt very sorry for his twin, Jasmine.

Interesting that Paddy's dad seemed to find this easier to handle than Paddy's mum.

I yelled at the TV all the way through. So, so frustrating.
I hated all the stereotypes stated as unquestioned fact by the children, the parents, the narrator. Girly stuff = pink, dresses, long hair, nails, sparkles, playing hairdressers. Girl brain ffs. Boy stuff= blue, football, sporty, firefighters, short hair, 'boy clothes'.
Not once did anyone question whether it is possible that all this stuff is just STUFF, and has nothing to do with male or female. Real, actual, true acceptance is about telling children that they can like any stuff they want, without it meaning their brains or bodies are in any way 'wrong'. I cannot fathom how it is easier to conclude that to like one category of stuff means your child's perfect body is wrong, and to then encourage them in that belief, setting them up for a lifetime of 'wrong body' mentality and all that follows.
I wanted to take those children and introduce them to other, less gender-conformist kids. Girls who reject the sparkly unicorn crap and who play sports, rip jeans, climb trees. Boys who do ballet, paint nails, draw quietly, play with dolls. Who would George and Paddy gravitate to, I wonder? Are they attracted to the superficial stuff, or the actual sex of the other children?
no-one seemed to be encouraging them to accept their brains and bodies as wonderful, the way they are.

Girls who reject the sparkly unicorn crap and who play sports, rip jeans, climb trees

Aren't you doing exactly the same gender stereotyping in referring to "sparkly unicorn " stuff as "crap". ?

Why is it "crap"? Because you don't like it? Because girls like it ? Does it cease being crap if a boy likes it?

Had you said "girls who dislike sparkly unicorn stuff" - fine; but you you are applying your own judgemental standards.

You know it is possible to be bored rigid by sports not because as a girl you're not supposed to like sports but because sport is actually really boring.

The mother didn't appear to give any thought to how Jasmine was feeling. I have identical twin girls and it was obvious Jasmine has suffered a loss.

Yes. I find it really hard to watch this stuff and find the gender stereotyping weird, but I have to assume that level of gender stereotyping is normal for many families, or loads of people would be going WTF when they saw those family dynamics.

But at the same time, this is the feminism section. It isn't just about gender stereotypes being wrong. It is also that there is something wrong with masculinity because masculinity is ultimately about subordinating other peoples and being more important than them (as we saw with George and his sister).

There's nothing wrong with sparkly unicorns.

I find it hard to imagine no one in these families or in their immediate area had thought people could be a female and like things often liked by males or vice versa. So I am sure the parents would have gone there first. We were seeing them after years of this, so this place at the point where the documentary was filmed was not where it all began.

I do think there is much more going on here for these kids than simply liking things that are identified as being for the opposite sex. I think for some kids they do totally identify as the opposite sex so by extension they are wanting to avoid things that are socially connected to the sex they are biologically.

For me it is our societies obsession with 'gender' which is part of the issue. And may cloud the issue for some, but I am not sure it simply causes it.

For Nic it was clear he wanted a male body, not just an absence of nail polish or to play football.

What is the research on all this?

Is there some research into what this all means for the individuals affected by it, it doesn't seem that much genuine scientific research is done. It seems to be all around accepting how the child or adult presents themselves and making the body into the body the person wants. This may be right for some, not for others. I am not sure how the medical profession is differentiating between people and how they present and what is on offer when the medical profession is not sure the person really has gender dysphoria etc.

I think that is very likely greyhound, that they want to go along with stereotypes because they want to identify with that sex.

But that isn't really what I was getting at (although maybe other posters were).

What I find weird is that in the process of taking on those stereotypes for their own child, they are making or encouraging the child to make vastly sexist statements or do sexist things to other people.

And that is not okay. And the families must know, as you say, that lots of people don't fit those. I don't think Jasmine wanted 'girl time' with mum or to not be hit and have nasty comments made because she was a girl. She wanted time with mum and not to be hit or have nasty comments made.

And there's a difference between stereotyping yourself and stereotyping others.

Absolutely almondpudding.

I totally agree.

I felt George treated Jasmine very badly.

I am always quite frustrated by the descriptions of a 'typical' little boy or girl, which go along with trangender kids, my dd is very much a girl but not 'typical' by the standard on these types of programmes. I do feel that that needs to be emphasised more. I feel all the documentaries start at this mid/end point and what I want to know is what happened before!

I didn't get why George couldn't just wear trousers, have short hair and be a tom boy without her parents suggesting that that meant she was a boy. I was a bit of a tomboy and my main friend was a boy when young. My son loved playing with dolls and dressing up in dresses when young. You don't have to change your gender just because you don't like the very fixed sterotyped stuff of childhood. Perhaps introducing George to less feminine women, getting her playing in a girls' football team etc would have helped. Instead when George refused to put on a dress his parents decided that meant she was a boy! Mad.
Many kids who want to be the opposite gender change their minds as older teenagers. Often when the reality and limitations of the gender assignment process kick in and when they realise society isn't as binary as it appeared when they were young.
I've yet to see a TV programme on transgender kids that has a mother who is an engineer or similar and doesn't equate being a girl with being girlie.

I watched this with great interest.

I am a feminist, I have 5 children, they have all been brought up to like a huge mix of different things, there has been no stereotyping in this house at all, and I have controlled/explained any gender stereotyping that comes from outside the house.

One of my children is transgender.

I think the families in that programme didn't particularly do other families living through this any justice.

Its about more than wearing a dress or climbing a tree, although the families in that programme made it feel that way, and I think in a lot of families that may be the case.

It isn't always the way though.

Although my child is choosing to live as the opposite gender just now they still go to boxing club, wear make up, does motocross, go to dancing, just a huge mix as it has always been.

Its something I struggle with a great deal, my child will do this with or without me, its not a choice I would make for them, but it something I have to support.

'I didn't get why George couldn't just wear trousers, have short hair and be a tom boy without her parents suggesting that that meant she was a boy'

I really don't get this either. I only saw about 10 minutes of the program, but George and Jasmine's mum talked about how she always dressed and styled them exactly the same when they were younger, and seemed to treat them as 'the twins' rather than 2 separate children. Couldn't George's fondness for short hair and jeans and physical activity just be a way of asserting the fact that he/she is a different and separate person from Jasmine? Why not just allow George to behave in a different way, dress differently, play with different toys without deciding that it must mean he is now a boy?

My 3 year old niece has short hair, loves jeans, has not much interest in clothes and is obsessed with Lego. Her parents just treat her as a girl who loves Lego, not a little girl who is becoming a boy.

Agree there was a huge amount of gender stereotyping in the part of the program that I saw.