Article on transgender children in preschool

[partystress]

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cdev.12758

The critique of Transgender Trend from teachers against conversion therapy references this article about transgender children in preschool. It reads to me like utter nonsense, but think the journal is pretty respected so would welcome views from anyone who knows more about this than I do.

Now there’s a surprise, Camper

by the way. if you want to experience a sharp increase in blood pressure, take a peek at the full wiki entry for Kristina here

In research examining mental health outcomes, Olson and colleagues have observed typical rates of depression and only marginally elevated rates of anxiety in transgender children when compared to control groups of children. Such findings contrast with reports of poor mental health outcomes among transgender adults, who frequently experience discrimination and marginalization

transitioning as a child is less harmful than transitioning as an adult?

In research examining mental health outcomes, Olson and colleagues have observed typical rates of depression and only marginally elevated rates of anxiety in transgender children when compared to control groups of children

But that means nothing unless you track that cohort through teens / adulthood

It's like people want to put children into neat little boxes

It's like people want to put children into neat little boxes

mmm hmm

it's so terribly regressive, and so infuriating that people buying into it are abusing the rights of gender non conforming kids while convincing themselves they're on the right side of history or some such nonsense.

if a child is upset or confused by the gender stereotypes being imposed on them you change the stereotypes, not the child for fucks sake!

My 11 year old is currently singing that he is a potato. Do I need to call birds eyeand book him in for waffle therapy?

Him?? Stop misgendering your potato, Stealth. There are laws against that these days...

Hope it's chips, it's chips...

When DS2 was born DS1 chose a toy pushchair from a boot sale and pushed it everywhere. He was being daddy. FFS. It's just kids. Being kids.

This kind of shit makes me do glad that my sons will be attending a nice old fashioned school with staff all over the age of forty.

and even if the boy is being mummy - really who gives a fuck?

kids like to pretend, and so do grown ups. and when it's harmless you just let them get on with it.

what you don't do is encourage them to believe that humans can change sex

When DS was little he went mad for this pink suitcase on wheels out of a charity shop. He put his toys in it and pulled it around everywhere. His dad went mad, said everyone would think he was a girl or gay. I told him to grow the fuck up. DS is 10 now and I have no idea whether he’s gay or not, but I am so don’t really care. He certainly doesn’t Think he’s a girl. His dad is still an asshat though, unfortunately.
Pink is a colour
A toy car is a toy car
A dress is a garment of clothing
None of the above have the slightest thing to do with reproductive sex.
I do hate pink though, always have. Still a woman though, and a girl before that.

Kids who are brought up in pink and blue colour coding are often the firmest believers in gender stereotypes at the ages of about 3-5, before they start to rebel. Sometimes kids who are brought up relatively gender-neutral then attend preschools full of pink and blue tribes, observe and generalise and join pink and blue tribes themselves. They have no clue what sex means (not saying gender as I don't think anyone has a clue what that means any more), they just generalise on what they see.
DS's generalisation at the age of 4 was that "girl" meant person with ponytail. Must have been a lot of long haired girls at his preschool. If he had had long hair, would he have demanded to have it cut, or deduced that he was a girl too? Could go either way. Plenty of children falsely deduced that DD was a boy after she randomly cut all her hair off at 4. By 6 they can cope with the idea that girls can have short hair and trousers and love football too. FFS let's not now teach them the opposite! (Next job to teach them that boys can wear skirts, but perhaps men need to establish that norm first as women did with trousers.)

Olson's article is funded by Arcus Foundation, see the footnote on the first page. The money comes from John Stryker, a U.S. billionaire. He is a massive funder of transgenderism across the world (and great ape conservation). To take just one example, he has given $1million to Transgender Europe.

... To quote Ereshkigal:
What does this steaming pile of ordure mean???

Thanks for sharing OP. I got so irritated, that I couldn't even read it properly. I will come back to it. But a couple of points I noticed when I skimmed it:

1. These children were apparently recruited for the study in 2015. We have NO idea how this will all pan out. There are only 36 of them, and this particular article focuses on those aged 3-5. Which means they are still children and who knows whether they will continue to identify as trans.
2. The "Limitations" part tells you a few very interesting things: Thus, our results on these measures could reflect the fact that young children may not understand sex and gender as distinct, and further, that we did not provide adequate explanation for this distinction. .... These findings open up questions regarding not only how transgender children interpret the items for these particular measures or how they represent sex versus gender, but also more broadly whether children at this age understand the distinction between gender and sex.

At this point, any responsible adult should shout: Of course they don't know the difference! They're CHILDREN!!!!! Most adults don't even know the difference between sex and gender!

3. The participant family demographics appear to reveal that most of these kids are coming from well-off, liberal households. This is interesting. The authors even reluctantly speculate that political ideology of the parents may play a role.

DS asked me when he was going to grow boobs when he was a preschooler. Kids that age have a somewhat fuzzy notion of how bodies work.
Trans preschoolers is just plain nonsense. What you actually have is preschoolers who don't fit into predetermined gender boxes because they're all individuals and gender is a social construct.
So tired of this nonsense now.

It only makes sense if you believe people are born trans, but that is exactly what trans ideology teaches.
I reject "trans" on it's own as an adjective. The umbrella is too big. "Trans" is not real. Gender dysphoria is probably real. I'm not sure I agree with the lack of research into any alternative treatments other than transitioning, but I respect those who have gone through it to reach a certain point and to find peace within themselves. All the other made-up genders, genderfluid, non-binary, they just aren't real things and today I decided I'm going to stop pretending they are. A guy at work asked me what genderfluid was. I think formulating my answer crystallised my feelings. It's just nonsense. It's nonsense younger people take very seriously because young people often take emotive subjects too seriously and have the zeal of the convert when they discover a new cause. Denouncing non-believers as evil is easy when you have the Ultimate Truth on your side, right?
I would have been converted if I was a child now. I have always been very masculine, since I was about three. (Persistent) All my friends were boys and I wore boys clothes, having huge rows with my mother when she tried to compromise with something at least "unisex". (presents as other "gender") I play acted as a man or a boy. I dressed up in my dad's clothes while my sister borrowed my mum's high heels. I came out in secondary school to a male friend.
I don't even think I'd have got the option to be "genderfluid" or "non-binary". They'd have pumped me full of anabolic steroids til my heart burst and all that was left of me was a corpse with a beard.
The fact they want to co-opt tiny children into this nightmare makes me furious. Let tiny children be tiny children. Let annoying and awkward teenagers be annoying and awkward. Let effeminate boys and butch girls be themselves. If this treatment was necessary, those who needed it would find it themselves, as adults. I can't understand how a child who can't sign a contract for a mobile phone is deemed competent to agree to sterilise themselves, cut down their pool of potential partners massively and commit to taking hormones for life, regardless of the risk to health. It is criminal.
rant over

heresy, 3) is really telling isn't it. The "trans" kids I know were brought up in liberal families largely ignorant of stereotypes. Happened to like things cross stereotype e.g. boys who liked long hair/pink. No discomfort with being their birth sex, till they then hit very stereotyped peer groups at preschool or school.

Though I've found even sadder the stories in the press about children whose parents are so insistent on gender conforming they effectively trans their own children ("he would never wear dresses"/"she always hated rough play" type narratives).

Whoever wrote the article are not scientists and they are doing whatever discipline they are involved with a great disservice. Probably a social science.

This sort of article is required though and the more serious researchers will eventually laugh them out the university of Washington.

pre-school-age children use gender to guide their own outfit choices (Halim et al., 2014) and toy choices

I must have odd kids then, because beyond absolute hatred for the occasional item (generally for no obvious reason, although sometimes because I haven't been subtle about how eager I am for them to wear it), my kids both just wear what they're issued with.. although DS2 is starting to get opinionated about my clothes when we go shopping.. so that's something I suppose (although he keeps trying to make me buy soft cardigans - mainly so he can snuggle them later)

And as to toy choices, they play with what's available surely... DS1 loved cars, didn't get soft toys, couldn't stand painting, enjoyed any kind of catapult/launcher. DS2 had many soft toys, carefully arranged in bed, would paint me pictures all day, and would turn anything into a gun/sword (his greatest desire was for a nerf gun for his 3rd Birthday, that he then wasn't strong enough to cock, and a fairy costume, which he rocked to school more than once)

The things that come out of these people's heads - have they ever actually met kids?

catkind
Agree. And I also feel sad for children whose parents completely reject them if they express any cross-gender behaviour or trans identity. I don't know what the answer is, but surely the Tavistock's advice to engage in watchful waiting and let kids be kids makes most sense. In fact, IIRC, they say that for very young children, you should be cautious with social transitioning because it might make identifying with their birth sex later more strenuous.

As a general reminder for everyone on this thread, this is what GIDS.nhs.uk has to say about it:

The age at which adolescents socially transition has decreased in the last decade. Steensma & Cohen-Kettenis (2011) report that between 2000 and 2004, out of 121 pre-pubertal children, 3.3% had socially transitioned (clothing, hairstyle, change of name, and use of pronouns) when they were referred, and 19% were living in the preferred gender role in clothing style and hairstyle, but did not announce that they wanted a change in name and pronoun. Between 2005 and 2009, these percentages increased to 8.9% and 33.3% respectively.

However, quantitative and qualitative follow-up studies by Steensma et al (2011; 2013) present evidence to strongly suggest that early social transition does not necessarily equate to an adult transgender identity. The qualitative study reports on two girls who had transitioned when they were in elementary school and struggled with the desire to return to their original gender role. Fear of teasing and feeling ashamed resulted in a prolonged period of stress. One girl even struggled to go back to her previous gender role for two years.

As such, in our approach, we would encourage exploration of gender roles in this younger cohort, with a view to keeping options open and not having any pre-conceived ideas as the longer term outcome.

gids.nhs.uk/evidence-base

FFS such dangerous nonsense. What young children dress in does not have lasting meaning for them and certainly shouldn’t for anyone else. Kids may have very little control over what they can wear anyway.

I am female (the boring old cunty type). For nursery and primary years I was usually dressed in boy’s clothes. Hand me downs- (no older female relatives), or usually from jumbles because we were skint.

Boy’s clothes were more hardwearing (i guess they still are) and our kids clothes needed to kit out more than just me. So that’s what I wore.

It’s horrible to think what could have been read into that and what bullshit my parents could have been encouraged to believe by well meaning teachers.

It didn’t occur to me to give a shit about any of this or to specifically ask for ‘girls’ clothes till I was a lot older- although had I had a choice I would have liked to have liked to have had ‘my own’ clothes.

Had I been given a choice I wouldn’t probably have picked anything much different at that young age because shorts and jumpers are easy to wear and don’t get in the way.

Great posts Barracker, Turph and everyone else. This is very unsettling. I can’t believe it’s being seriously promoted.

s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/35674080/Martin___Ruble_Curr_Dir_Psy_Sci_04pdf_2_1.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1534718152&Signature=bjt39vYKDHuGxzgAP67GAyGfuQk%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DChildrens_Search_for_Gender_Cues_Cogniti.pdf

It’s a piss poor article. I can’t be arsed to really read it properly but one measure they used was to get a researcher to mark the kids outfit out of 5 for if it was stereotypically girly/boyish! That’s science for you!

What strikes me is the assumption that gender is real and inate. Contrast with that one I pasted above from 2004 which talks about the way kids pick up social cues to learn about gender.

It seems implicit in the old article that gender is a social construct. Now it’s just feelz