I'm playing devil's advocate but bear with me...

[Ofew]

I was reading the thread about the AAP and what struck me was that the emphasis is on changing the child to fit into society (e.g. by making a gender non conforming boy into a girl via drugs and surgery, even in cases where there is no gender dysphoria) rather than changing society to accept children as they are.

I have a sort of parallel in my own life: one of my kids is deficient in growth hormone. There's no medical cause as such, he doesn't have a condition which causes him to lack growth hormone. He just doesn't make enough of it to grow at a "normal" rate.

When he was four and this was diagnosed we were advised that he should have growth hormone treatment.

This takes the form of daily injections which he will probably need until his mid twenties. Without the treatment his adult height would have been around 5'2", so very small for an adult man.

The only reason for him to take the growth hormone is essentially cosmetic. He should grow to well within normal ranges.

We did agonise about whether to set him off on this long term course of treatment. It felt like we were making our young child change to fit in with society instead of asking society to accept a smaller than average man.

After a lot of soul searching we made the decision to start the treatment. I still feel uneasy about it in some ways, but I couldn't bring myself to subject my own child to the challenges of being "different" when I knew there was something I could do about it.

Are there parallels here with the course that some parents might take with their gender non conforming kids? Am I judging them too harshly?

I can’t see how this is comparable. Your son was treated for a recognised condition and you followed medical advice. Giving unnecessary hormone treatment to children can lead to huge repercussions in later life, including infertility and cancer. Additionally, evidence suggests that children will usually grow out of gender dysphoria. I can’t even remotely see a connection between your case and this.

It's a difficult topic but I think there is value in just gathering testimonies about how we help children who are different in various ways.

When the consultant paediatrician told me she thought my younger son had autism, I felt caught between various narratives that were all negative in different ways. I didn't want to embrace and affirm his differences but nor did I want to pretend they weren't there. I was also weakened by my own fear of him becoming alone and lonely.

There was a brief initial period where gentle pressure was put on me to go through a certain system. When I resisted phrases like "not ready" and "deny" got trotted out - but not by people who were really applying their minds to the issue at hand.

Thankfully we were able to find language that worked both for me (with my strong sense of which things were good/bad for him) and the professionals (with their understanding of trajectories and of available techniques) . So we moved towards talking about letting his strengths "rest" whilst shoring up his weaknesses and found common ground.

A GNC child is may be joyfully and unproblematically asserting their imaginative play skills on the one hand or forming wrong conclusions about themselves due to their struggles with reading signals used between their same-sex peers. The parents need to figure out "what's really going on here" but they must, surely, have their judgment clouded by their own fears and now by fears being thrust upon them by lobby groups.

This is no fan-club of Susie-from-Mermaids but her statement that "I was terrified" when her child first claimed to be a girl is one I can totally relate to.

Peakpants - I think you're taking this too literally.

I understand the thought processes that make you come to this OP. My daughter was born with a cleft palate - now there is an argument that her birth defect could be left and that people should deal with the fact her voice would be very nasal - but we didn't want that for her. Life is hard enough...

However the difference is that there is physically nothing wrong with being a masculine girl, or being a feminine boy. there's no physical difference to anyone else, nothing biological that sets them apart.

Your son would have an immediately recognisable difference to his peers. trans kids don't - UNTIL they start to transition. It is in fact after they start the process that they look different, sound different and act different to their peers. They are purposely set apart.

Trans children become UNLIKE other children, rather than making them more LIKE other children.

I'm not saying that being the same as other kids is the goal. But equally, making physical changes to a child that immediately sets them apart from their peers feels to me like a backwards step and very unhelpful in the acceptance that they need to feel.

peakpants

I get what you are saying but I think the parallels are there.

The medical advice we received was basically "if you don't give your child growth hormone he will be a very small adult and this will have a negative impact on his mental health because he won't be a "normal" height".

We were even told that there could be a child protection issue if we refused the treatment (totally inappropriate in my view, but shows that there was a lot of pressure).

Your child is very unlikely to reach adult good and wish he was only 5'2" though. (Unless he really really wanted to be a jockey...?!) And no one is going to be able to tell that he was going to be 5'2". And it shouldn't affect his fertility - will it?

I understand what you're saying and you're right society should change - to accept that boys can be feminine and girls can be masculine.

*adulthood

Sanity yes that's true. We asked ourselves what the 18 year old DS would say if he was only 5'2" and knew there was something we could have done about it. We concluded he would be pretty angry about it. This was a large part of our reasoning for taking the treatment.

can I be the first to mention Napoleon?

I don’t think there is a parallel here for most cases. I worry that society has pushed kids into overly girly or boyish stereotypes and that kids who have attributes of the other types are made to feel something is wrong with them. I wish we could teach kids that being a girl, for example, is not about liking pink or wanting to wear dresses and that the spectrum for what a girl can like and do is incredibly broad. I do feel for some trans people and want to understand them better but I also am concerned that we should be telling kids that ‘different’ is ok and laudable and doesn’t always require ‘correction’ through medical treatment.

BTW I feel the same about my own body. I’ve been tempted to try things like Botox or to have my boobs ‘corrected’ post kids but decided against it because I refuse to accept my healthy ageing body needs to be ‘corected’. Something seems to be wrong with our society that normalises so much medical and surgical intervention.

OP I feel that this is different in the case of your DS and have no doubt you are doing your utmost best for him in his interests.

OP having re-read your first post, I do see a slight parallel because your point (I think) is that shouldn’t society just accept a short man? He would be no less of a man. There is a terrible stereotype than men should be big and strong (and it bugs me how many women buy into this and refuse to date short men). Why not challenge that stereotype?

The answer in a perfect world is for your son to be accepted as a short man. We don’t live in a perfect world however and probably things would be tougher for him without the treatment.

What a tough decision to make. I don’t think there is a clear answer.

Also it's a physical difference, he's lacking a hormone which you're replacing. The parallel is closer to a child born with congenital hypothyroidism - they not only will be stunted, they will also have learning difficulties without the hormone thyroxine. Society will be less accepting of their norm. This is technically disability theory.

True dysphoria will imo not be too linked to gendered items but a deep difficulty with their body, which is a mental health difficulty.

However, yes society should accept a short man.

Society should accept a lot of people but it doesn't.

I don't see this as the same at all.
I've never met anyone in my life who was totally gender conforming. We all have aspects of both "gender stereotypes" in our personality.

Transing children is based on changing their body based on their personality. And it's ludicrous.

Your son, on the other hand, has been diagnosed with an actual physical condition - a deficiency of a certain hormone. Not a "tall personality in a short body." And while it may not be absolutely NECESSARY to address that deficiency, it's certainly not the same as deciding a boy must be a girl based on his preferred toys and outfits.

You believe his life will be bettet if he grows up to be within accepted "normal" parameters of height. And I don't doubt you are right. I would probably do the same. But my "tomboy" daughter is now a young woman as she was always destined to be.

You can't change sex and transing children is lying to them.
This is not the same.

Sorry for the wall of text. Don't know what happened to my paragraphs.

Also, people aren’t suddenly being indoctrinated that being short is a dysfunction that requires correction (otherwise I’d be in trouble as I’m barely 5 feet tall myself!) On the other hand children are being told that there may be something wrong with them if they don’t ‘feel’ like one gender or another. I think that is the big difference.

My DB chose not to have the treatment and is 5'1". He is happily married to a woman much taller than himself and has lovely DC, he is a director at an insurance company so it hasn't harmed his prospects, my cousin did have the treatment and is also happy. At no point was either parent told that their child would kill themselves if they made the 'wrong' choice, they were not accused of being bigots for not wanting their child to be used for medical experimentation (this was 25 years ago at the time of cod when bovine growth serum had predominantly been used so their was risk).

I know the point you're trying to make but it isn't actually comparable.

I have a medical condition which I would say disfigures me (some people wouldn't classify it as a disfigurement I'd say). It does have medical consequences which might get progressively worse as I age but no one can say. It is harming my physical health now but in a small way. I'm choosing to have surgery on it. The surgery is very painful and many in my shoes would just choose not to have it. There are cosmetic benefits to having it done and I value those. I do look at how I'm modifying my body and particularly in light of the relief I feel making these changes I do empathise with some trans people who desperately want to alter my body

But in my case and in your son's there is sonething about us which makes us significantly different to the norm. Trans people are mutilating healthy body parts and drastically increasing their risks of other health issues like certain cancers. I firmly believe that other intensive psychiatric therapies would help the majority of them. And many still go on to experience acute distress after their surgeries and so it doesn't even actually help their dysphoria

Trans people are mutilating healthy body parts and drastically increasing their risks of other health issues like certain cancers. I firmly believe that other intensive psychiatric therapies would help the majority of them. And many still go on to experience acute distress after their surgeries and so it doesn't even actually help their dysphoria

yy
This is a new thing. Wait 20 years and I think you will see lawsuits from the children who were permitted to mutilate their bodies at an age when they were deemed too young to drink alcohol or get a tattoo.

It's a very interesting question, OP. There's a wonderful book by Andrew Solomon called Far From the Tree about children who are unusual in some way (e.g., they have dwarfism, or they're deaf, or they are autistic, or they are gay - a whole range of things) and it's about the extent to which parents accept their children as they are or whether they try to change them to be more "normal" (for want of a better word). It's often the case that the parents feel very differently from the children about this. In your son's case, it's a hard one because five foot two isn't abnormally short, it's the low end of the normal range, I guess, but on the other hand it isn't easy to be a short man in our society.

I can see the parallels about society accepting difference v forcing people to conform to expectation.

I think this is an important point re GNC children. I don't see parallels with gender dysphoric children who are distressed by their sexed bodies. we dysphoric children tend to be very inward looking. They tend not to be concerned about 'passing' etc. Their desire for blockers etc comes from the distress puberty is causing them with regard to aligning internal perception and external features.

Thanks to all the contributions to this thread. I was hoping for an Interesting discussion and have got that.

Just to make it clear I have serious concerns about the "transing" of children and the modification/mutilation of perfectly healthy bodies to fit into some gender stereotype. I doubt I'd ever think it was right to give my child puberty blockers or wear a chest binder, let alone do what Susie Green did.

I think good points have been made here that my son has a medically recognisable deficiency and we are replacing the hormone that his body should have produced on its own. I agree this does make situation different.

I wonder whether Susie Green et al might claim that their child was also lacking in a hormone that they should have had? This might be consistent with the "born in the wrong body" narrative, i.e. Susie G might argue that her child was not producing "enough" oestrogen and was producing "too much" testosterone, so medical treatment was "necessary" to "correct" that.

I also have a similar example, which at least made me think. I have a family member who doesn't produce sex hormones - as a result, had they not had medical treatment, they wouldn't have produced testosterone and developed into a normal adult male. A friend of mine suggested that wasn't this taking medical treatment to develop into their gender identity, and therefore, they were somehow transgender or not "cismale" or whatever.

It made me think, but I realised that no, this was a purely biological functional problem, and you would treat this relative just as you would someone with type 1 diabetes. My relative never doubted they were male, and they weren't given a choice of would they like treatment to develop into a male or female.

I wonder whether Susie Green et al might claim that their child was also lacking in a hormone that they should have had?

Yes I think things are very much going in that direction. You see some transwomen define themselves as intersex and say that they should have been female if there hadn't been a biological error somewhere along the line. Many literally believe they are female and their surgeries are correcting an abnormality rather what is actually the case.

But then you see some argue very passionately it isn't a medical condition too.