"My child is transgender" or, count the number of stereotypes...

[WeeBisom]

www.parents.com/parenting/my-transgender-child-this-is-how-i-know/

This article has to be one of the most craziest ones I've read yet. Things that are apparently 'masculine' and a sign that your girl is really a boy: finding farts funny, Pokemon, wanting to play baseball, watching wrestling, wanting short hair, zombies, Minecraft, mud, superheroes, selecting 'boy' pieces in a board game, having boy friends, wanting to wear a Transformers t shirt, Mario...

Also, can anyone with children tell me how realistic the initial conversation with the four year old child is? Do four year olds even ask what death is? And would a four year old even be able to grasp (let alone pronounce) the concept of reincarnation?

I think what makes me angry about these articles about trans kids, and their endless sea of stereotypes, is that could have been me. This child sounds a lot like me - even down to the funny interaction in the clothing store with her insisting on trying on boy's clothes. Except my mother didn't make a big deal of it and just let me wear what I liked. It's chilling that if I was a child today I could have been put down a lifelong path of medicalisation just because I liked dinosaurs and Power Rangers.

Four year olds often have a death obsession, ime.

The stereotyping is crap, though.

Another sign of being trans is having an unworldly command of language at a very young age:

Trans advocate Jazz Jennings on life before, after gender ... "When I was 2 years old, I went up to my mom and asked her, 'When is the good fairy going to come with her magic wand and change my penis into a vagina?'"

@nauticant

DD loves Pokemon, thinks farts are the apex of humour, keeps asking for a set of weights, and is a bit upset that the boys won't let her play with them at playtime. I just put it down to her being seven and having a personality.

Horrified by the idea that anyone could think she was supposed to be a boy or even is a boy just because she hasn't bowed to the female socialisation yet.

Surely all 4 year olds find farts funny ?

It’s ridiculous isn’t it. If they took that child to live somewhere without supermarkets and toy shops with pink and blue aisles, or boys and girls clothes aisles, and just let them be, I wonder if they would still feel that their body was wrong.

Who told this child they don’t belong in that toilet, or they shouldn’t buy clothes from this or that rail? Clearly the parents strict adhering to gender roles is the main thing at play here. When my DD wanted clothes from the boys section, I just bought them for her. In fact I would seek out boys shoes for school and nursery as the girls ones were all flimsy open topped ones, whereas the boys ones were closed tops and rugged, strong soles, ideal for playing outside and running.

When DD wanted short hair, I cut it for her. There has never been any emphasis on long hair being essential - again, I would encourage short hair because DD hated having it brushed.

That these parents go along with all the gender bullshit and are then somehow shocked when their child shows a preference for things “not allowed” for them, is laughable. Or would be if it weren’t likely to lead to a lifetime of medication, therapy and sterility ahead of them.

FFS. That girl sounds just like I was as a child. Even down to wanting to be called a boys name.

And what is with her being convinced she was carrying a boy when pregnant? My friend was absolutely convinced she was having a girl. Wouldn't entertain the fact it could be a boy, so strong were her gut feelings. Her 21 year old son is in the navy now! Sometimes our minds get these things wrong (I never had any feelings when I was pregnant with any of mine)

I still find farts funny. And yet I'm still a woman.

@ScrimpshawTheSecond, thanks, interesting to know. Would a four year old be able to carry on this kind of sophisticated conversation about reincarnation? This child seems very precocious, is all, and I have a suspicion that a lot of these conversations with trans kids are actually just invented by the parents.

I find this whole topic really hard to manage, to pin down in a conventional way.
My daughter (ASD) decided at 5 that she wanted to be treated as a boy. From 5-11 she presented fully as a boy, from pants on up. She tried out a boy's name. She freaked out if she was asked to even touch anything pink. She was referred to the Tavistock GIC. She talked about not wanting breasts, about having her brain transplanted into a 'boy body'. That was her best idea for how to solve the issue!
And we went with it. We bought her boys' pants, and boys' shoes, she got the boy option in party bags and fast food restaurants. All her friends are boys, so we fought for her to sleep in a boys' tent for y2 camp. If she'd wanted to change her name, we would have done. And I can't see that we would have been wrong.
BUT, the underlying issue for her was that she wanted to inhabit the space that boys have in our society. She didn't want to be cooed over, or encouraged to smile on command, or to play the socially complicated games that her peers were playing. She wanted people to respect her boundaries, and this was the only way that she could do it.
I don't want to hurt individuals who want to live differently to me. I don't want to dismiss others' lived experience, because of my privilege as a white, middle class cisgender woman. But I don't want people, especially girls, to feel that the only way they can live in their preferred way is to entrench themselves in stifling stereotypes!
So on an individual level, I stand for people's rights to choose how they want to live, and I will do my best to support them in that (when it is safe for everyone... I'm not supporting threatening/aggressive/vicious behaviour) but on a societal level, I don't want there to be a need to rejig your outward identity to be able to live comfortably! I want to be able to be my own sort of person, and not have to confirm to expectations, and I want that freedom to be extended to others too.

@Redshoeblueshoe

Surely all 4 year olds find farts funny ?

I find farts funny and I’m 40. Does that mean I’m actually a man?

The passage about them being in the clothes shop and the mother telling the child not to look at the boys clothes because they were made for a boy's body and she had a girl's body!! Well of course the child isn't going to grow up thinking they can be a girl who wears what they like if they get told that. 😥

The mother seems to have initially accepted that her daughter didn't want to conform to gender stereotypes, but the father seemed to want her to be more 'girly'. A psychologist took only twenty minutes (alone with the child) to 'diagnose' her as being transgender. Parents are being totally let down by the professionals who they are putting their trust in.

It wasn't easy to find a psychologist with experience in the kinds of problems our family had.

I wanted a test, a diagnostic tool like the Beck Depression Inventory, something definitive that would pronounce my child transgender or not. I learned that no such test exists.

Still, my husband and I left the room so the therapist could conduct an initial evaluation.

Twenty minutes later, we settled down on the same couch, my husband on one side of Isabel, me on the other.

"Your son said something interesting," the psychologist said.

I heard the word "son" louder than the "your" and the "something interesting." It was as if the therapist shouted that one word through a bullhorn and bolded and underlined it just before it traveled the distance from her mouth and to my ears.

"He said he didn't think his parents were ready yet."

Sorry for a derail, but I was just reading the article referenced in the OP and in between the Animal Crossing advertisment was a fucking porn ad?!!! WTF?! I took a screenshot and tweeted it to them - I don't want to put the screenshot here for obvious reasons. Can I link to the tweet?

There are 5 comments under that telling the writer that they are going through the same thing with their child. People are doing this to their children and it is completely unchallenged.

@OldCrone, Yep, within 20 minutes the psychologist had decided upon meeting this child for the first time that she was a 'he'. I would love to know what would have happened if a more sceptical parent had responded to the use of the word 'son' with an eye roll and a snort.

This was very sad to read. I don't want to say mean things about parents as I think we are all doing our best (well almost all and certainly the parent who wrote this) but the rigidity of the parents seems to have been part of the issue really. My kids dressed in hand me down clothes but we kept the ones they wanted whatever gender they were 'for'. 4 year olds can wear 'each other's' clothes with no trouble as it's not till puberty that their bodies are really very different shapes (and still then there's a lot of clothing 'cross-over' potential). I don't know why you would keep the pink trousers if your child hates pink. I don't know why you would insist that they wear clothes and have their haircut as suits you and the more you do things like this the more you teach them that there is something inherent about girls and boys and that the only way to be 'different' is to be a boy - hugely problematic. I was really struck at the start by the desire to see it as a stage - why? There was no problem so why are we calling it a stage? It's not like waking 10 times at night or struggling to get the hang of potty training or any other things which parents find comfort from seeing as a phase. To want to see it as a phase speaks volumes about the parents and volumes about what transgender maybe is.

@SoftlySoftly123

The passage about them being in the clothes shop and the mother telling the child not to look at the boys clothes because they were made for a boy's body and she had a girl's body!! Well of course the child isn't going to grow up thinking they can be a girl who wears what they like if they get told that. 😥

But at the end of that bit about the shop she says:

But we walked out with jeans, a Transformers shirt, a ball cap, and three pairs of boys' briefs.

I suppose it might be argued that 'boys' briefs' are for boys' bodies, but at four years old, who cares?

Parents are being swept up in this because of people like the psychologist in this article. The 'professionals' need to stop labelling children as 'transgender'.

Farts are hilarious though. Fact.

Yet we know that 90% of gender dysphoric children grow out of it and are content with their post-puberty bodies. That psychiatrist either lied or is being lied about.

We also know that children's are not tailored to fit boy and girl bodies because there's no difference before puberty apart from genitals that tuck neatly into underwear anyway. So that mother lied to her child.

Lastly and most glaringly, there's nothing - literally nothing - about the impact of puberty lurking just over the horizon for a Y5 child. How are 'Shane' and his parents going to cope when breastbuds pop up on his chest? It's not fair to other parents to leave this story here as if it's a happy ending!

Absolutely nothing but stereotypes and personality. And how sad we can't just celebrate our individual preferences for clothing, games, hobbies, friends. To think parents are thinking of creating a medical condition based on what jokes a child laughs at.

Btw, the other day, my 11-year-old daughter found some men's sandals and said "this is what I want." Like me, she has wide feet so we found a size that fit her, we bought them and she wears them. End of story. For some parents, that would have been a "revelatory moment."

@Redshoeblueshoe

Surely all 4 year olds find farts funny ?

I know lots of adults who find them funny

According to that list of the things her "son" likes, I am a boy.

Her therapist sounds like a nut job.
I've noticed quite often these kids are coming from a family where the mother talks about issues with the dad too. And having issues with femininity stereotypes herself.

@NiceGerbil

Farts are hilarious though. Fact.

This

Pointing out ......that is definitely US and not UK

Occasionally a fart fest breaks out when the family are over for Sunday Lunch. We must all be men, this will really surprise my daughter when I tell her to go out and buy some underpants 😂😂