Britain's youngest trans child

[poshme]

Article in daily fail (sorry)

4 year old female twin says she is a boy (like her twin brother) and expresses interest in firefighters & police officers & doesn't like pigtails.

So the parents are transitioning their 4 year old and saying they have grown up conversations about gender with them.

Sigh.

My nearly 10year old DD prefers boy shorts as they actually contain fabric rather than resembling pants... (She has disproportionately long legs so the girl styl3s can look ridiculous....)

I have a dinosaur t-shirt on today.

My younger DD is upset over her favourite dinosaur 'skeleton' being broken in our recent house move.

We are all still female. It's just our preferences...

(And their father is currently drinking his tea out of the pink mini mouse mug as it was at the front of the cupboard...)

Is the Let's Toys be Toys campaign still around?

We buy a mix. I find the boy brands are longer (Ds is enormous) and harder wearing. The girls bits are much more creative with design and colour. If we ever have a girl we'll reuse anything he doesn't destroy

Agree with the poster who made the point about teens having a more fixed view of gender than us oldies. I’m a secondary teacher - teens are obsessed with labelling their gender or sexuality. I feel like screaming wear what you want and fuck who you want (if it’s legal and consensual) but I can’t cos I’ll be sacked and/or arrested.

My DD is 9 and DS 6. I do worry about what role models they’ll have as they grow up. I do not want them fashioning theirselves on vacuous influencers who perpetuate gender rigid roles. At the moment DS’ fave person is Freddie Mercury as we watched ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ a month ago. Funnily enough when Freddie kissed Jim he didn’t bat an eyelid but when Freddie said ‘fuck’ his eyes widened and he giggled at me.

I do not remember the 90s being like this - I’m so old!

This is awful. My 4 year old son WAS Anna from Frozen for many months. I still knew he was a boy.

The impact on some teenage boys was raised by Kellie Jay Keen in an article for Lesbian and Gay News:

(extract)
"Their boys were mostly neurodiverse and as such struggled to make positive male peer bonds at school. They were othered. They were the locker room fodder for the boys in their school who conformed to type. They felt different, isolated, and alienated.

These boys ‘can’t perform maleness in the way other boys can’ and so they retreat from the stereotypical masculinity they encounter in the locker room. Ultimately, they look for another answer, and often find it in a culture that tells them they will be happier being female.

There were the ‘gentle types who feel uncertain of where they fit in the world’, as psychotherapist and writer Stella O’Malley, described." (continues)
lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/02/kellie-jay-keen-the-locker-room-has-a-lot-to-answer-for/

Agree with the poster who made the point about teens having a more fixed view of gender than us oldies. I’m a secondary teacher - teens are obsessed with labelling their gender or sexuality. I feel like screaming wear what you want and fuck who you want (if it’s legal and consensual) but I can’t cos I’ll be sacked and/or arrested.

100% agree
I think it's a really big topic for teens. My teen DD is always talking about such and such at school who is non binary etc.
I almost feel things have gone backwards and instead of saying you dont have to be defined by gender, and that you can and should wear what you like, do activities you prefer (rather than those stereotypically assigned male/female) and aspire for the career you want, we're creating a "different" category.
Non binary in that you identify as neither male or female suggests all males feel, think or dress a certain way and so do all females.
In the 80s Boy george, Adam Ant, Annie Lennox , new Romantic era all pushed boundaries in terms of clothes, make up and fashion - would they be non binary now?

It’s so much easier for a small child to be ‘trans’. Physically their body shape is similar, faces are chubby, etc... yes you could have out a dress in DS up to maybe 4 and he could have looked very much like a girl!

For this same child to hit the age when a child’s sex is much more obvious (and obviously puberty) is likely to be one hell of a shock to the child. I wonder if this is explained to them - nature will do what nature does. It would be pretty traumatic surely?

It’s so much easier for a small child to be ‘trans’. Physically their body shape is similar, faces are chubby, etc... yes you could have out a dress in DS up to maybe 4 and he could have looked very much like a girl!

This experiment to show how adults treat young children differently according to their perceived sex is worth watching:

Girl toys vs boy toys: The experiment - BBC Stories

My daughter was born with no hair. Not a single strand. Did she identify as a snooker ball? No.

She didn't get enough hair to do anything sensible with until she was about 4, and brushing it was a nightmare, I can't imagine the trauma of putting it in pigtails (for me or her - try pigtails all day yourself, I did for fancy dress at work recently, owww oww owww), but did I chop off her mop of straggly hair into a short back and sides and assume she wanted to be a boy? No.

How can one make an stand/intervention into appalling situations like this?

@Anonmousse Absolutely. To me every non-binary pupil I teach is someone I was like as a teen - no make up, short hair, wore non-feminine clothing. I still knew I was a woman. My first boyfriend was a metal head. He had long hair and wore eyeliner. He was just a lad who had king hair and wore eyeliner.

She didn't get enough hair to do anything sensible with until she was about 4, and brushing it was a nightmare, I can't imagine the trauma of putting it in pigtails (for me or her - try pigtails all day yourself, I did for fancy dress at work recently, owww oww owww), but did I chop off her mop of straggly hair into a short back and sides and assume she wanted to be a boy? No

Same here. But I did chop off her mop of straggly hair as I was advised to- it did look a lot tidier and a lot less fell out as it was being brushed.

Still didn’t mean she was a boy though. Even if most people thought so. I had arguments with many people who couldn’t get their heads round a girl with short hair, and insisted she was a boy in a dress.

Her hair did get her quite a bit of interest from model scouts though, she was asked several times to come in for test shots as her look was “strong, different and current”.

Long hair - he didn’t fashion his hair into a crown.

Ad the prize for missing the point of the thread by a country mile goes to............ drum roll........

@MishyJDI

My youngest is currently sporting 'boys' jeans and t-shirt, short cropped hair and a toy hunting rifle which she is using to shoot me, dh, her sister, the cat etc.... Does this mean she is actually a boy?

I noted that none of the trans organisations or the lobbyist mums retweeted this article which I'm sure they would have a couple of years ago.

Are they slowly seeing the light?

Were you around in the 80’s? I was a teen then and a lot of the posters on this thread we’re around then. The 80’s was the time of gender diversity and freedom. Not now. Now is the time of the patriarchy.

Very true.

I have identical 4 year old grandsons who obviously are very close and tend to want/ like the same stuff... if these twins attend different twin groups I wonder if there's maybe a set or two of identical boys that has made this child want to be more like an identical boy twin and appear to look exactly like her brother or has heard the parents chatting about identical twins which are often viewed as extra special.
When growing up every single month I had such painful periods that gave me the worse stomachs cramps and made me really sick, I used to curse being a girl and having to put up with the monthly pain and dreaded it.
I also saw that my brother ( 2 years older) was given a lot more freedom than me and while I stayed at home minding my younger brother ( mum was a widow so worked shifts) while my brother went out socialising etc I saw very clearly who got the best 'gender deal'. I'm so glad that I wasn't filled with hormones to change my sex etc as I love being a mum and grandma. These parents are wanting media fame and just trying to appear trendy and woke, ridiculous.

@salsmum

I think it’s probably the second half of your post- girl gets pissed off with having to sit and have her hair put in pigtails- didn’t we all hate having our hair brushed as kids?!), wearing sandals and being told to mind her pretty dress, being bought dollies and craft kits..

Sees her brother being allowed to wear practical clothes, play with trucks and fire engines, and decides that looks way more fun so she wants to be a boy like her brother.

I know when we were kids we used to discuss whether we wanted to be boys, the answer was always yes as boys got to do more fun stuff, have better jobs, play more sports. None of us wanted to be like our female role models, which was cooking, cleaning and keeping house while the boys got to do the interesting stuff and earn lots of money.

For two years my friend's dd went around on all fours barking because she wanted to be a dog. Good job her parents weren't the ones in the OP.

What puzzles me the most is how anyone can feel it's ethical to medically support these parents in the abuse of their child.

Also four is a notch above toddler, you don't have grown up conversations with four year olds. You don't need to have a four year old to know that, you just need an iota of common sense.

I’m tall, that’s how it is.

When I was younger I wanted to be smaller so that I didn’t stand out so much (I was a small child and started school a early so I was always the tiddler in the class until I got to about 15 then I got tall and add to that rather large boobs - I wanted to disappear).

I’m sure if I told my parents that I was desperate to be small, they would have said ‘tough luck, what can you do, thems the breaks, live with it...’.

“OldCrone

Her parents have even given her a stereotypical media-driven fashionable boy’s haircut.

There's nothing wrong with a girl having a 'boy's haircut', just as there's nothing wrong with a boy having long hair.“

OldCrone, I didn’t express that very well.
It was not the short hair I was remarking on.
It was the hairstyle itself which expresses a popular/fashionable macho identity not just an everyday typical short “ boys’ “ hair cut.

The opposite equivalent would be giving a trans girl/girl toddler a rather adult hairstyle and mascara.

When I was a child it wasn’t unusual for a girl to have a short ‘boy haircut’. I suppose it was neater and easier to care for.

@R0wantrees
Excellent article - that really resonated with the young men I know who are going through gender identity questioning.

Delphinium20

Angus Fox has a four part series of articles, focussed on teen boys/ young men: quillette.com/author/angus-fox/

Also discussed here: gender-a-wider-lens.captivate.fm/episode/20-gender-dysphoria-in-boys-part-