While this is an encouraging piece in a daily sea of “My child is transgender!!” media portrayals, a couple of things jump out:
8-year-old CJ Duran plays with dolls, wears skirts, and adores the color pink. While CJ loves playing with girly toys and wearing heeled sandals…he identifies himself as gender non-conformist, meaning that he still prefers masculine pronouns and is not transgender, but simply prefers the societally-defined “feminine” things in life.
It’s great that at least one 8 year old who plays with the wrong toys isn’t being called trans, but notice the wording–it’s all about how he, age 8, identifies himself. Did he really say he is gender non-conformist, not transgender? If so, where did he even get this language? And, just wondering: given that he is smack-dab in the middle of the childhood period when make-believe play and fantasy are prominent, would it also have been newsworthy if he “identified himself” as a puppy, a ballet dancer, or a turtle?
When CJ first decided that he preferred “girly stuff” over “boy stuff”, his mother, Lori, went online to do some research. When she realized that there were very few resources for parents who were learning to raise gender-nonconforming children, she was inspired to start her own blog, Raising my Rainbow.
Kudos to Lori for bucking the trend, because what is unspoken (but glaringly obvious) here is that there are PLENTY of resources for parents raising transgender kids! And in looking at her Twitter feed and blog, she herself appears to accept the notion that lots of kids are, in fact, transgender, and not just gender nonconforming. Still, she celebrates her son who enjoys colorful wigs, jewelry, and skirts.
I keep asking myself how we got here; that after the gains of feminism in the mid-late 20th century, parents and kids even have to use a term like “gender nonconforming” just to justify a little person being themselves.
The question is begged: What is the “differential diagnosis” between a gender nonconforming child vs. a transgender child? Answer, I guess, is in the first paragraph: whatever the (in this case, 8-year-old) child says s/he is–s/he is. This is a perfect example of the logical fallacy in the transgender trend sweeping the world: despite years of research showing that 75-95% of gender dysphoric kids grow out of it, if this 8-year-old had said, “I’m transgender,” this would have been a very different article…and Lori would be writing a very different blog.
Shout out to two great subReddits where I find many of these links. This article is a rare jewel in the daily onslaught of “transition is the answer” news stories being published around the world (which these two curators collect).
