I get requests all the time for evidence that most trans-identified kids grow out of it, the vast majority of them going on to be gay or lesbian adults. Here you go. Plenty of studies, helpfully compiled by Dr. James Cantor at this link:
http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html?spref=tw
Of course, nowadays, we’re influencing kids to STAY trans by “socially transitioning” them, using “preferred pronouns,” and puberty blockers. Wouldn’t it be interesting to just leave them alone instead of reassuring them that they really ARE the opposite sex, given how high the medical stakes are?
Parents urging and/or assisting minor children to transition is a form of conversion therapy. It is a way for their gender non-confirming child to grow up “normal”, i.e. not gay or lesbian. It’s a form of social control. It’s a form of gay and lesbian erasure.
A couple of decades ago the talk was of genetics or pre-natal hormones, i.e. finding some way to identify gay and lesbian fetuses in the womb (with the implied possibility of parents terminating such an unwanted and/or defective offspring).
Now parents can just wait until a gay or lesbian child goes through a typical (for the gender non-confirming gay or lesbian) gay or lesbian toddlerhood or childhood before they consider exercising their “parental option” of socially changing their gender and even medically altering their child’s body.
This is a form of child abuse.
Please note that I’ve made it clear that not all gay and lesbian children are gender non-conforming and for a time may wish to be the opposite sex. Some and only some are gender non-conforming.
I was one of those gender non-conforming girls. A tomboy always being mistaken for a real boy. That is until puberty…when with the rush of hormones and a sudden influx of new 7th grade girls to my K -12 all girls school I began to understand that I might be a lesbian. I forgot all about wanting to be a boy. I just wanted to be with my best girlfriend all the time. Two years later it was handholding, back rubs, and my secret fantasies of kissing her. My lifelong obsession with Greta Garbo, Kate Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Barbrara Stanwyck, and Marilyn Monroe movies grew exponentially. A not a-typical lesbian adolescence in the 1970s which developed from a not a-typical gender non-conforming lesbian childhood of the 1950s and 1960s.
What if my parents had “assisted” me in socially, or even worse, medically transitioning with puberty blockers? What would have happened to the “me” of me? What would ever have given my parents the right to sign away myself and my future body on a doctor’s Consent Form?
Where are the medical ethicists?
Please note that this has nothing to do with Intersexed individuals. And please note the long history of parents making the wrong decisions in those cases when children are born or well into childhood. This disastrous history should give us pause as we deal with parents making decisions for gender non-confirming children that most likely will have long-term if not life-time negative physical and emotional consequences.
Yes–where are the medical ethicists?
“What if my parents had “assisted” me in socially, or even worse, medically transitioning with puberty blockers? What would have happened to the “me” of me? What would ever have given my parents the right to sign away myself and my future body on a doctor’s Consent Form?”
