Family labels every aspect of life as "for boys" or "for girls", fights with daughter about wearing bows. Then act very surprised when the girl wants to be a boy. • /r/Gender_Critical reddit.com

[–]repugnent said:

“Research has shown that children form a gender identity as young as 18 months to three years of age. It is widely agreed that at this point that gender, including gender as it is experienced by gender variant children, is solidified early on.”

Where are people getting this misinformation? FFS, this child is five. My mom works at preschool, and she told me not too long ago that she had to explain to a child that a teacher with short hair was in fact, a woman. Or what about the research showing that most children with gender dysphoria lose it after puberty? This is what disturbs me most about the phenomena. The research that has been done is very clear and yet is routinely ignored, even in mainstream news outlets.

I find these childhood transgender accounts disturbing. It’s one thing when adults decide to transition, but to pigeonhole a 5 year old and relegate them to a lifetime of hormones, surgery and infertility, one should expect caution. Instead it’s the exact opposite; Louis Theroux asked this of a psychologist in his recent documentary, and she responded more or less “it’s this or suicide.” And this mother seems downright giddy about having a trans child.

[–]generibusGrammatical Gender[S] said:

It seems to be one of those things that people just repeat over and over until everyone thinks it’s true. I have a four year old and he is NOT very clear on the differences between the sexes, yet alone some mysterious “gender identity”.

[–]DoubleXMarksTheSpot said:

My younger daughter refused to let me buy her a girl’s swimsuit, insisting on the trunk-like suit for boys, and a tank top sort of shirt on the top. She also wanted “boys’ skates,” and wanted to play ice hockey. She wore baggy clothes and even changed her name for a couple of years.

Go forward half a decade or so, and she’s into manicures, make-up and colouring her hair.

What did we do? Exactly nothing.

This media coverage is so damaging for some families, who feel that if they don’t do something about their child’s experimentation with their identities, they’ll kill themselves. There’s even a local politician who has introduced legislation she has dubbed “Leela’s Law,” that professes to ban conversion therapy for gays, lesbians and transgender kids, but basically targets this one clinic that has come under fire from activists for not promoting transgender identities at the expense of all other treatments for troubled kids in its care.

People are terrified their kids are going to die. I have spoken out against Leela’s Law on Facebook, and the first reaction I got was from the 16 year old daughter of a friend who said, “Kids are killing themselves from dysphoria every day. Don’t discount dysphoria.” (I replied that I feel children should be allowed to express themselves independent of the straightjacket of socially determined gender identities, and she agreed.)

I have slowly started to speak out against these misconceptions in RL (with a mostly positive response). There needs to be pushback in the mainstream media and not just in subreddits and radical feminist blogs.

[–]generibusGrammatical Gender[S] said:

“We tried to steer P’s choices of boy clothing to days when it would not be too problematic”

What on earth would be “problematic” about a girl wearing “boy clothes”? This is another family with extremely rigid gender roles.

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“Widely agreed”  that a child of 18 months has a set gender identity??

I have recently posted links to research studies that are even acknowledged by WPATH, the main organization focusing on transgender health, refuting the idea that toddlers have a set gender identity. Most (75% or more) “dysphoric” children outgrow their feelings of body dissociation and grow up to be gay or lesbian!

Why is the mainstream media falling in line with this garbage?

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is my child transgender? communicatingwithkids.com
“In jumping straight to the assumption of the statistically most unlikely outcome that a child is transgender, aren’t we just reinforcing those gender stereotypes, and in fact doing exactly the same as the parent who forces a child to conform?”

A rare find: A parent who dares to question.

From one of the comments on the article:

“It also seems to me that any concerns that are voiced about this topic are dismissed as prejudice. Personally I think there’s a very real difference between believing that transgender people should live their lives without violence and discrimination, and believing that children who like the ‘wrong’ toys are candidates for drugs and surgery.”

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No, you don’t “care” about my child

So I have figured out a few things vis-à-vis the few (and they have been few, so far) people who personally attack me, claiming they only do so because they ”care” about my child. By “attack” I mean character assassination, not respectful debate.

First, they believe without an iota of doubt that there is such a thing as a “male” or “female” brain. And one’s male or female brain absolutely must dictate what sort of body it is attached to. Second, they believe that even a toddler innately knows which brain they have. When that child says “I feel like a girl” or “I feel like a boy” that subjective experience is objective reality, and no one—no one—has the right to question it. Ever. The only viable option is to support their assertion with all that modern medicine and pharmaceutical products can supply. Even questioning this orthodoxy amounts to child abuse.

The people who vomit their bile on me believe a child’s self-professed gender is as hard-wired and as objectively indisputable as their left elbow. They fervently believe this even if said child is of the age where they are also saying they are –or they wish they were–a dog or a tractor or Spiderman or a princess. They don’t think gender is a social construction. They don’t believe life experiences might mold a child’s idea of gender. No, the gender cake was already baked while they were in the womb. So if a kid is referred to and treated as the opposite gender–by parents, teachers, doctors, psychologists–from the time they’re 2 years old, if they’re on puberty blockers, if they are indoctrinated that this means they are “transgender,” those years of experience won’t have ANY influence on whether they choose to medically transition later. No pressure at all! Case closed.

For all their supposed knowledge of neuroscience, they never seem to have read anything from the decades of research pertaining to pediatric brain development, the years of childhood make-believe, of confusion of fantasy with reality…the relatively new knowledge that the frontal lobes of the brain—judgment, decision-making, awareness of future consequence, impulse control, self monitoring–don’t develop until age 25. None of that has any bearing on the Gender is Set in Stone at Birth dogma.

And their ideology is as impervious as granite. It’s all nature, no nurture. To these people, 15 years of a girl being told she is actually a “he” couldn’t possibly influence a biological girl (oops, I mean, “assigned female at birth”) to move on to medical transition when she’s older, even if, actually, she’s a girl who would have grown up to be a lesbian (which is what statistics say usually happens) if she had just been left alone to figure it out on her own.

The transactivists are not interested in any research that could cast doubt on their hypothesis . They only want to cherry pick studies that claim there is a male or female brain. Even though THOSE studies have been disputed, and generally have a subject base consisting mostly of trans people who’ve already transitioned and been on hormones for years. And, of course, the conclusion they draw from those flawed studies is that the brain dictates the body it’s attached to, period. Hell, I even saw someone crowing about an article touting head transplants in the future for trans people. Cut off your “male” or “female” head and attach it to a donated body of the opposite sex! Problem solved.

I’ve mostly engaged in civil dialogue online. I came here in the first place because there aren’t many people raising the questions I am, from the perspective of a parent who cares enough to dig deeper, and I want that point of view to be heard. And I want other lefty parents like me to have a place to go where they aren’t dismissed as ogres and transphobes. Where they aren’t told that–simply by questioning, by expressing doubts–they are personally responsible for the suicides of troubled teenagers.

In my short time here, I’ve learned a ton about what it is really like to have gender/physical dysphoria, to have the intense desire to transition to the other sex. I respect that experience. I’ve talked with people who have medically transitioned, and I’ve adjusted my views based on things they tell me. I’ve been humbled; I’ve learned, and I’ve opened a few minds myself. I’m doing this in good faith, and most other people seem to be doing the same. Those of us who are running “serious” theme blogs have a purpose outside entertainment. We feel like we have something important to say. Disagreements I’ve had are generally respectful. I have zero interest in making enemies of people I don’t even know. I have better things to do with my time.

But, like anywhere else on the Internet, there are a few haters. Because I am running a blog which dares to question the trans orthodoxy, I occasionally get drive-by vitriol, usually from kids who are angry at their own parents. I get told I am a terrible mother, an abuser even, of my daughter (except they always say “son” based on the sparse personal information I’ve shared here, if they’ve even read that, which I doubt).  Apparently my “son” is exactly the same as all the other “sons” out there, despite the suddenness of all this, and how it only arose after a short time of binging on certain Internet snack bars .

They claim to “care” about my child, they are “scared” for her, they are “worried” for her; they automatically assume it’s “him” because remember—if anyone, anywhere simply says they might be trans, then that is the word of god from on high. It is sacrosanct.

I’m not naïve or stupid. I knew venturing onto Tumblr would be—let’s say, a rough and tumbl ride at times—and I’m not going to let myself be destroyed or derailed by the words of a hateful or unhinged stranger online. Haters gonna hate.

But I will say this to those few shit-throwers:

You don’t know me. You don’t know my family. You don’t know my daughter—hell, call her my son, I don’t care. You don’t have the slightest idea where we are in this process. You are clueless about what kind of parent I am. And most importantly: You do not “care” about my child. You don’t “worry” about her. You’re not “scared” for her. I’m the one who is doing that. Your feigned “caring” is just a way to lash out at someone who is daring to raise questions about a dogma you have imbibed, and it bothers you. You don’t want anyone upsetting your apple cart.

I’m not changing my Ask box policy. If you send me hate, you go straight to the trash bin. All you’ll get is the chance to briefly spew your cyber-bile onto a stranger. If that floats your boat, knock yourself out. But it won’t make me shut up. Most of all, don’t flatter yourself that you “care” about my child, so you might as well let go of that little self-aggrandizing delusion.

And to the ones who scream “Unfollow me!!!!” (which I invariably do): Did it ever occur to you that following a blog is sometimes a way to learn something new? Just something to consider.

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Let kids be kids huffingtonpost.co.uk

“I wanted to slice off my breasts with a bacon slicer…Fortunately, I made it through puberty with my breasts intact, but had my parents been less no-nonsense, had they heard of transgender children and had we been living in America today, I might have been given a mastectomy…

At the end of the programme, Theroux says the choice to transition is, “a chance to exercise the most fundamental right we have - the right to be ourselves.” But the children are already being themselves - and we need to accept them as they are.

Instead of shoehorning children into prescribed gender roles, and “reassigning” them when they don’t fit, we need to question our adherence to gender roles. Force feeding children puberty blockers and cross gender hormones and putting them on the path to gender reassignment surgery, when they fail to conform, is actually an infringement of children’s rights to be themselves, as they are. As a society, we need to accept that sometimes boys like to wear dresses and sometimes girls like to wee standing up.“

One commenter on this article added:

As a former tomboy, I’m leery of all this transing of children. I recall it was normal to find puberty traumatic and be unhappy in your body as a teen. We even learned that in health class. Whatever an adult want to do with their body is their choice, but slicing off a teenager’s breasts because she feels “dysphoric” is horrifying.

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President Obama, how is this not anti-gay "conversion therapy"? ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

“In a study of pre-pubertal male and female children with gender dysphoria followed-up approximately 10 years later, only 27 percent of children with gender dysphoria remained gender dysphoric at follow-up [10]. Of those individuals who no longer expressed gender dysphoria at follow-up, a significant portion (all female and half the male participants) expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation [9]. Thus, gender concerns in neurotypical children prior to puberty may represent a developmental process related to both gender and sexuality for many individuals. 

…Facilitating an exploration of sexuality seems especially pertinent given recent findings that most children with gender-related concerns eventually identify with their natal gender following puberty and frequently adopt homosexual or bisexual identities [19]. It is possible that individuals with ASD may experience similar trajectories in their gender narratives, but potentially follow a different timeline than normally developing individuals owing to reduced social interaction and fewer opportunities to explore their sexual identity.”

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While this article is specifically about autism and gender identity, it cites multiple research studies that confirm, once again, that MOST children who question their gender in childhood end up as gay or bisexual if left alone. Also, socially immature/isolated kids, or kids with ASD, probably need even longer to figure out who they are, which makes a good argument that dysphoric adolescents and even young adults with social anxiety or other similar issues should not start medical transition, as they too often do.

On April 8, 2015 the New York Times reported that President Obama has called for an “end to conversion therapy for gay and transgender youth.”

Somebody explain to me, please: If most children–especially girls–resolve gender dysphoria and grow up to be non-heterosexual adults (and study after study corroborates this finding), how is childhood “gender reassignment” not proactive conversion therapy to prevent adult homosexuality? 

Given these findings, why do doctors, psychologists–and increasingly, compliant parents–assign gender non-conforming children as trans until proven otherwise?

And can it even be “proven otherwise” if they spend their entire childhoods  being told, and treated as if, they are actually the opposite sex?

Your thoughts, President Obama?

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“I’ve given plenty of trans girls shots from my supply”: creepy behavior in the trans community | Transgender Reality transgenderreality.com

And I imagine there are analogous giveaways of testosterone to teen girls whose parents aren’t bankrolling their “transition” to FTM.

Transgenderreality.com is providing a really important service. Please let parents of gender nonconforming kids know about this site.

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