LGBT News UK news item about trans children

That's beautiful. It's incredible that things are slowly changing and such issues are being taken more seriously.

 

I find it way too young. At that age I didn't even understand gender. Hell, I didn't even know I was gay. I had school crushes on boys but didn't realize this was unusual. If there wasn't social pressue for me not to play with dolls, I would have! I always wanted to play with babies as a kid, but knew that was a girl thing. I also actually did some "girl" things such as sewing, making jewelry, etc. I never became transgendered. I also know a lot of gay guys who dressed up as girls as children sometimes and wore makeup.... None turned out transgendered. I think kids experiment and especially as society becomes more open, they will experiment more. But I think if you tell them "oh, you can be a girl, because you like girl things" at that age, they may not even understand what they are saying when they say they are actually a girl. I think that's too young to tell a child they are definitely transgendered. They shouldn't even know about it at age 6 or 8.

 

That's really young to be making up their minds about their gender... And isn't in kind of normal because when I was little I am pretty sure that I would wear dresses, play with dolls, etcetera, and I thought that's normal for kids in nursery to infant school. So seeming they're so young it's just kinda... Suspicious... I mean, it's taken me 13 years of my life to work out... Whatever my orientation is, and that's just orientation! It might come off sort of cold blooded, but I feel like children should only be introduced to the idea when they can think for themselves, so 10 to 12, not 6.

 

Okay, first of all it's transgender not transgendered.

Second, it is not like these kids are getting sex reassignment surgery, hormones, and breast implants at age six or eight. The first time any physical medical intervention comes into play is when they are about to start puberty, and only then with hormone blockers. If they stop receiving those they continue to develop and go through puberty normally, so it is not permanent.

The first real options for transition are not received until around 16 or 18 years old, and certainly by this time more people are fully aware of their gender.

Not to mention, that all of this is under the supervision of doctors and child psychologists. This actually puts these kids in a better and safer environment than the vast majority of kids, who do not live under such close monitoring.

I also want to point out that enjoying culturally female things is not the same thing as feeling like a female. I also enjoyed some stereotypical female things growing up. I never once felt female, and the only concerns that I had were other people outside of my family finding out. (Mostly other guys.)

 

I'm sure it isn't coincidence that this story appears on bbc at the same time as the Louis Theroux documentary on transgender kids.. like aldrick says the only real risk of making a wrong decision comes with the physical intervention come puberty and then the risk of making a mistake has to be weighed up against the risk of not acting and having a transgender kid end up in a body they don't feel at all comfortable in..

 

It's wonderful that these children are getting an oppourtunity so many before them have been denied. With enough support and acceptance from those around them early on they might just escape a significant portion of the anguish that most have to endure growing up. It's pretty clear that these kids (and others like them) became profoundly distressed from being referred to or treated as male. When a child displays that level of discomfort it is nothing short of cruel to ignore their wishes or treat it as 'just a phase'.

Agreed. Even in the event they do eventually come to feel differently and identify as their birth sex, they have the options left open to them either way. They have plenty of time to be sure before doing anything permanent. Considering the alternative of them potentially having to go through the distress that most transgender kids do, it's clearly better to give them the option.

 

First of all, I don't see the difference between transgendered and transgender. I try to use transgender typically because I know that is preferred and I try to be respectful, but if you wanna be anal about my word usage then honestly I think the pickiness about words is a load of crock.

Second, I know doing female things doesn't make you transgender, but from the article it sounds like the parents basically told their kids "you do female things, so that means you're a transgender female." If I was told that as a kid, I'd believe it too! And I'd tell people I was transgender. Just because the kids say it, doesn't mean they are; they are just listening to their parents. Once they grow up they may be really confused if they end up not being transgender. If you're transgender, I'll ask you, how does it make you feel to be told you're the opposite gender than you are? Most people say it gives them dysmorphia. In a way, I think that's similar to how these kids will feel growing up if they actually are not female gender when they were told they were female all their life because they liked female things. They are 6 and 8 years old. Let them be kids and play with whatever toys they want and worry about genders later... If the kid asserts they are transgender, then okay, maybe. I just don't believe prents should "feed" it to them.

And to be honest, we don't know if people are born transgender or not. They could be socialized that way (and before you get offended, I believe being gay is partly socialized -- it does not make it any less legitimate). Pretty sure I just saw a thread that they think they found a gene related to it. However, almost all genes, including something as physical as a predisposal to cancer, are influenced by environment... stress, etc. In that case, conditioning them to be transgender could potentially cause them to be transgender. Again, nothing wrong with being transgender, but think of the pain you'll put your kids through, as any transgender person can attest to, if somehow telling them they're a certain gender may make them that way. To clarify, don't socialize them to be their birth gender if they don't want (don't force your boy to play with GI Joe), but don't feed them their gender; let them choose. You can argue what you want but that is my opinion on this topic.

 

Austin, the fact that you'd know/do all these things doesn't mean that those others kids will do it too. YOU didn't understand gender at that age, which doesn't imply that others don't understand it either. You didn't realise that your boy crushes were unusual, and some do.

You're basing your opinion almost entirely on what you would do and think. Others are different, some others DO know.

Moreover:

Transgender: Evidence on the biological nature of gender identity (Boston University Medical Center - retrieved from ScienceDaily)

Yes, the sample size is a bit small, but there is growing evidence that being transgender is a biological phenomenom.

 

So, basically what you are saying here is that there is a conspiracy between both the parents and child psychologists who "confuse" kids into believing they are trans*?

I obviously cannot speak to your personal self-awareness, but I can certainly speak for mine. I know for a fact that, despite begging my sister to play Barbies with me, that I never felt even a little bit female. I have always felt, and strongly identified as a male. There is literally no amount of "feeding me" information on trans* people that could have confused me, now or at any time in the past. Maybe you have had different experiences, I don't know. However, I can say with a fair bit of confidence that having such doubts and feelings is not typical for the average biological male.

I am not going to touch that with a ten foot pole. I do not have the time nor the energy. I will say, however, there is more evidence to point to biological links for people being trans* than there are for people being gay.

You start with the wrong premise. You start with the premise that the parents who know the child intimately, the doctors, and the child psychologists who know the child intimately as well are wrong and are therefore harming the child. Reverse that premise: What if they are right about the child being trans*? Does it not cause harm to them to do nothing?

You are making the argument that nothing should be done to help these children, and they should be forced to go through puberty despite the psychological trauma it could cause them. You are against this on the very small possibility that they could be wrong, in which case there is no physical damage done. A cost vs benefit analysis has to be done, and I believe if it is done then we will see that the benefit far out ways any potential cost--by a long shot. The reality is that most of these kids -- probably well over 99% of them -- are trans*. I am confident in saying this because the vast majority of parents are going to be resistant to the idea of their child being trans*, and especially displaying gender deviance at a young age. The majority of children who show such tendencies are likely to be abused until they conform to the gender norms of their biological sex.

I actually agree with this, shockingly. Yes, parents should stop gender stereotyping their kids. Not only is it harmful to trans* children, it is harmful to cis-gender children as well. It forces everyone into narrow little boxes, that says, "boys do this" and "girls do that"--when in reality most of us enjoy doing things from both groups.

To be clear, though, toy selection and dress are only symptoms of being trans*, in the same way a man sucking another mans dick is a symptom of him being gay. Gender identity in that way is just like sexual orientation--it is something innate, and something you feel "oriented" toward. Some people who are trans*--and this probably makes up the bulk of children who identify as trans*--have varying degrees of body dysmorphia. This is likely how they know at such a young age. This is why it is important for things to be set in order well before puberty, so that by the time a child reaches that point we know whether or not to give them hormone blockers to prevent the onset of puberty. This buys them time until they are old enough to make decisions on whether or not they want to begin transitioning.

I am only being anal because, as you said yourself, you know better, but you decided to do it anyway. That's not trying to be respectful, that's getting it wrong. Either because you were being deliberately respectful or you forgot. You were reminded, and now you hopefully will not do it again.

I will explain to you why transgendered is an inappropriate term to use.

Take the following sentence: "Last week Austin came out to us as a gayed person." Now, obviously it looks wrong. However, what does the -ed at the end of the word imply? It implies that it is something that happened in past tense, that you somehow became gay last week. Maybe the gay passed, or maybe you still have it--who knows. However, the -ed implies that it is something that happened to you, rather than something that you are and have always been.

It is inappropriate for the same reason it is inappropriate to say: "Jim is a colored person." That is inappropriate because it makes it sound as if Jim became colored, rather than the fact that Jim has always been a person of color. This is why such a sentence should be written as: "Jim is a person of color."

This is important when discussing trans* issues, because of the assumption that a person is changing genders, rather than having always been the gender that they identify as. It would be like someone claiming that you were once straight, and then you became gay. There was never a point in your life in which you were straight, you have always been gay--even if you happened to struggle to come to terms with it. It is no different for people who identify as trans*. If someone comes out as a trans* woman, for example, then she has always been a woman, even if only last week she was identifying as a man. Her gender has not changed, because it has always been female, only the information that people knew about her has changed.