That was definitely the case for Mathéa, whose case I mentioned before. Come off it, Janx, do you seriously believe that children get positive reinforcement when they insist that they are of the opposite gender? Nobody’s first hypothesis is that the child is trans.
WhyNot, you posted exactly what I was trying to formulate when I read Janx’s post.
I am a parent, and Janx is damn near 100% full of bullshit. And not a parent, one would assume.
My four year old knows the physical differences between the sexes- duh! He has one of each as parents! And he has eyes! My kids have know this forever.
Back to the OP- wow. This family has quite a road ahead of them. I just want that child to be loved and feel happy and secure. Every child deserves that.
I certainly knew when I was five, but I was also realistic enough to keep my trap shut about it till I was in my mid-teens. It was a different time, way back during the McKinley administration, of course. I’d recommend supporting her but leaving doors open. It is a lot easier to live androgynously nowdays, which would be a good option for her till she’s old enough for medial intervention.
Janx My niece has called it a “gina” since she could talk. She asked what the name of that body part was, my sister told her. My mom owned and ran a daycare center for 15 years. Not all parents teach kids cutsie names for genitalia. OTTOMH The age at which boys and girls begin to self-segregate is about 3. Kids observe that men have beards and women have breasts at by three or so.
I will read the article after I get back from grocery shopping. But, at this point, whatever the parents choose will be wrong. Letting the kid live as a girl leads to teasing and scarring. Making the kid live as a boy leads to teasing (for being a ‘sissy’) and scarring.
I was 5 years old in 1964. At Montessori school whenever there was gender segregation I instinctively went among the girls where I felt I belonged. I refused to go to the boys’ room and kept going to the girls’ room no matter how many times I got yelled at. When they told the girls to gather in the front of the room so an Indian visitor could show them how to wrap a sari, and the boys to go play in the back, I slipped over to the girls’ side to be initiated into the mysteries of sari wearing.
In those days any declaration of gender-variant nonsense from me wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell. There was no one who could have been prepared to deal with it. I knew I had to keep silent when crossing the boundary. Then my parents put me in a conventional school where I was the most popular with the girls, but the boys often beat me up for not liking football. I remember when all my female cousins used to gather in my sisters’ room, I sometimes sat alone on the floor outside their closed door. The girls’ world was not open to me, and there was no consciousness that it could be opened. In today’s language, I lacked agency.
Agency—the ability to make conscious choices and act on them, and the awareness that one has this ability—is what these transsexual kids have access to today. They would have a far easier existence if they could simply live as they feel they need to; their problems are caused by rigid cultural mores that punish failure to adhere to birth gender. Forcing children to repress their natural sense of self will not make transgender go away. There will be no solution to the problem until the society stops punishing people who cross the gender boundary. Do we want to teach our children to persecute gender variants or accept them? How will we teach acceptance? By hiding?
Those who think it would help trans kids to repress their wishes and submerge back into birth gender, consider: I did that. I still got beaten up for being gender variant. Plus I repressed a hell of a lot which is now all coming out and put me in therapy. Forcing transgender kids back into the closet doesn’t do us any damn favors. The only way to stop us from getting beaten up is to educate kids that a range of gender expression is natural and acceptable.
My mother was an RN, and taught us only the proper Latin names for our genitalia as soon as we could speak. One of my earliest memories is confusing the sound of vagina with China, whereupon I associated the external shape of the vaginal slit with the shape of Chinese eyes. It seemed a logical conclusion, given the premises.
S’il te plaît, matt, pourrait-tu expliquer la différence entre les deux?
It took 40 years to apply the lesson, but now I wrap my own saris. 
I’ve read the article now. Zucker bothers me. His insistence that his way is the right way and all cases of pediatric GID can be ‘cured’ by his method set off my alarms.
I don’t understand something, for those who claim it’s a phase or somesuch, why not let the kid go to school as Nicole? If it is just a phase, the abuse you claim will occur should end it.
I agree with Lissa. I think it’s important that boys learn that they can be girlish, just as girls can be boyish. Unfortunately, in our country, it may be more acceptable to redefine oneself as GID than to just be a guy who likes frilly things. 
Personally, I find the parents’ reaction to gender dysphoria troubling. What if your Pasty Irish child decided that he really wanted to be a South Sea islander, & dress as such? What if he decided he was really a Martian, & his skin just **had ** to be dyed green? What if your child declared that he wanted to be an ogre & eat people? What if he decided that he was going to be a chimp, & acted it? There’s gotta be a line somewhere; I would draw it at changing physical anatomy. Learning to grow the body you can grow is part of learning to be fully adult.
Did I miss something? He hasn’t taken any surgery or hormones.
I’m not sure how the latter part of your statement is supposed to be taken.
:smack: Can I get a little help with the coding there?
For those of you who deny that gender identity can exist at such a young age, where are your cites? All the studies I’ve seen say that gender identity is in place at the age of 3. Cites: here, here, here.
Sexuality has nothing to do with gender identity and does not impact transgenderedness. There are lesbian, gay, bisexual and asexual transgendered people.
But is this child really trans? Only an experienced doctor will know for sure. I used to hate feminine things and only wore male clothes. However, I never once told my parents that I wasn’t female or seriously wished that I had a penis instead of a vagina. A trans child will be consist and unwavering in her assertion of her true sex. It can be distinguished from a child who wishes he or she was a dinosaur, lion or any other creature by this consistancy. Nothing will be done right now anyway.
But that isn’t the case here. I was a boy who did like girlish things, as were many of my friends. I wasn’t exactly taught that that was okay, but the point was I knew that I wasn’t a girl, I was a boy who liked girlish things.
A trans person is not a person who merely likes things related to the other gender. They are a person with a deep, abiding conviction that they are a gender other than that attributed at birth.
And it is definitely not “more acceptable” to be trans in this society than to have interests that are gender-atypical. The amount of tsuris I’ve gotten in my life over being genderqueer pales in comparison to the mile of shit trans people are made to eat.
It appears that people believe that the first time little Nicholas picked up a doll or asked why he was a boy, immediately the parents dumped him in skirts and declared him Nicole. That’s a really astonishing conclusion to reach.
From what I understand, some people prefer to identify as transsexué/e rather than transsexuel/le, the more standard word. I’m not certain I really have a grasp on it, but from what I understand, the ending “sexuel” has connotations of sexuality, i.e. libido; whereas “sexué” connotes sexual in the sense of the sexes. “Des différences sexuées” are differences between the sexes. So a person might prefer the word transsexué/e to emphasize that it is not an erotic matter, a sexual orientation, etc.
Well, actually, to be more accurate, I was a boy who liked non-boyish things, which at that time amounted to the same thing. But the point, and it is also true to those of my male friends who liked girl-things when they were children, is that we knew we were boys, even though we were aware that we liked different things from other boys. This is a very different case from what we’re discussing.
You are, I hope (giving you the benefit of a doubt), talking about five-year-olds here, and not denying that transsexualism actually exists in older people?
I find your ignorance profoundly troubling. There is proof that we can have a male brain in a female body (and vice versa). How’s that for a line? We can reject conditions which both have no scientific basis, and violate known laws of science?
Find me any biological basis for South Sea Islander dress and language.
Find me any proof that Martians exist and that a terran can be born with a Martian brain.
Show me a study proving ogres exist, and that a human can be born with an ogre brain.,
Guess what I’m going to say here? G’wan, guess.
Now, if you’ll stop throwing out strawman, flawed analogies, and comparing a condition backed by scientific evidence to conditions contradicted by evidence, we can continue a reasoned debate.
I found that absolutely hilarious. “Damme Seamus, what is that facial tattoo?”
In reading Johanna’s OP article, it seems that the parents are doing their best to understand their child’s needs, and doing their best to let Nicole develop a sense of self…seem pretty balanced in that article, not grandstanding for any cause.
Janx, I was raised in the 60/70’s by biologist parents, and learned the terms penis and vagina early on, at age four. Twas terminology, when I asked, I was told what the sexual bits were, and how they worked. Pretty simple, and no problem. Around 11, my mom took us to a Drive-In movie showing of the Christine Jorgensen Story, a 70’s movie about the first media noted male-female transition person. I was amazed that that could happen, and remember swinging on the playground swingset at the Drive-In during the intermission, thinking, wow, That’s different!
Never did I think it was weird or wrong, just different, and my Mom explained that there were many ways to be in the world, and that a boy wanting to be a girl was just another way to be.
Thanks I was taught that young. It’s obvious now that gender dysphoria is another permutation in the myriad of ways that people are born into. I hope that Nicole will be welcomed as is to the school, but, it will probably be difficult. I hope they get support and understanding, and admire their courage in trying to understand their child.
The parents look to me absolutely sane, responsible, and caring. But they’ve been pushed into publicity by a very gung ho trans activist. From the vivid portrait of him drawn in the story, I can intuit what fuels his gung hoitude: he’s totally shootin up T!
while I’m finally enjoying respite from the stuff
I used to think like foolsguinea. I thought that trasgenderism was just some kind of deep role playing fantasy akin to furries. I didn’t have anything against them or any desire to interfere with their life decisions, I didn’t even have any problem with respecting their desire to be related to as the gender with which they identified, but I still thought of it as primarily a psychological phenomenon rather than a physiological one. It wasn’t until I read that there was some pretty strong evidence for actual physiological and possibly genetic causes for gender dysphoria that I eliminated my ignorance on that account. I also know that most TG people report that they knew their own gender identification from as early as 2 or 3 years old, but I still think that diving full tilt into feminizing a 5 year old boy is a little premature. It’s not impossible that he is NOT transgendered and I think the parents should take it slow and get some evaluations along with some possible family therapy.
I think this is indeed what they are doing. I know the parents of Mathéa, mentioned above, threw themselves at every resource they could get their hands on to try to understand their child better before taking a course of action.