There are certainly things you can do to make a kid MORE vulnerable.
Why is everybody using the female pronoun? When was it determined that this little boy is not a little boy?
I question whether a five-year-old child is capable of making any kind of meaningful choice, or even having any kind of meaningful insight, about his/her gender identity.
I don’t object to the suggestion that she might not be trans, I object to your stated reasoning, and your lack of substantiation. I CERTAINLY object to your claim that NO CHILD could ever possibly be trans (either you’re claiming this, or that they can be trans but shouldn’t be treated for it, which is horribly unethical). Can you back up what you’ve said?
Forget me and what I think (which, for the record, is that I don’t have enough information to know). But don’t worry about that. Just back up your own claims. You don’t have to attack me to do so, right? You have some sources outside of your personal interpretation of a few vague statements in the article, right?
Then why do we begin enforcing gender roles at that age, and even younger? Why do non-trans people think they are “boys” and “girls” at that age, and resist attempts to enforce the “wrong” gender? Why do they perceive others as being male or female, and how is it that they can pretty easily make that determination even without anatomical information? Why aren’t all little boys wearing pink frilly dresses?
Furthermore, the child is not making the choice. As always with children, adults are making decisions based on their understanding of the child’s best interests. You disagree about what the child’s best interests are, and I don’t understand why you think you know.
If you think children cannot give input into their own psychological treatment, or have insights about their identities, you need to provide the extraordinary evidence for that extraordinary claim.
At home, if they want to treat the child as s/he wants to be treated, no problem. But for public such as school? I don’t understand why they aren’t just dressing the kid in the typical kid-appropriate and basically gender-neutral play clothes and explaining that for now, the grown-up rules require that because the kid has a penis, s/he’ll have to use the boys room. They can also explain that when the kid gets big, things can change, but for now, those are the silly rules. A kid is sufficiently sophisticated at five to understand that grown-ups have rules they don’t yet understand. Call the kid Nicky and call it a day.
Kids identify themselves and others gender-wise very young, although not necessarily through genitalia - I remember reading of a little boy who insisted that one of his playmates MUST be a girl because the child had barettes in his hair. He clearly didn’t know or didn’t care about genitalia; anyone who wore barettes must be a girl! I have a little trouble understanding why the kid is saying he wants a vagina rather than some of the rather more visible signs of femininity. But again, he’s clearly been raised with more sophisticated anatomical knowledge than I had (or cared about) at that age. In any case, based on the line quoted in the title of this thread, this kid clearly gets that he DOES have a penis and that based on that, he is going to be considered a boy for now. Otherwise why would he want a vagina?
As long as he understands that, once again, this is an arbitrary rule, and can change when he gets big, I don’t see why living as a boy would permanently damage him assuming he does grow up to be TG one bit more than having been raised as a girl would damage him if he doesn’t. The parents talking about it with him, telling him that he will be loved and treasured regardless, indulging his current belief at home - why wouldn’t those be enough? When adult TG people talk about the damage that growing up ‘wrong’ did, I don’t think we’re talking about a similar situation. Those children usually grew up with a painful and extremely guilty (in their own minds) secret, and with no one but themselves to know they were not what they physically seemed. That’s a whole different thing from telling a kid to play along for now, because that’s the way the grown-ups want it to be. As the child gets older, s/he can decide with considerably more safety in either direction which way s/he wants to present, and heck, change schools if necessary. Surely a child who has been certain he is a girl from pre-school to, say, the age of ten is a whole lot more likely to truly end up TG than one who is still only five.
Or am I all wet?
Honestly, I think letting the kid decide to present as a girl right now isn’t going to do any lasting harm. Bullying? There are options-homeschool her. Find a special school, or private tutoring.
I haven’t claimed either one of these things. All I’ve said is that this particular child has not been DIAGNOSED as TG. Do you think a child should be treated BEFORE a diagnosis? That seems to be what you’re suggesting.
Excuse me but what claims are you referring to? I’ve claimed only that
- this child has not been diagnosed as TG
- The article cites three different sources as saying that most kids with GID are not TG.
- Therefore this kid should not be “treated” for TG (and publicly identified as a girl) until he’s fucking DIAGNOSED as TG.
I haven’t once said that a 5 year old can’t be TG, so that’s a load of crap.
As for your point #2, your “sources” in that article are either obviously invalid, or too vague to have the concrete conclusions you’ve drawn from them.
Here are you statements to which I am responding:
From these statements and others I reached a conclusion, but perhaps it was erroneous. Do you believe that if the vast majority of children who present signs of GID “grow out of it” (a fact you have yet to demonstrate, and which even the article does not support as you continue to claim, but never mind that for now), then treating children for GID through public gender transition is a bad idea?
Transition is a treatment for TG, not for GID.
Are we all reading the same article? Because it looks to me like the child has been diagnosed with GID and nothing else, and that having the child dress as he likes at home and dress neutrally for school and in public is the name of the game right now – he is the one who doesn’t like the program.
In any event, I think treating children with GID by public transition is in general a bad idea, if we have the same definition of punluic transition. I cant imagine how it could be a good ide, but I am not very imaginative and would be happy to hear how it could be.
It seems to me that treating a child with GID by pretending that he or she is "really"either the gender of the body s/he is in or the opposite are equally bad choices. I think it is important, no, really I think it is vital that kids this age not be messed about in this way. Either one involves some fairly substantial lying on the part of the adults involved.
What he really is, is a child with the body of a boy who thinks of himself as a girl. And what really is true is that sometimes it stays that way and sometimes it does not. That gender is not always as black and white as people think, but that his job right now is to be his own child self and not somebody’s idea of what a child ought to be.
It seems to me also true that there isn’t any need to do anything dramatic about it now because what is appropriate to do when it is time to do something will likely become clear in the fullness of time. And in the meantime, it seems to me that their plate is pretty full just dealing with accepting and understanding and growing into what is, before we get on to what might be.
I think your average five year old can swing that; and I think this is far from your average five year old – I think he is socially unusual for the reasons I mentioned before.
Thanks, Marienee. You just said everything I’ve been trying to say, only better.
Has anyone else considered the possibility that this could be a case of an intersexed baby who was given (an incorrect) sexual assignment surgery?
Apparently much, much better, since you’ve actually said things that completely contradict your me-tooing here. But since you’re incapable of supporting your own position, I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that you declare it’s something different every few posts.
I did, yeah. The mother called him ïntersex"which made me wonder – I think it happens more often than people think. But since it was according to the article a pediatrician who first raised the red flag, I sort of let it go.
Are you sure you’re not conflating someone else’s posts with Dio’s? I haven’t seen anything from him in this thread that contradicts Marinee’s post, or that has struck me as unreasonable or unfair to TS or GID folks.
Like what?
I think you just need to work on your own reading comprehension since you’ve already accused me of saying things I haven’t said. You don’t seem to understand the difference between GID and TG and you want to treat the former as though the latter was confirmed as a certainty, which is not necessarily a good idea. For some reason this seems to a difficult point for to grasp.
Maybe the “concerned look” was one of “Oh shit! I’m gonna get caught up in a malpractice suit!” and not one of “Get that kid to a psychologist ASAP!”
For some reason, you want to repeat an irrelevant point instead of addressing the questions and points I’ve put to you. Mere posts ago, you declared that “all you were ever saying” was that diagnosis hasn’t been properly made in this case, but now you say that you agree with Marienee and that she’s saying what you meant to. What she said didn’t have anything to do with whether the child has been diagnosed, or what with.
Address the questions I’ve asked you and the arguments against your points I have made. Quit stalling. I’m really starting to think you don’t even know what you think or why, or that maybe random people just come and type on your keyboard at various intervals.
I was wondering if any TG’s, who have expressed having known about their condition at such a young age, experienced the same level of disgust with their own genitalia as Nicole. To me it is the most unsettling part of the article. A discussion of self-mutilation in children so young is usually a giant red flag for educators.
Emphasis mine:
I’m really not sure why you have such a hard-on for Dio in this thread. Your responses to him seem to have very little to do with anything he’s actually written. Usually, I really enjoy your posts, but in this thread, you’re coming entirely out of left field.