I think their approach is perfectly appropriate. They are living with and loving the kid they have.
Well, that depends on what “presenting at home” means. At home, if my 8-year-old daughter is “presenting” as a boy, what is she doing? (Other than saying, “Call me Ishmael.”) Wearing pants, asking for short hair, playing with trucks? What is this traumatic change she is forced through each day when she leaves the house?
Some names you recognize. I’m not sure if I always agree with you, but I don’t have you on my shitlist, and that’s gotta count for something. 
Wiki strikes again…
Insistent, persistent, consistent. Third or fourth time I’ve had to write this. It’s not a matter of just saying it.
Got a question for you.
If a human being with a penis who identifies as a male loses said penis (disease, accident, whatever) does he cease to be a man? If yes - then what is he, because he’s not a woman. If no - well, he’s a man without a penis, but he’s still a man.
I suspect the vast majority of people will still see such a person a male, despite a lack of male genitalia. Therefore, no, being male is not always dependent on plumbing. Ditto for women.
What irreversible thing would they do at that age? Puberty blockers would not be an option until 12-14 or so, and even those are not irreversible.
The way the system is supposed to work:
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Young kid expresses gender identity different from birth sex persistently, consistently, and insistently.
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The kid is tested for intersex conditions by physician. If such is detected, it is addressed medically if needed. Here this can be complicated and is tangential to the overall discussion, so I shall let it sit.
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If no intersex conditions are detected, the child goes into counseling, and the parents, counselor, and physician work to determine how real the gender identity is.
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When puberty arrives, if all ADULTS agree that the child has continued to be persistent, consistent, and insistent about their gender identity, the child may be placed on puberty blockers.
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After a period of 2-4 years on puberty blockers (often 2-3 years) the situation is re-evaluated. If the gender identity has moved more in alignment with the birth gender, then all parties can agree to remove the child from the blockers, and allow normal puberty to kick in.
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If however the child has maintained their gender identity as different than their birth sex, the child may be started on the appropriate hormone treatment.
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When the child is at the age of majority, then surgery may be an option.
Does it always go this way? No. Just like your kids can buy pot and crack if they really want to, they can also buy hormones and bypass the system. And they will too - the transgirl I mentored today told me that the hormones are readily available from the same dealers who are selling the hard drugs.
Some may even be able to “doctor shop” and get surgery at age 16-17 (not in this country). Some children are moved faster through the system if the adults decide that it’s better for their health and welfare, other times they may move slower.
To hear some folks in this thread talk, again, it’s like you think there’s a roving band of hormone-scattering knife-wielding madmen corrupting our children’s precious bodily fluids.
Actually, a rather nasty experiment was done to a man named David Reimer. No, pouring female hormones into a male brain is not going to make a male human being female.
Mr. Reimer eventually killed himself, and I can’t help but think his distress wasn’t that different from many transsexuals.
(Wondering what the hell constitute “female behaviors” and “male behaviors” where there isn’t considerable overlap in the population)
Oh, heavens - when I was 8 I was doing all of that (never got that yellow Tonka truck I wanted, not that I’m bitter…!) but I never doubted I was girl. I was a girl that preferred pants, had tried out short hair, and very much wanted a truck. (Don’t worry - I’ve owned a bright red Ford Ranger these past 16 years, I’ve compensated for the childhood deprivation.)
Stop concentrating on the superficial crap! My spouse got married in a kilt but he’s very much a hetero, non-crossing-dressing man. I seldom wear dresses or skirts, but I’m very much a hetero woman (given some of my dressing choices 100 years ago I definitely would have been a cross-dresser, maybe even as recently as 50 years ago.) Gender isn’t about how you dress, whether or not you wear eyeliner, and so on. Frankly, I find it appalling that transsexuals used to have to become caricatures of a gender in order to transition.
I don’t know what makes a trans woman or a trans man. I’ll leave it to them to try to explain that to us cis-people. I do know it’s NOT about what you wear or what toys you like to play with.
Uhh, I have never met any of those people and know next-to-nothing about this issue, so… why would my thoughts matter? Certainly nothing I have said in any way implies that parents categorically should NOT respect children’s requests to be treated as a different gender.
In the following article, a six-year-old’s gender identity was ascertained by the child’s self-report and preferences in TOYS AND CLOTHES. The child won a lawsuit in Colorado.
Except that that is EXACTLY how it’s determined in children.
Broomstick, sorry for responding with the same article twice. Once would’ve probably been sufficient. I think we agree anyway: that toys and clothes are a poor way to identify gender.
Aggression and isolation in men, communication and grouping in women.
These are neurological tendencies observed among men and women–specific developments of certain parts of the brain due to hormones flooding the body during puberty.
I’m arguing against complete gender relativity where you are seeming to suggest there is no such thing as “male” or “female” behavior tendencies. In fact, the entire premise of Gender Identification Disorder relies on a foundation of typical “male” and “female” behaviors.
Who put George Sand in your vagina?
Oh, well, you said “What I would actually do if I encountered a 6- or 8- or 12- or 16- year old with a outside-the-norm gender identity I don’t know,” so I thought I could present an actual example and possibly give you the opportunity to discover that.
Hormones are powerful, but we have plenty of experience with giving or not giving them, and it’s pretty clear at this point that hormones don’t change gender identity.
There are differences in males and females, but what that MEANS is relative. For example, for much of human history the fact that women are usually physically smaller was a huge deal, one that basically determined the structure of society. Now, not so much. The difference is still there, but it doesn’t have the same meaning.
I do feel for the parents in this case though. It’s easy for us to coonect actions to outcomes in retrospect from our armchairs, in hindsight, but the question of which boundaries need enforcing and which should be let slide can be a complete fucking nightmare of a minefield for parents.
For every tragic case like this, there’s another where an equally tragic outcome happens because the parents were too liberal with enforcement of societal norms. Not the same specific norms, of course, but we at the SDMB find it really easy to point out what shoulda happened. For the parents, in the thick of it, sadly it isn’t usually nearly so cut and dried.
I don’t feel for them, since they let religion guide their actions instead of science. No-one’s suggesting the parents should magically have known exactly what to do, but they should have worked it through with trained counsellors who base their therapy on up to date research, not on lies based on thousands of years of bigotry.
They were demonstrably, provably wrong, and they had the opportunity to do better, which they didn’t take.
Hmm, you mean like this passage:
Coy was born a male, but began at an early age to identify as a girl through toys and dress and started calling herself a girl between the ages of 4 and 6, according to the summary of the division’s ruling.
I wonder if her diagnosis had more to do with the toys and dress or her consistently calling herself a girl? And why is that passage directly followed by this one:
In August of 2011 she was enrolled in kindergarten as a boy, and when other parents and teachers did not recognize Coy as a girl, she began suffering from depression and anxiety that affected her ability to learn, Chavez wrote.
Oops. What is it with you and sources in this thread?
But jokes aside, what we have here seems to be a pretty straightforward case of a child who is consistent, persistent, and insistent in their claim to being of the opposite gender, and parents who correctly, after two years of this, recognized it. And then we see those negative consequences you so dismissively asked about earlier:
Well, in this 6-year-old, depression and anxiety that made it hard for her to learn. This is why this shit needs to be taken seriously!
It’s not hard to look up online resources on gender dysphoria. It’s not hard to see what the major scientific bodies (APA, AMA, AAP, for example) have to say on the matter. From what we can tell, the evidence is strong that her parents didn’t do this, or ignored the advice of those organizations in favor of religious doctrine. This isn’t simply a matter of monday-morning quarterbacking - this is a case where the parents legitimately and clearly fucked up, and where I think it’s entirely reasonable to believe that most of us would have done better. You know, kind of like parents who treat their children’s eczema with homeopathy or parents who let their children die of treatable illness because of their religious faith. It’s not just us judging “[in] retrospect from our armchairs”, we actually would have done better.
Really? Is there? And of course, it’s not just about “societal norms”, it’s about the very real science behind this issue.