True, but that is why the child should be evaluated by professionals, as opposed to random people on internet message boards, or busy-body neighbors.
Absolutely. My point was just that it does happen that a child who isn’t as skilled at articulating feelings may conflate one thing (in my daughter’s case: I want to play with the boys but they’re excluding me) with another (I hate being a girl and I would do anything to be a boy).
Either way, as a parent, it’s absolutely gut-wrenching to watch and listen to your child be so unhappy. I would guess that no parent in any of these stories acted without first doing a lot of soul-searching and internal struggling.
But with respect, one could just as easily question without knowing any personal, medical, and professional details anyone’s problems. “What if you’re not really cured by Zoloft, and your depression returns?” “What if taking statin X for cholesterol makes you sicker?” They’re sort of silly questions, because the decision to transition isn’t done flippantly and not without scads of documentation and professional evaluation.
If by age 11-13 Coy still isn’t sure, or the doctors aren’t sure, or her parents aren’t sure, then the option exists for puberty blockers, to allow an extra couple of years to see if the gender issues resolve. Almost always they will, as their peers all go through puberty around them, it will often serve as a “wake up call” for the (very few) who change their minds.
There are no stats on the exact number of transkids who establish a gender identity early on, but revert to their body gender at puberty. The psychologists and psychiatrists I know claim it’s “exceedingly rare.” However, that shouldn’t be mistaken for a cite.
Absolutely. But the question is, how far did you pursue your daughter’s desire to be a boy? Did she threaten suicide if she couldn’t be a boy? Did she try to hurt herself, to change her body? Did she lock herself in her room and cry every morning, too worried she would be forced to go to the wrong bathroom at school? Was she then evaluated by psychologists, mental health professionals, and others, multiple times in a clinical setting? Was she administered testing for gender identity? Did they even try some antidepressants and other mood modifiers to see if perhaps her GID was really a side effect of an underlying mental condition?
Not putting words in your mouth, but I would imagine that the answer is “no” to all of those. Whereas with the case of transkids who transition, it’s almost always “yes.”
I think the key here is that your daughter *wanted *to be a boy. She *wanted *the doctors to change her into a boy. She *wanted *the social benefits of being a boy - playing with the other boys - which right there disqualifies her from a diagnosis under current guidelines.
Coy doesn’t *want *to be a girl. Coy *is *a girl.
That’s the difference - your daughter wanted to be other than what she knows she is; Coy knows what she is. The rest of us just needed Coy to tell us that, because the usual marker we look for (genitals) is mismarked in her case.