“That’s nice, sweetie. More potatoes?”
Great! Get back to us when you have the $100,000 for the operation saved up.
Dennis
I have an online friend whose daughter came out as gay around age 12-13, then by 14-15 came out as transgender. She is now He - had breast removal surgery a year or two after beginning the transition (during which he lived as male including taking hormones).
From what my friend said, studies show that kids who are supported in this at a young age tend to do better long term than those whose changes are suppressed.
All that said, I’d still have a hard time with it - especially when it comes to something permanent like the mastectomy. I’d try my best to deal with it.
The situation can lead to one bit of hilarity: my friend posted about making an appointment for her son with the gynecologist. Which caused me a double-take but, well, yeah - until / unless those bits are removed, you need to see a gyno and the situation is complicated by the hormones.
The thread timing is interesting - we’ve hosted students from overseas in the past, and just today signed on to host one for two weeks this fall. S/he is female identifying as male, and when we saw the list of students we specifically told the agency “in case other families are weirded out by that, we’re fine with it”. Hell, I’m more concerned that he’s a smoker 
(he knows that smoking in our house is not permitted, he can smoke outdoors).
Saw a documentary about Buck Angel, a FtM person who, among other things, works in the “adult entertainment industry”. At one point Buck needed a hysterectomy and yeah, odd looks from the personnel at the medical center signing in a very male looking person for womb removal. Buck hadn’t bothered with getting those bits removed until they started causing problems.
One of our MtF posters here on the Dope posted about needing to get her prostate checked during regular physical exams.
There are some amusing aspects to these situations, except of course they’re usually quite serious to the person involved.
But isn’t this more a sign that the child is simply being open with their struggle rather do continue it in silence? It’s not as if the child can simply op to feel like they are a different gender.
We’ll see with my kids. They are still young, but they are are also pretty stereotypical for their respective genders.
Honestly, I can’t see approaching differently than I’d see any medical or psychological condition. Refer them to the professionals and follow the recommendations of the professionals. It’s not a life choice I’d encourage or recommend. It would be nice if people didn’t have this problem, just like it would be nice if they didn’t have depression or cancer or diabetes either. If it’s my kid’s issue, then it is what it is. Denial and moralizing are not going to get you anywhere, are they? I have enough confidence in medical professionals to weed out confused teenagers from people with genuine issues and I’d certainly make sure we get a second or third opinion.
I have an 11 year old daughter who has already told me in no uncertain terms that she is attracted only to girls. I’m sure autism plays a big part in how direct and honest and rational she is but she knows her body better than anyone. She also seems like she may be a bit on the … masculine side. Or ambiguous maybe? I don’t mean to stereotype but she’s not very girly.
Anyway I’ve thought about the possibility that this could in be my future. I’m fine with it and I’m glad to see my part of the world is more accepting. A lot has changed since I was a girl. My only concern would be her safety, but I’m already concern for her safety. Nobody wants to see their babies hurt. But I am totally down for advocating to make the world more trans-friendly. I wish we could completely move past those stereotypes (like about the “girly” thing) and let people be who they are without needing to justify every deviation from the norm.
Any sort of medical procedures I’d want to hold off on until she was 16 or so and not without all necessary counseling first, but considering how poor we are I doubt the issue would even come up. I’m looking for handouts now just to get the kid in braces. 
Let’s walk through this with an exercise I do with audiences when this question is asked.
Close your eyes and relax. Clear your mind. Then ask yourself: are you male, female, uncertain, a mix of both, or none of the above?
Now ask yourself how you know that? Most people will immediately think “it’s because I have a penis” or “because I have breasts.” That’s natural. Now what if magically, tomorrow, you work up without a penis, or breasts and vagina. A neuter body Would you still be what you are inside? What if you woke up with a body of the opposite physical sex? Would you still know what you really were inside? And how would you know?
Most people, the vast majority IME, answer that even without any sex characteristics, even if they woke up one day with a completely different body, that they’d still be the same “them” inside.
And then people will ask me “how do you know what it feels like to be a woman?” And I’ll ask them “how do you know what it feels like to be a woman/man/etc?” Typically a response will be “well, I like to do girl things, I hang out with girls, I like to dress this way…” Well, so do I. So then they may say “well, you didn’t grow up with a peer group of other girls, and your parents didn’t raise you as a girl, you weren’t socialized as a girl…” Well I know more than a few cisgender girls who were essentially raised as boys, maybe had one female friend their entire formative years, were raised just like their brothers by their parents…and developed into strongly femme women. Don’t they know what they are?
Rhetorically, why can’t I know what I am?
And if they ask me to define what it means for me to say I am female, I can only answer that I am most comfortable in female peer groups, I enjoy talking to other women and being friends with them, I have common interests with many more women than men I meet, I tend to have naturally “female comportment”… No male is excluded from having any or all of those same qualities, but generally speaking when people meet me and get to know me, they often, when asked, will refer to me as a very femme person (or as my ex-boyfriend used to say, “the femmiest femme that ever femmed”).
And then of course one could delve into “what does femme mean? What does masculine mean?” etc. and I simply don’t have time to keep going down those paths. I mean, if you put someone on the rack and you go far enough down the gender reductionism path you eventually get to a point where everyone is all genders and none, gender has no meaning, and everything we are is contrived, etc. It begins to become quite boring.
I just know I feel female, I’ve always felt that way, and now I have a happy and full life where I am a productive, energetic, positive person.
A friend of mine is just coming out now as a female, at age 42, with a wife and two kids! He felt social pressure to “conform” to his body gender his whole life and kept it completely hidden from everyone including me. I feel badly for her because it is going to play havok with her life. It would have been way better for her and many others if she could have begun this as a teen.
All my life I’ve been one of the boys, I am told that girls aren’t good at math, girls can’t read maps, girls aren’t engineers, girls aren’t gamers, girls like pink… and the relatively few women with whom I communicate effortlessly have also spent their lives being told they’re wrong for that kind of reasons. But our response isn’t “oh I must be a boy”, it’s “update your definitions”. I will always support you, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to really understand. It’s just a kind of feeling I don’t happen to have.
80% of children who claim to be transgender stop having those feelings by adulthood.
Perhaps you should do a thread to ask people. These things wouldn’t be in my explanation, for one.
That’s not what the 80% statistic says at all. It’s quite often misquoted as such, but that’s not true. That 45 person study found that a majority of gender non-conforming boys grew up to me gay men, not transgender. They were never transgender, so that’s not surprising at all. And nothing about biological females is in that statistic.
As for me, like other posters, I would support my child in doing what they need to feel most comfortable, short of irreversible body modification unless it was suggested otherwise by a medical doctor. That is, haircut, clothing choices, binders if applicable, and hormone blockers? Absolutely fine. I’ll do my best to learn preferred names and pronouns, totally. But surgery will have to wait until your body is grown or the doctor says it’s time.
This is me, too. I’ve believed for years that gender is a continuum, and I am not socially comfortable with people who are too far to either end of that continuum. And I suspect that most of us who are somewhere in the middle are mostly comfortable being lumped into the social gender that matches our bodies. But a very large fraction of my friends are gay men. And I have as many straight males as females among my close friends.
But I’ve met both men and women who are very far towards the binary. And I suppose there must be some people whose brain is very far towards the end that doesn’t match their body. Perhaps I’m completely wrong, but that’s my best guess.
The actual study is 80% of preschoolers who don’t conform to gender norms (i.e. play with toys associated with the other gender) do not identify as transgender in adulthood. Not particularly shocking.
Which is why nothing permanent and irreversible is done to such children until they are legally adult for medical purposes, and why years of counseling and therapy are required prior to permanent, irreversible procedures being performed even on adults.
Part of legitimate therapy for people with gender issues is making sure what their issue(s) actually is, and what the best course is for that person.
“Best of luck, kid. I don’t pay for elective surgery. I suggest starting by getting a job.”
What do you do if your child doesn’t come around? If they continue to assert they are transgender, do you eventually accept them as that? Or do you stand fast in believing you are right and they are wrong? Do you act on your belief by addressing your child as what you believe they are? If it gets to the point where your child insists you address them as what they believe they are or they’re going to end their relationship with you, what do you do then?
By that definition of “gender norms” and depending on who’s deciding which toys are boyish or girly, that can be the immense majority of children, most of whom will eventually become cis-gendered, straight adults.
About 10% of the 2yo kids entering the kindergarten my nephews attended are having “gender fights” with their parents (I actually asked the teacher, back when the nephew was one of them). They do not correspond to kids who are outside the norm, but to parents whose definitions are: the kid wants to wear a backpack or clothes that the parent deems wrong because of its color or because it depicts an opposite-gender cartoon character (nephew wanted a Dora pack). There may be another 10% whose parents are also like that but, since the child has happened to pick the “right” clothing and backpack, there is no fight (niece wanted a Dora pack, too… but in her case, it was deemed “appropriate”).
This is such a broad and difficult question that, especially not having kids myself, I’m not sure how a real answer can be given. I think, as with any such major life changing decision or pronouncement, it really depends on the circumstance and the child. And this is exactly why I think it’s generally ridiculous for people not involved in the situation, especially the government. Assuming I one day have kids and am able to mostly follow through on my theories of how I’d raise them, I’d like to think I’d be attentive to how they’re fitting into society and their peers, adjusting to various changes that come with life, and that I’d strongly encouraged trust and openness in share their feelings, fears, or whatever with me.
Assuming the best case, I think the way forward is simple. Have lots of conversations, do what it takes to help the child feel comfortable sharing with us, seek professional help from people familiar with these sorts of situations, and put off any potentially life altering decisions like surgeries until there’s a certain degree of certainty of it’s permanence among all those involved in the decision, including the child, me, the mother, the therapist. I think virtually every child will have some questions about his or her gender, sexual identity, and any number of other issues like that. Some of it they figure out, some they don’t, some are phases, some are permanent changes. It seems utterly irrational and downright dangerous to just assume that is sure enough to just dive into that head first without all due precaution, perhaps unless it’s one of those sorts of situations where pretty much everyone knew the whole time, but even then, who knows.
And, for the record, I say this as someone who, frankly, doesn’t really feel any particular attachment to my own gender identity, as it really largely seems like a social construct to me. Yeah, I was born male, was raised male, if asked, I identify as male, but it’s not something I consider remotely essential to my identity. It’s more like a box I check on random data about me, like my date or height, but wouldn’t come up in me describing myself until after I’ve gone through probably at least a dozen other things. If I woke up tomorrow and were suddenly female, other than having to learn how to deal with the appropriate differences in living life as one, and wondering how the hell it happened, I really don’t think I’d care that much; hell, I might even find it an interesting experience just learning what it’s like. I think I’d feel the same if I were suddenly to wake up gay or another race. The largest adjustment seems, to me, to be how others would treat me differently, not so much how I’d think of myself. The sorts of changes that would really shake my identity to the core would be more like if I suddenly had a major shift in my taste in music and the culture surrounding that, I suddenly had vastly different religious/spiritual/political beliefs, I suddenly became an extrovert or thrill seeker or whatever.
Other than that, I get that different people attach their identities to different things, so in that context I totally get how someone where those other aspects that aren’t essential to me are to them or why things I see as vital to me are trivial to others. So all we really CAN do is offer compassion to people in these situations who struggle with certain aspects of their own identities.