That's partly the issue of concern, isn't it? Giving children the idea that if they don't fulfil a traditional male or female role, then they must be some alternative gender identity.
Many people don't agree with this stance, both from a conceptual point of view, and that in practice it may lead impressionable children to want to modify their bodies to fit some idea of gender identity they've had instilled.
I'm kind of disturbed by this and think that we will eventually look back on it as a sign of the primitive barbarism of today's society [0], but for nearly opposite reasons from the usual right-wing transphobic reasons: I suspect a substantial source of gender dysphoria -- if not the dominant source -- isn't a fundamental incompatibility of internal identity with biological sex features, but a fundamental incompatibility of internal identity with imposed social gender stereotypes where socially-perceived gender is tied to outward biological sex characteristics.
To the extent this is the case, this approach amounts to making children conform their outward sex characteristics to society's gender stereotypes that most closely correspond to their internal identity. Which may be less barbaric than trying to force them to conform their behavior to the gender stereotypes that most closely match their outward sex characteristics, but not much less.
[0] I do want to emphasize that, in saying that, I am not arguing against the idea that its the best approach we have available now, or that parents and clinicians shouldn't choose this approach; I'm saying that I strongly suspect that the reason that it may be the best approach we have available is a much more fundamental problem with our social approach to gender.
I'm sympathetic to concerns that some kids (mostly girls) are doing it because it's a trendy thing to do. I'm worried things like The Genderbread Person send the wrong message by gendering clothes and activities. It tells a boy wearing pink and playing with barbies he's a girl.
If my kid's LGB, I'm glad they found what they're looking for, and if they change their mind, that works too. The trans bit worries me because it's permanent.
I think both sides have gone too far on this issue, and find California and Florida equally scary.
This is silly. Young children are essentially genderless. If they express gender issues, work on it using therapy to find what the cause is. I don't see the need to make them crossdress etc. at such a young age.
> It's just that people don't like the idea of children being transgender, probably because it reminds them that they could potentially have a gay or transgender child.
A shallow dismissal, a perfectly reasonable argument against irreversible action for changing children’s genders is that many of them aren’t so sure as it seems and later want to transition back.
The issue is what causes a child to experience gender dysphoria (or more accurately what causes a child to believe that their distress at their own body is genuine gender dysphoria rather than a symptom conversion from another psychological issue)?
And then there’s the issue that holding that objective gender exists and is innate in the same way biological sex does is a philosophical / ideological position - other positions exist. My generation (late X) were taught to see people as unique individuals differentiated by sex only for the purposes of reproductive role - that people are born ‘gendered’ is a complete anathema - society should not be in the business of assigning acceptable appearances, behaviours and attitudes to individuals based on their sex, or worse, surgically modifying people such that their apparent sex matches their gender.
(Clarification - surgery is of-course fine as the cure for untreatable gender dysphoria, and in adults as a free choice. My objection is to the belief in appropriate gender norms and appearances as being the correct ordering of individuals in society - I’d rather see a girl with masculine interests remaining comfortable with her female body, rather than asked to question her ‘gender identity’).
>> In some cases, sex or gender assignment does not align with future gender identity, and the assignment can be problematic.
For starters, while this is a fringe case (~0.3 - 0.6% is a lazy estimated range taken from Wikipedia) it takes up 2/5 of the introductory section.
Sex assignment not matching future gender identity "can be problematic". This is something I do not agree with; I'm of the opinion that gender and sex should be treated very much separately, and this posits that assigning a sex at birth is "potentially problematic" just because the person's gender might not match up later in life.
>> Reinforcing sex assignments through surgical and hormonal means may violate the individual's rights.
That's well and good, but this is only relevant for intersex people, and this seems to imply that it is also so for transgender children. Intersex occurs significantly less than transgenderism, at around 0.06% of the population.
This kind of thinking can and has resulted in the thinking that it is a child's right to determine their sex; see for instance the gender reassignment clinics in Canada that treat children as young as 4 years old. I find it very hard to envision a reasonable country where a child of 4 is given the choice to undergo intensive surgery which will also render them infertile.
It's already forbidden for Canadian schools to tell parents if their children are identifying as the opposite gender at school; I suspect the next step will be placing children out of their homes if their parents refuse to let them transition. A brave new world.
To add insult to injury, child gender reassignment surgery and the usage of puberty blockers are still highly experimental. A few things are known (like the decreased bone density) but many important questions remain unanswered, like the impact on brain development. It will be a long time before this is solved because there just aren't a lot of children undergoing sex reassignment surgeries, thank god.
>> Terminology
This section goes to great lengths to only use "Male" and "Female" in the context of "Assigned X at birth". In fact, the whole article contains not one mention of the names of the two sexes, except when narrating about people who do not "fit typical notions of male and female bodies", the one in "Terminology". Again, over half of this section is dominated by transgenderism-related text.
>> Assigned X at birth
To me this idea seems to imply that sex is something that is arbitrarily chosen by a Doctor at birth; the Doctor here being portrayed as the personification of "the Patriarchy". As if sex has nothing to with sexual organs and the means of procreation.
>> Sex reassignment: ... physically change a person's gender to match their gender identity after a putatively erroneous sex assignment at birth
"Physically change a person's gender". I don't agree that gender is a physical thing at all. I consider gender to be a set of social protocols that generally ease interactions between individuals, by providing a default set of roles a person of either gender can build their identity off, and while also easing day-to-day interactions between the sexes by defining common protocols.
"putatively erroneous sex assignment at birth" implies that gender dysphoria is more real than a person's sex, ignoring the fact that a person's sex does not change with "sexual reassignment surgery" as a person's chromosomes don't change and that person will never have the same sexual function as a person of the sex whose visual characteristics they imitate with surgery.
Neither this section or the rest of this article acknowledges that sex is in any way grounded in biological reality. There is a much better Wikipedia article on "Sex determination systems", but none of the information there is mentioned in the "Sex assignment" article. It's also not mentioned in the "See also" section.
>> Assignment in cases of infants with intersex traits, or cases of trauma
This belongs in the main article ("History of intersex surgery") but takes up twice as much as the introduction and Terminology section.
>> Challenges to requirements for sex assignment
"the perceived need to legally assign sex is increasingly being challenged": there goes the narrative again, "assigning sex is bad and you should feel bad".
For clarification, the children I mentioned changed their names, appearances, and pronouns to match their own gender identities. It’s not just “boys playing with dolls, girls playing with trucks”.
Kids have a lot of information at their fingertips these days. I don't think that I heard about "transgender" until maybe highschool. Kids also can see the extra duties, requirements for behavior and dress, discrimination and harassment that end up on girls and women.
My thought is that if a child sees all this, and that they'd be subject to it, why wouldn't that child avoid those extra expectations, burdens, duties, harassment and discrimination by saying "I'm not a girl"?
> Leaper said boys and girls section also create a stigma for children who are gender non-conforming or exploring other gender identities.
> “But even for kids that identify with their birth-assigned gender there may be some children who want to play with some of these toys, but then end up avoiding them because they don’t want to be considered abnormal somehow,” Leaper said.
That's not the steel man, that's a straw man where you just flipped the politics of the scenario.
Letting kids feel safe to introspect and question their gender expression is a good thing.
The implication that kids will be _systematically_ forced to delay puberty or undergo a transition they don't want is absurd and not a valid "chain of reasoning". Yes, I'm sure it has happened and could continue in rare instances because a) there are lots of crazy parents; b) it is a new, trending concept and people like fads. But that is really no different than other types of trauma parents and teachers give to kids across the political spectrum. You're going to have to do a lot more work to prove this is something likely to happen on a broad scale.
The fact that gender identity is now something kids are allowed to have means people will interrogate them about it. People may even attempt to coerce them (just like any other beliefs) and kids will likely change their minds over time. The ability to defend their beliefs, resist influence, have role models, receive reliable advice and mentorship, manage their relationships, make serious medical decisions, etc etc is all part of the equation. It's also not that big of a deal or the end of society.
How do children who exhibit behaviors that the doctors and parents stereotype as opposite-sex benefit from having their natural development blocked with and/or overwhelmed with opposite-sex hormones?
Most parents are fine with gender non-conforming children (in the parent's mind of course - the kid is just being themselves). It's not a panic for them to ask why modifying their child's body to match their toy choice is so important.
I think the fact that our society is being more thoughtful towards gender identity is a good thing. But is it possible in our attempt to be thoughtful we sometimes will over analyze individual situations and change our environments, interactions, and treatment, towards those we are trying to help in such a way that it is actually detrimental to them?
In the case of allowing children to choose their identity in the way this article describes, is it possible that a parent might misunderstand their child and enable a short-term change that could be detrimental to a child's development (socially, academically, etc)?
I feel like gender identity is a hot issue right now, and people in general get caught up in the rhetoric and forget about the actual people.
Gender dysphoria is probably the number one most harmful influence being spread amongst young teens and children through these methods. I’ve seen it through my own eyes, way too many middle and high school kids these days are claiming to identify as a different gender than what should be statistically normal. Most of them males.
Ah, is that the main point of disagreement? People are thinking back to their own experience of gender at that age, and then expecting it to be the same for trans kids. I think, as I mentioned, a logical explanation for that is that cis people don't have any reason to think about it. Or at least didn't when we were kids. I've asked my kids, and they're both confident in their gender at a young age.
I'll add onto this, if people are genuinely worried about invasive surgery, the policing of trans identity is counterproductive to addressing that concern.
What would be productive is allowing kids to use different pronouns, allowing them to dress themselves the way they wish and allowing them to seek affirmative care and affirmative communities -- so that they can explore their own gender identity without feeling like they need to commit hard or lean in against opposition that tells them they're not really trans.
To the extent that gender identity can be influenced by social norms, allowing kids to identify their own genders is a way of allowing them to safely experiment in that space without invasive surgeries that they might regret. But if everything becomes policing whether or not someone really is trans, if everything involves policing even minor interventions like puberty blockers, then of course kids who suspect they might be trans are going to think that surgery is the only way that they'll be accepted or feel comfortable -- because that's what "gender-critical" groups are telling them, they're telling them that having a certain body is a barrier to their identity.
For some trans people, exploring gender is a process. Allowing people to feel safe and accepted during that process decreases the risk of rash decisions. And accepting them regardless of whether or not they pass for their gender decreases social pressure that might exist telling them they need to medically transition to be valid.
It's not surprising that mocking gender fluidity, over-emphasizing physical attributes in gender identity, and restricting low-impact interventions like puberty blockers might make uncertain kids feel like they need to hard-commit to medically transitioning. It's not surprising that trans kids and trans-questioning kids would be alienated by that environment, and that they might be less willing to openly air their doubts and fears or seek external advice.
Allowing the child to make up their own mind is almost exactly not the approach offered by Dr Zucker. His approach involved telling parents to prevent their kids from playing with toys of the "wrong" gender and making friends with other kids of the "wrong" gender in an attempt to make sure they grow up the right gender. That's why activists call it conversion therapy.
This is what the article means when it says that: "That’s because the authors believe that messages from family, peers, and society do a huge amount of the work of helping form, reinforce, and solidify gender identities, and that at young ages these identities tend to be quite malleable. There’s great potential for confusion. A young boy might notice his new baby sister getting more attention than he is, and start dressing like a girl in a bid to be noticed. His parents, not knowing what to do, might go along with this, inadvertently reinforcing the notion that he’s a girl — a notion which, according to the GIC model, probably doesn’t come from a deep-seated kernel of gender identity, but rather mostly from social reinforcement and family dynamics."
His position - what he told parents coming to his clinic for help - is that if parents don't do everything they can to dissuade young kids from acting in gender-inappropriate ways, to make sure they wear the right clothes and play with the right toys and socialise with the right gender of other kids, they'll turn their kids trans. This is the point of dispute, and he's way outside of the scientific consensus here. All the stuff about the adolescent he may or may not have mocked is a red herring - I've followed this issue, and literally the only place I've heard it mentioned is articles defending Zucker.
Many people don't agree with this stance, both from a conceptual point of view, and that in practice it may lead impressionable children to want to modify their bodies to fit some idea of gender identity they've had instilled.
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