This is one of the nuttiest stories I've ever read, but it seems like there are also some deep issues here that will have a lasting impact on transgender children for awhile.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...r-greg-abbott/

Cliffs from my reading:

Father and mother disputing whether their biological son is a transgender girl. The father says that the mother is telling the child that he is a she, and puts him in dresses/paints his nails/etc against his wishes.

Mother says that father refuses to call child by her preferred pronoun/name.


Biggest questions I see:
1) Can it be determined at 7 (and apparently younger) that a child is transgender?
2) Should a 7 year old be able to make this decision?
3) If the answer is no, how do we determine which parent gets to make the decision?


I'll add my opinion on this later but wanted to get everyone's thoughts. Apologies in advanced if I screwed up any pronouns, I have 0 idea what is correct for this situation.

1) Find out what the kid actually wants (this is tricky but doable)

2) Do that

3) **** everyone else.

Well it this thread isn't headed for trouble then no thread ever is. I'd suggest WN just lock it now and save everyone the trouble of making good posts that they then aren't able to quote easily.
Just wanted to get my thoughts in early. I think the question (and the sorts of questions we should be looking at) is: should a 7 year old be able to play poker online with their own money? Because I would play them headsup as long as I knew they were properely bankrolled and that I wasn't taking their last candy money.

Tom’s nailed it afaict. Lock it up before JV comes in and we might have the first ever non-dumpster fire thread here.

I'm not sure it's quite as simple as your answer suggests. I know the parents of a transgender child very well. They had discussions with a psychologist about the age at which it is possible to reliably determine whether a kid is transgender. I don't remember what age they were told, but it may well have been older than 7. It wasn't much older than 7 as I recall, but it might have been somewhere in the range of 8-10.

These parents were not searching for someone to tell them that their kid might not be transgender. They were looking for honest advice about how best to support their child. And even at age 7, they weren't telling the kid that he had to behave in a way that was more "male." It really was a question of when the kid would begin to self-identify at school as a girl.

As it turned out, the child continued to identify as transgender through the age at which the psychologist told them a reliable determination could be made. And the parents proceeded accordingly.

What if the 7 year old child wants to transition and neither parent supports it. Is it now the state's job to force the parents to allow it?

7 years old is far too young to make this kind of decision. I don’t have kids but if I did I’m not even sure I would let my daughter wear make up or get her ears pierced at 8. It’s just too young.

Let’s say you replaced 7 with 15, then no it shouldn’t be up to the parents imo.

There's already a trans thread and I believe I've already posted a study or 2 that show the majority (or significant portion. i forget the exact numbers) of children with trans issues grow out of it and identify as gay when they become fully formed adults. There's also some research coming out showing a level of regret that nobody wants to talk about.

https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-...l-sex-11827740

I think this is the crux of the problem, particularly in this case. The needs of the child is what comes first, but at what age does the child know what it needs? There seems to be a consensus in this story that this conversation started when the child was three. Even at 7, if the child wants to dress up as a girl, does that even mean the child wants to be a girl? What about 8? 10? I personally think 7 seems quite young to make the decision (I had a friend at 7 who thought he was a lion, lol), but something like 12 even seems to old to be able to start making that decision. This seems like an absurdly tricky subject with no great outcome outside of just let the child go and see what happens-which I doubt could ever happen with the majority of parents.

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7 years old. Let the poor kid have a childhood first. What the hell is wrong with people?

Agreed the brains are still forming. Heck let the 7 year old drink, do drugs, smoke, vote, serve in the military

Don't get me going on Transgender Men competing in Women's events

This just begs the question. In most of these cases, the child has been expressing a desire to be treated as the opposite gender for a consistent period of years, even by the age of 7. In other words, I don't think there are many, if any, parents that hear a request for toe polish from their four-year old son on Sunday, and then run to the preschool on Monday and demand that their kid be treated as a girl.

For instance, the child I described in my earlier post began at age 4 to consistently express a preference for being treated as a girl. What exactly does it mean to "let that kid have a childhood first"?

It's worth considering that a 7 year old might be able to operate behind enemy lines a lot easier than an adult. Kids are still a sponge for languages at that age and could make for good spies.

theres levels to this though

-letting the child choose how they present themselves
-letting the child choose and change their identity
-the previous plus telling everyone else they are the opposite sex and to go along with it
- hormonal and/or surgical intervention that will have permanent and unknown/poorly understood impacts on their development
-allowing the child, parents, and physicians to sterilize and perform other irreversible changes when it is known there is a significant amount of regret and reversal happening

Arguing a 7 year old boy can choose to wear dresses and that's fine is a long ways away from chemically sterilizing them

I wasn't making the case for chemical sterilization of 7 year olds. I was merely pointing out that saying "let the kid have a childhood" begs the question of what that means. And it begs the question precisely because, as you say, there are different theoretical levels of parental response. And I agree that the appropriate response depends partly on the age of the child.

Speaking only for myself as a parent, if I had a child who was potentially transgender, I suspect I would be very inclined to follow professional advice, whatever that advice was. Put another way, I don't think I understand childhood development and gender development well enough to trust my own judgment over professional advice.

yeah professional opinions will vary wildly. i would probably seek multiple opinions on how to handle points 1-3 and then reach my own conclusion. points 4 and 5 would be off the table. we don't let kids decide what they want to eat, they aren't choosing to sterilize themselves if i have any say in it. the fact that parents might not have a say in it is an absolutely absurd and terrifying direction. your kid chooses a new identity and the government, not you, can rule in favor of sterilization. nightmare

I think this is probably one of those things where a few super rare extreme cases get talked up a bunch in the media so it looks like it's endemic and their readership can get riled up. In this case about nutty progressives harming their kids so they can virtue signal to their peers.

That said a guy I've known since I was a kid used to wear dresses at every opportunity and would answer "a woman" to the old "what do you want to be when you grow up" and 20 years later is perfectly content as a cis gay guy. It's very easy to imagine him getting given treatment at a young age that would have made his life a lot worse had he been born nowadays so I wouldn't mind more attention being paid to that phenomenon.

The last thing I would be trusting is "professional advice" in that situation. Just use some common sense and make your own judgement. It's not that difficult. If the kid wants to dress up. Fine. Kids love to role play.

"Professionals" get things wrong all the time. In this case it could be disastrous.

I don't like that my friends let their daughter wear lipstick to kindergarten. Does that make me a bad person?

I'm quite busy now and for the next couple days traveling, so I'm just going to preemptively quote this section of the forum guidelines as a reminder (and a request) to everyone:

Not in my book. There is no way in hell I would let a child that age wear makeup.

I’m sure leaving this place totally unsupervised for several days will work out really well!

Given the DailyMail discussion, ironically this is one of their top stories right now.

"Kim Kardashian's 'born again' husband Kanye West bans North, six, from wearing make-up and crop tops after he spent years dressing her like Rihanna... and it's caused a 'big fight'"