RoadRatt wrote:
Fine, I'll just go with transgenders since no one seems to want to post anything other than a smart ass answer...
So, going back to Edenthiel's baby type question. You transgenders have a baby. What do you do, give it a boy's name if it has a penis? give it a girl's name if it has a vagina? or do you wait for it to grow old enough to tell you what gender it thinks it is and what it wants to be called?
"You transgenders"??? What does that even mean grammatically? (hint: nothing, it's not an actual word)
But anyway, our daughter *is* transgender. The doctor assigned 'male' to her on her birth paperwork but said that based on several factors there was a 1-in-4 chance he was wrong. For much of her third year, during the typical developmental stage where children realize a sense of Self that includes their sense of sex and gender identity, she gave herself a gender neutral nickname. A few months later, just short of four years old, she told us she was a girl and needed to live as one, and told us the name she wished to go by.
We read up on the biology & neurology & genetics & endocrinology underlying what it meant to be transgender. Then we talked to pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists and yes, therapists. Including the only one on the West Coast that had much experience back then with trans & gender atypical (or 'gender creative' as she prefers to call them) children. Then we joined parents online groups and local meet ups with other parents of trans kids, and learned their stories, too. Since our daughter was very clear and consistent about knowing she is a girl, since we knew there were other physical indications of mixed sex development (not necessarily intersex) and since by then we had learned what often happens to such kids who are not allowed to be themselves, we decided to respect her self identity. Our history is extremely typical of families where the trans child knows at a young age, by the way, and is not forced to repress who they are just to please people who think they know better.
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