1 in 10 kids gender nonconforming, more likely to be abused

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21 Feb 2012, 12:40 pm

Well that explains all those 'are you a boy or a girl?.' comments at school.......not people actually asking but asking just to say I did not look/act like a typical female so somehow that was reason to be rude to me. Luckily it did not cause any abuse from my parents though but yeah depending on how uptight parents are about gender roles I can certainly see how a child not conforming to them would be at risk for abuse.

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21 Feb 2012, 3:04 pm

Sweetleaf wrote:

I also got comments like that from my peers as well. I knew that they were just being rude, so I'd avoid those kids at all costs.

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21 Feb 2012, 3:26 pm

I didn't know how to avoid them. But I still got those comments as well.

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21 Feb 2012, 7:53 pm

MagicMeerkat wrote:

I never felt like I was male or female. My problem was feeing as if I was born in the body of the wrong species. I felt like I was supposed to be a cat (spefically a jaguar).

animals appreciate and accept me

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21 Feb 2012, 8:17 pm

Invader wrote:

Gender roles are irrelevant here. It is not really even the non-conformity in general which is to blame, it is the fact that violence and abuse are common, regardless of what kind of excuse is used to justify them. People who are abusive will take the opportunity to abuse someone whenever they can, regardless of whether or not the victim conforms to their expectations.

This!! !^^^^

All these psychologists, educators, and scientists researching bullying always point out the victims' differences, disabilities, or perceived social ineptitude. Not one of these studies points out that just maybe society needs to stop being so violent and hateful in the first place.

Instead, of course, they recommend rehabilitating or "educating" the ones who are being bullied since they think if they stopped "being" who they were, they wouldn't be subject to violence in the first place. Makes me stabby just thinking of it. :evil:

Invader wrote:

Promoting equality is great and all, but not if we have to distort the truth and make a mockery of both science and logic to try and make a point, especially when doing so makes people overlook important facts about much more significant problems, just so some rabid feminist thinkers can bitterly indulge in their own bias.

Um, what "truth" are you speaking of? And where are the "rabid feminists"? When people start talking about "rabid feminists", I wonder if they really are okay with equality, at all. You know, like when people say, "I'm not a racist, but..." then say something KKK worthy.

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21 Feb 2012, 9:46 pm

I don't understand people who feel like "a girl inside a male body" or "a boy inside a girl body" (but I think it is ok to change your body if you don't like it) , my mind has no genre.

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22 Feb 2012, 2:35 am

The part I don't understand about it is what boy/girl (or male/female) bodies are. I always had a broad structure, always had body hair, always got mistaken for a boy on the phone, etc. That makes me male-bodied to ME, but people would only refer it to sex characteristics, just one of the things I don't get about society, I guess. I think the Trans community is the most discriminating against Trans people in that sense - for using such terms, for example.

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22 Feb 2012, 5:58 am

Frankie_J wrote:

Medical interventions? It's not a disease! That's written as if gender nonconforming is abnormal. It isn't. That writer needs to be shot. That's absolutely ridiculous! "Oh no! My child isn't how I want him/her to be. I know! Let's try and cure them!" Pathetic! And, no, I am a walking, talking example that the 'behaviour' doesn't always tend to fade with age.

That quote is probably referring to transgender people, who need medical interventions to transition. While I agree that pathologizing gender is ridiculous, transgender people tend to have extremely high rates for suicide attempts due to lack of acceptance, difficulty in accessing transition, employment discrimination, etc. Medical intervention in these cases does not happen nearly as often as it should.

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22 Feb 2012, 6:02 am

Frankie_J wrote:

hanyo wrote:

I was assuming that "medical intervention" meant getting gender reassignment surgery.

Ah. I hope they meant that.

When you think about it it's because of gender roles that makes kids grow up wanting gender reassignment surgery. We wouldn't put so much significance behind having particular genitals if gender roles didn't exist.

I wouldn't assume this at all. Recent studies have found neurological differences in transgender people - trans men's brains tend to develop like cisgender men's brains, and trans women's brains tend to develop like a mix of cisgender men's and cisgender women's brains. There could be far more to this than simply gender roles, especially given reports of children as young as four years old who try (typically very ineptly, fortunately) to alter their genitals.

If gender roles didn't exist, there's still the physiological differences between having estrogen or androgen dominant in your biochemistry.

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22 Feb 2012, 6:06 am

Invader wrote:

This is a very poor study by very poor scientists.

Individuals who do not conform in general, and cause themselves to stand out in general, are more likely to be abused. Bringing gender roles into it is only a means of twisting the evidence to support an agenda which is specifically against gender roles, which is made even more obvious by the fact that they were trying to study them in the first place. Such bias should be avoided if a person is seeking valid scientific information.

Actually, there's quite a bit of research that shows that children who are gender non-conforming experience a fairly high rate and intensity of bullying compared to those who do conform. There's also research showing that children tend to have fairly rigid ideas about gender. Not all differences are equal, and some differences can intersect to make things worse.

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Trying to pin it down to intolerance of gender roles only serves to distract focus from the real issue (people who are abusive), just so that pedantic activists and terrible scientists can try to take advantage of the situation and trivialize it to draw attention to their own little "cause".

They're not trying to pin it down to intolerance of gender roles. They're identifying one factor that plays a large role in bullying. I doubt you will find anything in the study that suggests this is the only or primary cause of bullying.

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They're not distorting the truth and this isn't "rabid feminism."

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