my 7 year old aspie son says he wants to be a girl

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hi all - sorry to cross-post.. I have a 7 year old aspie boy who, for some time now, has told me he wishes he were a girl and/or he feels like a girl inside...is jealous that girls "have more beauty"....and can wear beautiful dresses...twice in his life has changed his name at school to a girls name...and when a stranger thinks he's a girl and we correct them - he gets furious. I just bought him a dress. i have no idea as to why i'm posting. don't know what exactly I'm looking for. feel like I've just started to feel really settled with aspergers and now feel like theres something else i have to wrap my head around. of course, my husband and i will follow his lead...but I'm scared and worried. about what exactly I'm not sure. any thoughts?

Sounds like your son is lucky to have open minded loving parents such as yourselves. Can't say I have any advice other than your current plan and what you have done so far, especially buying him a dress sounds great!

I might suggest Googling "Bobby Montoya", a Denver boy who began wanting to wear girls' clothes at a very early age. Here he is at age 7 (a few years ago)...

Use the name and pronouns your child wants you to use- tell you child that they can be any gender that they want to be, and that they can change their mind at any time. Buy them the clothes they want (as long as it's not to expensive of course), and let them play with any toys they want. Protect your child from bullying and don't be ashamed of your childs differences. Do your best to keep current with your childs wishes - they may change over time, or they may not. Good luck!

It sounds like your child is either transgender or gender nonconforming, though gender nonconforming children don't tend to have the extreme emotions about being pushed into the gender assigned to them at birth that trans kids do. Only time will tell but as an early 20's transgender aspie, it sounds like you're doing a great job of supporting your child and I wish my parents had been as supportive as you. You got this!

Another inspiring story to Google would be that of the Dawkin brothers (Bryce and Brandon) who I believe grew up in Canada in the 1960's, one of which desired to identify as female, also around age 7, IIRC.

I'd say go with the flow as you have.

I'm a girl but I feel like I am both male and female, if that makes any sense.

Your daughter is lucky to have a parent like you who cares so much and is listening to her. I understand this is very scary and completely unexpected for most people to see their child going through. How could you ever foresee such a rare and poorly understood situation? We don't learn about gender and sex as two separate things. We don't learn about lgbt as natural, normal variations of human sexuality and gender identity, at least not until recently. No one mentions gender dysphoria in childhood development literature, even psychology textbooks get half their information wrong. And there is a lot of fear and hate out there for people with any type of less common difference from the kind of people who don't like to color outside the lines. Your daughter may have some extra hurdles to face in life. This is the bad news.

The good news is that this is one of the most exciting, rapidly advancing times in American/Western transgender history: we have great hormone treatments and very good surgical treatments (if needed, she can avoid some surgeries like facial feminization and hair removal by delaying or stopping your daughter's male puberty with hormone blockers), people are starting to understand transgender in a way that they never have before, and the medical community is waking up to the call for accessible, adequate treatment. It's very reasonable to expect that your daughter's lifetime will see a dramatic improvement in the civil liberties of trans people and that many parts of the Western world will be a safer place for girls like her. For girls her age, being trans isn't a tragedy, not like society used to make it.

And with a supportive, informed parent advocating for her, your daughter is more likely to grow up to be a happy, healthy adult. If you dive into this now and get a firm understanding of what your daughter needs, she can avoid so many years of suffering and loss from going through the wrong puberty and then facing transition in an unsupportive, hostile environment.

No one would wish these challenges on her and your family, but if there was a better time to be born trans in American history, it had to have been before any European colonists settled here.

I would connect with your local trans community to find other parents and community leaders to support you as you learn about what is best for your family. You're not alone in this journey and there is a lot of hope!

^I always thought that queer meant weird, strange, unusual. Does it mean something else now?

At the 2015 IMFAR International Meeting for Autism Research conference in Salt Lake City, a few research studies were published and discussed which showed generally that about 10-percent of people with autism are gender dysphoric. Similarly, about 10-percent of people with gender dysphoria are autistic. Female-to-Male gender dysphoria seems to be more prevalent (the male-mind theory is involved here), but the 10 percent figure includes Male-to-Female gender dysphoria, too.

^So what does that mean in English?

I think that you should let her live as a girl if that's what she wants. I live my life as a man and it works for me. I don't have the money for the operation, but I've gotten over that hang up in recent weeks.

I also think it's more of a human thing than a spectrum thing.