My Aspie Son (5 years old) says he wants to be a girl.

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My son is constantly saying he wants to be a girl and not a boy and he doesn't like his girl voice. He says he only loves others not himself. To those who are transgender did these feelings start this early. I just want him to be happy and to love himself. I am trying to understand if these are real feelings or just things he is saying because of his confusion over social situations and interactions. Let me know your thoughts.

You mean your 5 year old aspie daughter?

I felt similar at one point when I became interested in transsexualism. It didn't last, but for your child, I don't know. It doesn't seem like he can really know for sure at that point in his life, but it depends on how long he's been thinking it I guess.

I don't think that that's helpful, tbh.

Actually in some children it's a perfectly normal phase. I have a son that loves feminine things and tends to prefer company of girls. 5 years old is awefully early to consider it more serious than a phase. If it continues then it's entirely possible that it wasn't just an experimentation with his feelings and such.

this organisation is very helpful

http://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/

they have a phone line as well.

Most trans people I have come across had these feelings from 2 years old. 80% of gender variant children change their minds before 12 years old and less than 10% go on to be trans, most turn out to be gay.

I'm not a TG or homosexual, but interested in psychology, actually there are quite a few boys who think they have to be a girl when they are very young but when they get older never feel like a girl again and are very ashamed when their parents tell them what they have tried to be in younger years. I've seen a documentary about that, they want to be cute and beautiful, and some parents really treat them as girls till they grow older and try to suppress this whole part of their life.
his real sexuality will show when he gets into puberty, it's wonderful how you care about your sons welfare, but in this case you save him from big shame if you just let him socialize with other boys, since all the "boy things" are nothing but stereotypes society brings. they aren't memorized in our dna. but sexuality is and sexuality expresses itself in puberty.

Everyday I think even more that we should just use an uniform noun marker since sexuality is already a fluent aspect of life and absolutely overexpressed through style, character and life though it actually is nothing but some organs and hormones who can be manipulated since many years now. but that isn't even necessary. I think sex isn't the main thing in life. at least in a rational thinking life. why should anyone know if we are male or female who isn't the love of our life with which we want to mix our dna? and I think that we don't have to be what society makes out of our sexual organs, and we also don't have to be what we feel, since what we feel is mostly shaped by society. It's just what we know that is the best for us. and the age of your son doesn't allow him to know that. children of this age don't have the ability to think about their prospective life.

I'm trans & started getting transsexual feelings around that age. I used to try peeing standing up & wearing boy's clothes & had an 'alter-ego'. However, that was the same time I had selective mutism, so most of my attention was focused on that. Because I was trying so hard to fit in after I began talking (because everyone knew me as the freak with the walkie-talkie before), I had to hide any gender-variance so no-one would reject me. They still did though. After that, I stopped caring & just did what I wanted (I wear men's clothes, have shortish hair (longish for a boy) & am planning to tell my parents I'm trans ASAP).

Love your son/daughter, whatever they do. Nothing's worse than being condemned for something you can't control (I should know, being a trans, gay, suspected Aspie who used to have selective mutism!).

Good luck x

Most children who feel that way grow up to accept their birth gender. Whatever you do: don't contact associations for children with gender identity disorder (GID). They will try to make you think your child is just born that way and that there is no way he will ever accept his birth gender. Many of this associations are doing activism to promote giving drugs to children with GID to stop them from ever entering puberty and puberty is when most children with GID finally accept their birth gender! This associations create transgender children, who weren't transgender in the first place! I had GID untill the age of 20, when I finally accepted that I'm female, so even years after entering puberty, there is still ways to overcome gender dysphoria. Also don't listen to transgender activist, they will lie to you about research findings. There is still no scientifial proof that gender identity is located in the brain. The research trans activists always refer to SUGGESTS that gender identity MIGHT be located in the brain, but they will try to make it sound like it proved it without reasonable doubt.
The best way to support your child is to make him understand that boys don't have to be stereotypes to be boys. Let him play with barbies or easy-bake oven if he wants to. If you tell him: "you can't play with that, that's for girls", he might think "since I like this things, it must mean I'm a girl". I'm talking from experience here. As a child, people always asked me things like "why do you act like a boy?" "why do you want to be a boy?" etc. They thought that just because I wasn't interested in barbies and because I prefered playing soccer over doing "girlie" things, it meant I wanted to be a boy. This made me think that I had to become a boy to be myself, since everything I liked was "not for girls".

thank you for that comment, Kiran, it's exactly what I think, just that you found the courage to write down the fact,
that noone actually knows where the sexual orientation is locatet and if there is a sexual orientation or if it's nothing but
a social influence and the process of getting used to it. because I think that we all just had to let ourselves in for those things, just as it is with music or art where peer pressure leads people to unknowingly getting used to it and the effect is that they suddenly like it and treat that as a matter of course. one person likes hiphop, another person likes punk. both say the other style was primitive and would make no sense. they couldn't even imagine to enjoy it. in fact it's just the group of people they socialize with who made them like it by letting themselves in for those styles, if you would swap the persons they would certainly say the opposite. it's actually ourselves who prohibit us from thinking and feeling universal, right?

For some children it can start that early (look at this article http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3088298&page=1). But I don't think it usually does. There are definitely some kids who go through a "phase" (or whatever you want to call it) like that. For instance, when my girlfriend was very, very young (probably about the age of your son) she liked to wear boyish clothes and asked people to call her a boy.

I've had feelings of being a male trapped in a females body for as long as I have memories. I still feel that way to this day.

This strikes me as a perfectly typical, healthy aspect of growing up that is disconnected from sexual identity later in life.

I can assure you, your child's feelings are real. You definitely have the right attitude -- as long as you place his happiness before his ability to conform to gender norms, you are doing it right. Resist any urges to shame or pressure him into doing or liking "boy things," and don't allow others to do the same. (You can only do so much -- almost all adults and many kids are obsessed with gender policing, especially with regards to young children.)

I am a cisgender 20-year-old masculine of center dyke. I first started saying and feeling very "transgender" things around four or five. I wanted to be a boy for a few reasons: because boys get to marry girls, because all my friends (save one) were boys, and because nobody tried to tell boys that they had to wear a dress and mary-janes to a wedding when obviously dressing up should involve a bow tie. My only girl friend? He is a female assigned at birth (FAAB) transgender aspie, we've been best friends since kindergarten. At five years old, he identified as a mouse. Then a reptile, then an alien. He came to a human male identity at twelve or thirteen.

I'm not really sure if I have a point. Maybe that only time will tell.

Please know that there is a correlation between Aspergers and Transgenderism. For information on that Google on the keyword TransgenderPDD
That Yahoo group is not terribly active (it is largely talked out) but there is wonderful reading in the old archives.

The suggestion by a prior poster to contact the Mermaids group is very good. Even if you do not live in the UK (just remember the time zone difference). Ask to speak with the telephone volunteer who was a mother who raised as Aspie transchild (yes there is one). Or set up a phone appointment by email.

In the meanwhile, for a five year old "sensitive" Aspie kid try to get him (or her) reading well above the level of his (her) peers; the more the better. And understand that penmanship WILL likely be two years behind those peers, so don't push or bully. Play to the strengths, because language is these kids' lifeline to the world. Things like a written list of things to do at bedtime posted up on the wall can do wonders (wee, then wash hands and face, brush teeth, select bedtime storybook, take off clothes, put on pajamas, tell mummy you are ready for bed, whatever). Consider informal physical therapy such as balancing, swinging, scrambling, ball bouncing, anything to build gross motor skills and eye coordination. Speech therapy if needed, but psychotherapy is a waste of time and money for Aspie kids. And for goodness sake DO NOT let them talk you into psychoactive drugs such as ritalin.

And finally, let him have unisex clothes. Clothes that could be either boys or girls. No buttons so they have no sides to them, white tennis shoes, red tee-shirts, whatever. Know that he may grow out of this, what you need to try to do (an impossible task) is to try to make it not matter terribly much whether he does or does not. Try to make his life as free of gender issues as possible. That means for example no ban on Barbie dolls but no princess outfits to wear either. Also he may be gay, that should not matter either way at least until puberty.

Those are my thoughts, take what you like and leave the rest.

I am transgender.

Being transgender has nothing to do with how you dress or what toys a child likes to play with. It is about feeling that you are in the wrong body. I can't even begin to explain how it feels. It's utter misery. PLEASE let your child explore their feelings. If they eventually accept their birth gender, then that's wonderful. If they decide that they truly are a girl, please be accepting and love them for whoever they are. That's wonderful, too.

Groups that deal with GID usually do NOT have an agenda, but of course it's possible. There will also be people with an agenda on the other side who will tell you that GID is not real or that it is a "sin". Gather all of the info you can, just for the sake of being educated.

This decision is for YOUR CHILD to make. Not you. Right now they are only 5, so again, let them explore their feelings. The advantage is that you have some time to figure this out...puberty is years away. Try not to figure this out overnight, even though I know it is overwhelming.

I had GID when I was young but I couldn't put my finger on what it was until I was older. My mother drilled gender roles into me so I felt guilty even THINKING about doing anything against the role of my birth gender. I finally realized what had been eating at me for years in my 20s. I had been so depressed for the majority of my life and had considered suicide.

If you try to force them to accept their birth gender despite them insisting they are a girl, then they will constantly feel guilty, wrong, "bad", a disappointment, etc., and you cannot imagine the kind of havoc that it causes in the mind.