Yes, because I'm going to ignore 10 years of actual experience to pay attention to a website that has no basis in scientific fact, or common sense.
That link you posted is downright dangerous and harmful. It's impossible that everyone who transitions will be happy. Often, those who are unhappy are those who transition post-puberty.
Have a think about why that is.
Overwhelmingly, statistics show that it is those who haven't transitioned who are most at risk for suicide. This isn't up for debate, it's not an opinion, it's a fact.
Yes, because I'm going to ignore 10 years of actual experience to pay attention to a website that has no basis in scientific fact, or common sense.
That link you posted is downright dangerous and harmful. It's impossible that everyone who transitions will be happy. Often, those who are unhappy are those who transition post-puberty.
Have a think about why that is.
Overwhelmingly, statistics show that it is those who haven't transitioned who are most at risk for suicide. This isn't up for debate, it's not an opinion, it's a fact.
I feel that a good therapist could solve most of those issues though. The main issue seems to be about accepting your personality and it's difference to the societal perception of what it should adhere to from your natural gender. I can't see how that can't be solved psychologically, in a much more safe manner than going to the extremity of surgery.
That site you linked to was rather evangelical in trying to prove its case. A case the author admits he has been fighting for many years.
Precisely. Judging from the books he's wrote as well, I suspected he's a devoted Christian. He's not to be trusted on this subject at all.
Edit: Nothing against devoted Christians at all, I just mean that if I wanted scientific facts, I would rather be told from someone who was not biased/prejudiced at all.
I feel that a good therapist could solve most of those issues though. The main issue seems to be about accepting your personality and it's difference to the societal perception of what it should adhere to from your natural gender. I can't see how that can't be solved psychologically, in a much more safe manner than going to the extremity of surgery.
Then why are 'good therapists' not solving them? Why does the medical profession recognise the disorder and that transitioning is an effective way of achieving the result (ie the well-being of the individual)? The transgender people I know have all been through years of therapy from experienced professionals and it has done nothing to alter whatever it is that has caused the way they feel. Many were childen when they went into therapy and it didn't make a difference then either.
You talk about 'natural gender' as if biology is an absolute and it is clear it isn't. There are people who have both sets of reproductive organs and people who have neither. There are people who have the 'standard' set of sex-linked genetic material and people who don't. Why is it so difficult to accept that there are people who do not have the same neurological make up as most people and that this expresses in gender disphoria? If their brains are different then all the 'good therapy' in the world won't help and that is the experience of most transgender people I have spoken with.
Hasn't there been some suggestion that Lauren Harries was persuaded to transition by her, let's say 'unconventional' parents?
Since she has done about a bazillion interviews, she has had ample opportunities to say so. She is an eccentric person from an unattractive family, but there is no reason to doubt her identification as female is genuine.
My opinion on this kind of hasn't changed over the years, despite the many arguments I've seen. It may seem controversial to some of you, maybe not.
The vast majority of us are born one or the other. That is simply a fact. Our personality is then layered on top. Our personality is formed by a mixture of hormones, instincts and learned behaviour. In reality there is no such thing as male or female behaviour in my opinion, it is almost entirely cultural except in cases of natural need (men cannot have babies). If a male child has a preference for what we might perceive as being more feminine behaviour, it is likely that peer pressure will put said child in the "female" box. They are likely to be treated negatively for this behaviour by society, and thus feel they are "out of place". In the case annette, she is unintentionally performing this exact behaviour, and the child is likely to pick up on these subtle musings. A boy who likes Frozen is still a boy.
In a ideal world, we would have people being content with the genitalia they are born with a alongside the personality they are comfortable with. This disjunction between the two leads to people seeking surgery to fix a problem that, in my opinion, could easily be avoided without.
You are not the first person to suggest this of course, but it just doesn't seem to be true. A lot of transgender children report that their behaviour as children was perfectly mainstream for their registered gender. Trans women often report being, if anything, somewhat macho as children. Many of them go on to do jobs like the army or fire brigade in order to try to bolster a male identity. But gender dysphoria is far more fundamental than, and often unrelated to, choice of toys. It is their body that feels fundamentally wrong, not their toybox or choice of film.
If you think transgender children 'could easily be fixed' by speaking to a counsellor, I suggest it is because you don't know any transgender people. They are entitled to speak for themselves, as you are entitled to speak for yourself, and it is not for anyone to ignore someone's own description of their life because they don't like it and have a version they would have preferred.
Since she has done about a bazillion interviews, she has had ample opportunities to say so. She is an eccentric person from an unattractive family, but there is no reason to doubt her identification as female is genuine.
You are not the first person to suggest this of course, but it just doesn't seem to be true. A lot of transgender children report that their behaviour as children was perfectly mainstream for their registered gender. Trans women often report being, if anything, somewhat macho as children. Many of them go on to do jobs like the army or fire brigade in order to try to bolster a male identity. But gender dysphoria is far more fundamental than, and often unrelated to, choice of toys. It is their body that feels fundamentally wrong, not their toybox or choice of film.
If you think transgender children 'could easily be fixed' by speaking to a counsellor, I suggest it is because you don't know any transgender people. They are entitled to speak for themselves, as you are entitled to speak for yourself, and it is not for anyone to ignore someone's own description of their life because they don't like it and have a version they would have preferred.
There have been studies that show there is a higher prevalence for transsexualism in the military than in the civil population.It's thought transsexuals enlist as a way of "purging their feminine side" (of course i'm talking about some) but i know myself, two who are ex military. Btw, i was that kid who wore my mums shoes played with my sisters dolls (and would get roundly beaten by father for it) yet from everything i've seen, there is nothing to suggest that i would have been mis- diagnosed as transgender. Its very encouraging that these children are being listened to and helped.
Then why are 'good therapists' not solving them? Why does the medical profession recognise the disorder and that transitioning is an effective way of achieving the result (ie the well-being of the individual)? The transgender people I know have all been through years of therapy from experienced professionals and it has done nothing to alter whatever it is that has caused the way they feel. Many were childen when they went into therapy and it didn't make a difference then either.
You talk about 'natural gender' as if biology is an absolute and it is clear it isn't. There are people who have both sets of reproductive organs and people who have neither. There are people who have the 'standard' set of sex-linked genetic material and people who don't. Why is it so difficult to accept that there are people who do not have the same neurological make up as most people and that this expresses in gender disphoria? If their brains are different then all the 'good therapy' in the world won't help and that is the experience of most transgender people I have spoken with.
I said in my original post "the vast majority". Most transgender children, as this topic is about, do not have both or neither.
It's a mental disorder according to an esteemed psychiatrist and
people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder
He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.”
Since she has done about a bazillion interviews, she has had ample opportunities to say so. She is an eccentric person from an unattractive family, but there is no reason to doubt her identification as female is genuine.
You are not the first person to suggest this of course, but it just doesn't seem to be true. A lot of transgender children report that their behaviour as children was perfectly mainstream for their registered gender. Trans women often report being, if anything, somewhat macho as children. Many of them go on to do jobs like the army or fire brigade in order to try to bolster a male identity. But gender dysphoria is far more fundamental than, and often unrelated to, choice of toys. It is their body that feels fundamentally wrong, not their toybox or choice of film.
If you think transgender children 'could easily be fixed' by speaking to a counsellor, I suggest it is because you don't know any transgender people. They are entitled to speak for themselves, as you are entitled to speak for yourself, and it is not for anyone to ignore someone's own description of their life because they don't like it and have a version they would have preferred.
I think it would take more than a counsellor to help severe disphoria. I still believe it is possible though. I don't see it as being much different to normal disphoria, which is treated with therapy, and only very rarely cosmetic surgery. Research shows that differences in neurological make up per gender are few in number, and is mostly down to hormones, which as I expressed in my post are a part of what defines our personality. However our personality and our physical genitalia don't have to match up to be content, much like a female does not need fake breasts to be content.
You also say "preferred", so you admit that it's a preference, and if so one can surely learn to accept the choice that they never got to make, no?
You're right that I don't know any transgender people, hence why I stressed several times that it was merely my opinion.
It's a mental disorder according to an esteemed psychiatrist and
I'd settle for the opinion of a distinguished, peer reviewed psychiatrist over those of the amateur forum shrinks.
Actually a number of posters on this forum have worked with real transgender people for years AND spent days or weeks talking to involved psychiatrists and psychologists as opposed to found an article from someone on the net who has an agenda.
Plus some are actually transgender so can speak with first hand understanding.
I certainly prefer to trust those who in some cases on here have had a lifetime (literally) of comprehending the ins and outs of this and probably years of therapy to boot.
If this were a 'mental disorder' in the derogatory sense you mean then some psychiatrist would have become rich off the back of successfully 'curing' this and the NHS would not be funding surgery if the balance of opinion (not one medical opinion) said this was indulging in people's fantasies.
They do fund it - as opposed to vanity plastic surgery, for instance - because the balance of medical opinion is that it is a genuine unexplained syndrome for which the only workable treatment is this.
On the other hand, if you interpret mental disorder as some dissonance from an unknown cause between the mental self of the person and the physical body you are spot on. Problem is most people assume that means a delusion. But they are not automatically the same thing. There could be a still undiscovered cause within brain states or genetic factors that trigger this phenomenon from birth and create the subsequent trauma.
When anyone starts citing figures about the percentage of emotional baggage that the transgender population displays it assumes a direct correlation. But it is equally probable that much of this originates from being forced to repress these things deep into oneself and when they are ultimately released facing the still quite prevalent social stigma this condition attracts from certain quarters of society.
You could argue that the suicide rates of people with a physical disfigurement, for example, are higher than the normal population and that this is true even after plastic surgery to try to help. However, if you thus conclude that there is no value in doing the surgery to help alleviate the disfigurement or that the disfigurement is really a mental delusion and they should just 'live with it' then you would be making a really sad error of judgement.
I'd settle for the opinion of a distinguished, peer reviewed psychiatrist over those of the amateur forum shrinks.
His views do not represent the views of the mainstream medical establishment though. And if you read up on him, he is a controversial divisive figure with regards to this and child abuse.
I said in my original post "the vast majority". Most transgender children, as this topic is about, do not have both or neither.
Not the point I was making - you seem to be rejecting a neurological cause for transgenderism. My point is that, as there are physical causes for other gender differences, why reject such a cause for this one.
Not the point I was making - you seem to be rejecting a neurological cause for transgenderism. My point is that, as there are physical causes for other gender differences, why reject such a cause for this one.
I'm not. I fully admit that there are neurological reasons for personality to be affected, which could in turn lend itself to a psychological feeling of disconnect, but not a cause of disphoria. Disphoria is a mental illness. Do you think anorexia is neurological and can't be treated with therapy?
It's scientifically proven that there are few differences between a male and female brain, and most of those differences are hormonal. You are born with a human brain, it doesn't really have a gender, although I will admit there are very minor differences. Do you think lungs have a gender? I feel that cases where a "female" brain, which is virtually identical to a male brain anyway, is accidentally developed inside a male body, would be an extremely rare occurrence.
I'm not. I fully admit that there are neurological reasons for personality to be affected, which could in turn lend itself to a psychological feeling of disconnect, but not a cause of disphoria. Disphoria is a mental illness. Do you think anorexia is neurological and can't be treated with therapy?
It's scientifically proven that there are few differences between a male and female brain, and most of those differences are hormonal. You are born with a human brain, it doesn't really have a gender, although I will admit there are very minor differences. Do you think lungs have a gender? I feel that cases where a "female" brain, which is virtually identical to a male brain anyway, is accidentally developed inside a male body, would be an extremely rare occurrence.
There are differences between male and female brains however and further differences have been identified in the brains of transgender people. Personality is an expression of the physical - it doesn't float along in some kind of metaphysical state - and so there may well be neurological causative factors associated with anorexia that have yet to be discovered.
You are born with a very complex body that is influenced by genetic, epigenetic, environmental and developmental factors. To dismiss some of those based on a 'feeling' that a particular set of circumstances is not possible seems odd to me. To state with such certainty that one solution, that does not have a track record of success, is better than another solution that does, seems perverse.
His views do not represent the views of the mainstream medical establishment though. And if you read up on him, he is a controversial divisive figure with regards to this and child abuse.
I have been thinking about the arguments on here from sceptics. There are some points worth considering I think.
The argument is that children who become transgender are really just effeminate or tomboyish and it is their family conditioning that 'turns' them from simply expressing themselves this way and becoming a TV game show host into wanting to be the gender they seem most closer to representing.
Now that I think is based on the much more open society that we live in today where children are able to express themselves more freely and being transgender is no longer unheard of or help inaccessible. As such it seems more and more are coming out to families very young and those families might now react in ways that differ from the past.
Most transgender children up to, say, the 1990s, when there was no internet or tabloid TV covering the subject incessantly (it is on ITVs This Morning every other week it seems!) faced a very different family environment with much less awareness of transitioning and the like.
From all the transgender people I know the difference is quite marked, In an earlier post I reported on how one friend I have known for 40 years tried to tell her family, was ridiculed and rebuked (and basically written off by a doctor). Then eventually betrayed as they shopped her to a tabloid. So she repressed these feelings and eventually joined the army with disastrous consequences.
This was how it seems to have happened over and over. They did not express themselves as if they were of the opposite gender, they became introspective and often tried to rebel by over emphasising the traits of their birth gender - though never apparently with any success.
Whilst this does call into question the idea that being transgender is really just a soft option escape from being different it throws up a little concern about how it is possible that some children who in the past would not have become transgender just might choose that path because their family seem so accommodating towards it rather than antipathetic.
I do not think it is at all easy to nudge a child out of their innate sense of gender, so I am not unduly concerned. And it does seem that this new open regime is much more helpful to those who are transgender. But it emphasises the need for careful screening over a long period before critical decisions are taken just in case we are by accident creating a new sub set of children with issues that they might previously have escaped from in a different way.
These are just niggling thoughts not overt concerns. But the utterly different climate of 2015 compared with transgender children in 1975 or even 1995 is bound to have some potential negatives alongside all the very apparent positives.
I have been thinking about the arguments on here from sceptics. There are some points worth considering I think.
The argument is that children who become transgender are really just effeminate or tomboyish and it is their family conditioning that 'turns' them from simply expressing themselves this way and becoming a TV game show host into wanting to be the gender they seem most closer to representing.
Now that I think is based on the much more open society that we live in today where children are able to express themselves more freely and being transgender is no longer unheard of or help inaccessible. As such it seems more and more are coming out to families very young and those families might now react in ways that differ from the past.
Most transgender children up to, say, the 1990s, when there was no internet or tabloid TV covering the subject incessantly (it is on ITVs This Morning every other week it seems!) faced a very different family environment with much less awareness of transitioning and the like.
From all the transgender people I know the difference is quite marked, In an earlier post I reported on how one friend I have known for 40 years tried to tell her family, was ridiculed and rebuked (and basically written off by a doctor). Then eventually betrayed as they shopped her to a tabloid. So she repressed these feelings and eventually joined the army with disastrous consequences.
This was how it seems to have happened over and over. They did not express themselves as if they were of the opposite gender, they became introspective and often tried to rebel by over emphasising the traits of their birth gender - though never apparently with any success.
Whilst this does call into question the idea that being transgender is really just a soft option escape from being different it throws up a little concern about how it is possible that some children who in the past would not have become transgender just might choose that path because their family seem so accommodating towards it rather than antipathetic.
I do not think it is at all easy to nudge a child out of their innate sense of gender, so I am not unduly concerned. And it does seem that this new open regime is much more helpful to those who are transgender. But it emphasises the need for careful screening over a long period before critical decisions are taken just in case we are by accident creating a new sub set of children with issues that they might previously have escaped from in a different way.
These are just niggling thoughts not overt concerns. But the utterly different climate of 2015 compared with transgender children in 1975 or even 1995 is bound to have some potential negatives alongside all the very apparent positives.
Today though (hopefully) your friend who took flight to hyper masculinity by enlisting to join the army, would not feel compelled to do so. Because i think perhaps today children would feel they could freely explore and express their feelings about their gender identity. (well ideally) And parents being more informed, would allow them,without judgement ,to explore and process those feelings. I do think there are a lot of transgender, who perhaps feel pressured into having operations to feel more accepted. A transgender, who isn't particularly passable as a generic female finds it much harder than one who is and im sure feels pressure to go through surgeries that she mightn't if society was kinder.I have a younger transgender friend who isn't taking hormones hasn't had any surgeries and is living a very happy life, she is lucky in that she is passable, she admits that if she wasn't so, she would definitely be on hormones and be contemplating surgery . (due to societal pressure) and of course there are many more for whom that operation is vital to enable them to feel comfortable within their own skin.
Reeble, I can see what you say, I must ask her next time whether she would feel differently in today's world.
Though she grew up in the age of the Beatles and was in that scene - even is on one of their videos she keeps telling me. Not seen her in it yet - though, to be honest, I am not sure if I would recognise her as I never knew her pre transition.
She has certainly made herself an okay life and seems happy. Really that is all you can say to judge her treatment a success. Her doctor at Charing Cross (Dr John Randall) used to put photographs on his wall of his 'successes' in the 1970s when this was still a very new thing. She says there were many and all looked happy.
But you never know how life might have worked out in different circumstances. You can only be grateful if you have been happy enough after the trauma of a transgender childhood in the 50s and 60s.
as a transperson, i agree. in an ideal world, boys would be boys, and girls would be girls.
we do not live in an ideal world.
I agree with (and understand) all of that, but it is to some degree conditioned by the environment we grow up in when first encountering a dissonance of this magnitude.
Though far from ideal, the world has changed markedly for the better in the past decade alone. More understanding and 'normality' ascribed by the majority to acceptance of someone post transition, better medical support, new laws that enshrine both protection and recognition.
You could always have an appropriate passport and now you can have an appropriate birth certificate. That measures the degree of progress.
There will always be people who cannot 'get it' and feel uncomfortable for lots of reasons. Because of their religion (though Dr Randall at Charing Cross was a fervent Christian). Because of discomfort over the way it blurs lines they might fear to cross. Because of self doubts maybe? Or, most likely, because they sincerely believe it must all be some kind of mental illness that should be treated as such - as that seems very reasonable unless you have faced it directly or have studied the literature attempting to use such methods to 'cure' this 'delusion' with zero success.
But perhaps threads like this help a little towards understanding and quell some of the disquiet. As time moves on each generation will have less and less problem accommodating these issues. Which is good to know for those who come next.
Comments
which parts are you struggling to understand?
Yes, because I'm going to ignore 10 years of actual experience to pay attention to a website that has no basis in scientific fact, or common sense.
That link you posted is downright dangerous and harmful. It's impossible that everyone who transitions will be happy. Often, those who are unhappy are those who transition post-puberty.
Have a think about why that is.
Overwhelmingly, statistics show that it is those who haven't transitioned who are most at risk for suicide. This isn't up for debate, it's not an opinion, it's a fact.
I feel that a good therapist could solve most of those issues though. The main issue seems to be about accepting your personality and it's difference to the societal perception of what it should adhere to from your natural gender. I can't see how that can't be solved psychologically, in a much more safe manner than going to the extremity of surgery.
Precisely. Judging from the books he's wrote as well, I suspected he's a devoted Christian. He's not to be trusted on this subject at all.
Edit: Nothing against devoted Christians at all, I just mean that if I wanted scientific facts, I would rather be told from someone who was not biased/prejudiced at all.
Then why are 'good therapists' not solving them? Why does the medical profession recognise the disorder and that transitioning is an effective way of achieving the result (ie the well-being of the individual)? The transgender people I know have all been through years of therapy from experienced professionals and it has done nothing to alter whatever it is that has caused the way they feel. Many were childen when they went into therapy and it didn't make a difference then either.
You talk about 'natural gender' as if biology is an absolute and it is clear it isn't. There are people who have both sets of reproductive organs and people who have neither. There are people who have the 'standard' set of sex-linked genetic material and people who don't. Why is it so difficult to accept that there are people who do not have the same neurological make up as most people and that this expresses in gender disphoria? If their brains are different then all the 'good therapy' in the world won't help and that is the experience of most transgender people I have spoken with.
If you think transgender children 'could easily be fixed' by speaking to a counsellor, I suggest it is because you don't know any transgender people. They are entitled to speak for themselves, as you are entitled to speak for yourself, and it is not for anyone to ignore someone's own description of their life because they don't like it and have a version they would have preferred.
I said in my original post "the vast majority". Most transgender children, as this topic is about, do not have both or neither.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/johns-hopkins-psychiatrist-transgender-mental-disorder-sex-change
I'd settle for the opinion of a distinguished, peer reviewed psychiatrist over those of the amateur forum shrinks.
I think it would take more than a counsellor to help severe disphoria. I still believe it is possible though. I don't see it as being much different to normal disphoria, which is treated with therapy, and only very rarely cosmetic surgery. Research shows that differences in neurological make up per gender are few in number, and is mostly down to hormones, which as I expressed in my post are a part of what defines our personality. However our personality and our physical genitalia don't have to match up to be content, much like a female does not need fake breasts to be content.
You also say "preferred", so you admit that it's a preference, and if so one can surely learn to accept the choice that they never got to make, no?
You're right that I don't know any transgender people, hence why I stressed several times that it was merely my opinion.
I completely agree.
Actually a number of posters on this forum have worked with real transgender people for years AND spent days or weeks talking to involved psychiatrists and psychologists as opposed to found an article from someone on the net who has an agenda.
Plus some are actually transgender so can speak with first hand understanding.
I certainly prefer to trust those who in some cases on here have had a lifetime (literally) of comprehending the ins and outs of this and probably years of therapy to boot.
If this were a 'mental disorder' in the derogatory sense you mean then some psychiatrist would have become rich off the back of successfully 'curing' this and the NHS would not be funding surgery if the balance of opinion (not one medical opinion) said this was indulging in people's fantasies.
They do fund it - as opposed to vanity plastic surgery, for instance - because the balance of medical opinion is that it is a genuine unexplained syndrome for which the only workable treatment is this.
On the other hand, if you interpret mental disorder as some dissonance from an unknown cause between the mental self of the person and the physical body you are spot on. Problem is most people assume that means a delusion. But they are not automatically the same thing. There could be a still undiscovered cause within brain states or genetic factors that trigger this phenomenon from birth and create the subsequent trauma.
When anyone starts citing figures about the percentage of emotional baggage that the transgender population displays it assumes a direct correlation. But it is equally probable that much of this originates from being forced to repress these things deep into oneself and when they are ultimately released facing the still quite prevalent social stigma this condition attracts from certain quarters of society.
You could argue that the suicide rates of people with a physical disfigurement, for example, are higher than the normal population and that this is true even after plastic surgery to try to help. However, if you thus conclude that there is no value in doing the surgery to help alleviate the disfigurement or that the disfigurement is really a mental delusion and they should just 'live with it' then you would be making a really sad error of judgement.
http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/ireland-s-transgender-children-richie-s-story-1.2171761
An interesting read
Not the point I was making - you seem to be rejecting a neurological cause for transgenderism. My point is that, as there are physical causes for other gender differences, why reject such a cause for this one.
I'm not. I fully admit that there are neurological reasons for personality to be affected, which could in turn lend itself to a psychological feeling of disconnect, but not a cause of disphoria. Disphoria is a mental illness. Do you think anorexia is neurological and can't be treated with therapy?
It's scientifically proven that there are few differences between a male and female brain, and most of those differences are hormonal. You are born with a human brain, it doesn't really have a gender, although I will admit there are very minor differences. Do you think lungs have a gender? I feel that cases where a "female" brain, which is virtually identical to a male brain anyway, is accidentally developed inside a male body, would be an extremely rare occurrence.
No, that just scares me. A lot of 6 year old have imaginary friends, are we supposed to presume they're real?
There are differences between male and female brains however and further differences have been identified in the brains of transgender people. Personality is an expression of the physical - it doesn't float along in some kind of metaphysical state - and so there may well be neurological causative factors associated with anorexia that have yet to be discovered.
You are born with a very complex body that is influenced by genetic, epigenetic, environmental and developmental factors. To dismiss some of those based on a 'feeling' that a particular set of circumstances is not possible seems odd to me. To state with such certainty that one solution, that does not have a track record of success, is better than another solution that does, seems perverse.
With a big religious agenda too.
The argument is that children who become transgender are really just effeminate or tomboyish and it is their family conditioning that 'turns' them from simply expressing themselves this way and becoming a TV game show host into wanting to be the gender they seem most closer to representing.
Now that I think is based on the much more open society that we live in today where children are able to express themselves more freely and being transgender is no longer unheard of or help inaccessible. As such it seems more and more are coming out to families very young and those families might now react in ways that differ from the past.
Most transgender children up to, say, the 1990s, when there was no internet or tabloid TV covering the subject incessantly (it is on ITVs This Morning every other week it seems!) faced a very different family environment with much less awareness of transitioning and the like.
From all the transgender people I know the difference is quite marked, In an earlier post I reported on how one friend I have known for 40 years tried to tell her family, was ridiculed and rebuked (and basically written off by a doctor). Then eventually betrayed as they shopped her to a tabloid. So she repressed these feelings and eventually joined the army with disastrous consequences.
This was how it seems to have happened over and over. They did not express themselves as if they were of the opposite gender, they became introspective and often tried to rebel by over emphasising the traits of their birth gender - though never apparently with any success.
Whilst this does call into question the idea that being transgender is really just a soft option escape from being different it throws up a little concern about how it is possible that some children who in the past would not have become transgender just might choose that path because their family seem so accommodating towards it rather than antipathetic.
I do not think it is at all easy to nudge a child out of their innate sense of gender, so I am not unduly concerned. And it does seem that this new open regime is much more helpful to those who are transgender. But it emphasises the need for careful screening over a long period before critical decisions are taken just in case we are by accident creating a new sub set of children with issues that they might previously have escaped from in a different way.
These are just niggling thoughts not overt concerns. But the utterly different climate of 2015 compared with transgender children in 1975 or even 1995 is bound to have some potential negatives alongside all the very apparent positives.
no trans-person would want any child to be trans.
no transperson wants to be trans.
as a transperson, i agree. in an ideal world, boys would be boys, and girls would be girls.
we do not live in an ideal world.
Though she grew up in the age of the Beatles and was in that scene - even is on one of their videos she keeps telling me. Not seen her in it yet - though, to be honest, I am not sure if I would recognise her as I never knew her pre transition.
She has certainly made herself an okay life and seems happy. Really that is all you can say to judge her treatment a success. Her doctor at Charing Cross (Dr John Randall) used to put photographs on his wall of his 'successes' in the 1970s when this was still a very new thing. She says there were many and all looked happy.
But you never know how life might have worked out in different circumstances. You can only be grateful if you have been happy enough after the trauma of a transgender childhood in the 50s and 60s.
I agree with (and understand) all of that, but it is to some degree conditioned by the environment we grow up in when first encountering a dissonance of this magnitude.
Though far from ideal, the world has changed markedly for the better in the past decade alone. More understanding and 'normality' ascribed by the majority to acceptance of someone post transition, better medical support, new laws that enshrine both protection and recognition.
You could always have an appropriate passport and now you can have an appropriate birth certificate. That measures the degree of progress.
There will always be people who cannot 'get it' and feel uncomfortable for lots of reasons. Because of their religion (though Dr Randall at Charing Cross was a fervent Christian). Because of discomfort over the way it blurs lines they might fear to cross. Because of self doubts maybe? Or, most likely, because they sincerely believe it must all be some kind of mental illness that should be treated as such - as that seems very reasonable unless you have faced it directly or have studied the literature attempting to use such methods to 'cure' this 'delusion' with zero success.
But perhaps threads like this help a little towards understanding and quell some of the disquiet. As time moves on each generation will have less and less problem accommodating these issues. Which is good to know for those who come next.