The NYT on Gender Variance

The New York Times had a very nice article yesterday about gender identity. Surprisingly good, actually.

From the CRC's shrieks of outrage, I surmise that this is a topic that really upsets some people -- boys who feel like girls inside and girls who feel like boys. I admit I don't really understand what sets them off, but I think it must have to do with people failing to submit to the authority of the majority. Like, if most boys act like the stereotype, then why can't the rest of them just play along?

Well, I can't read their minds, but that's my best theory.

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 — Until recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.

But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.

Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun to advise families to let these children be “who they are” to foster a sense of security and self-esteem. They are motivated, in part, by the high incidence of depression, suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools are now required to respect parents’ decisions. Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear

I had the opposite thing happen when my daughter was little. I was at a university, and the Developmental Psychology students sometimes used her for research. They'd observe her, interview her, whatever they do. But the thing was, when she was little, like two and three years old, she loved pink. She loved Barbies and ponies and cute stuff. And this drove those grad students absolutely nuts. They were just sure we were forcing her into traditional gender roles or something. Now, at eighteen, she's all t-shirts and blue jeans, we haven't seen anything pink around the house for years, she grew out of that phase. But look, here's the point: a kid knows who they are.

Anyway, it seems straightforward enough to let the kid work it out.

“First we became sensitive to two mommies and two daddies,” said Reynaldo Almeida, the director of the Aurora School, a progressive private school in Oakland. “Now it’s kids who come to school who aren’t gender typical.”

The supportive attitudes are far easier to find in traditionally tolerant areas of the country like San Francisco than in other parts, but even in those places there is fierce debate over how best to handle the children.

So this would be the CRC's paranoid fantasy that tolerance of one thing will lead to total destruction of all norms. No ... the fact is, it doesn't make any more sense to discriminate on the basis of gender identity than sexual orientation.

A person is what they are -- but some people seem to take rejection of differences as the default position. What's so hard about just accepting that there is a lot of variation among people?

Cassandra Reese, a first-grade teacher outside Boston, recalled that fellow teachers were unnerved when a young boy showed up in a skirt. “They said, ‘This is not normal,’ and, ‘It’s the parents’ fault,’ ” Ms. Reese said. “They didn’t see children as sophisticated enough to verbalize their feelings.”

As their children head into adolescence, some parents are choosing to block puberty medically to buy time for them to figure out who they are — raising a host of ethical questions.

While these children are still relatively rare, doctors say the number of referrals is rising across the nation. Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have laws protecting the rights of transgender students, and some schools are engaged in a steep learning curve to dismantle gender stereotypes.

... "block puberty medically?" ... Can somebody tell me what that means? I don't know, that sentence just seems like a kind of hit and run. Do they mean parents of kids who do not have an easy-to-grasp gender identity? Or parents in general?

Look, I've got two teenagers. Are they saying here that there's a cure for puberty?

Or are they saying that if somebody's kid is different they give them steroids or something?

At the Park Day School in Oakland, teachers are taught a gender-neutral vocabulary and are urged to line up students by sneaker color rather than by gender. “We are careful not to create a situation where students are being boxed in,” said Tom Little, the school’s director. “We allow them to move back and forth until something feels right.”

The vocabulary thing is tough. Does anybody know why the English language has to have two sets of pronouns, one for males and one for females? We do pretty much the same things, why do we have to use different words? As this article notes, it sometimes happens that somebody doesn't fit immediately and intuitively into one or the other of those categories.

We had a rude member of the citizens advisory committee refer to a transgender woman as "he," and the rest of us let it pass one time. Second time was going to be a problem. On the other hand, nearly everybody has had it slip accidentally, the right pronoun just doesn't rise to the surface in the instant. It seems to me that a quick apology remedies the discomfort, in that case, but what do I know? I'm just an adult bovine creature in a china shop when it comes to these things.

This story is really good:

For families, it can be a long, emotional adjustment. Shortly after her son’s third birthday, Pam B. and her husband, Joel, began a parental journey for which there was no map. It started when their son, J., began wearing oversized T-shirts and wrapping a towel around his head to emulate long, flowing hair. Then came his mothers’ silky undershirts. Half a year into preschool, J. started becoming agitated when asked to wear boys’ clothing.

En route to a mall with her son, Ms. B. had an epiphany: “It just clicked in me. I said, ‘You really want to wear a dress, don’t you?’ ”

Thus began what the B.’s, who asked their full names not be used to protect their son’s privacy, call “the reluctant path,” a behind-closed-doors struggle to come to terms with a gender-variant child — a spirited 5-year-old boy who, at least for now, strongly identifies as a girl, requests to be called “she” and asks to wear pigtails and pink jumpers to school.

Ms. B., 41, a lawyer, accepted the way her son defined himself after she and her husband consulted with a psychologist and observed his newfound comfort with his choice. But she feels the precarious nature of the day-to-day reality. “It’s hard to convey the relentlessness of it, she said, “every social encounter, every time you go out to eat, every day feeling like a balance between your kid’s self-esteem and protecting him from the hostile outside world.”

Think back. You've known kids like this. What makes a big crisis out of it? Hint: it's not them, it's us.

A little more:

Both sides in the debate underscore their concern for the profound vulnerability of such youngsters, symbolized by occurrences like the murder in 2002 of Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager born as Eddie, southeast of Oakland.

“Parents now are looking for advice on how to make life reasonable for their kids — whether to allow cross-dressing in public, and how to protect them from the savagery of other children,” said Dr. Herbert Schreier, a psychiatrist with Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland.

Dr. Schreier is one of a growing number of professionals who have begun to think of gender variance as a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a disorder. “These kids are becoming more aware of how it is to be themselves,” he said.

In past generations, so-called sissy boys and tomboy girls were made to conform, based on the belief that their behaviors were largely products of dysfunctional homes.

Among the revisionists is Dr. Edgardo Menvielle, a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington who started a national outreach group for parents of gender-variant children in 1998 that now has more than 200 participants. “We know that sexually marginalized children have a higher rate of depression and suicide attempts,” Dr. Menvielle said. “The goal is for the child to be well adjusted, healthy and have good self-esteem. What’s not important is molding their gender.”

The literature on adults who are transgender was hardly consoling to one parent, a 42-year-old software consultant in Massachusetts and the father of a gender-variant third grader. “You’re trudging through this tragic, horrible stuff and realizing not a single person was accepted and understood as a child,” he said. “You read it and think, O.K., best to avoid that. But as a parent you’re in this complete terra incognita.”

The biological underpinnings of gender identity, much like sexual orientation, remain something of a mystery, though many researchers suspect it is linked with hormone exposure in the developing fetus.

Studies suggest that most boys with gender variance early in childhood grow up to be gay, and about a quarter heterosexual, Dr. Menvielle said. Only a small fraction grow up to identify as transgender.

That's a good place to leave it off. There's a lot more to this article -- click the link and learn a little bit here. HERE it is again (it may require free registration)).