6 ms·

Transgender children and gender dysphoria

36 points by nsgi 11y ago

jonesb6 11y ago
I think the fact that our society is being more thoughtful towards gender identity is a good thing. But is it possible in our attempt to be thoughtful we sometimes will over analyze individual situations and change our environments, interactions, and treatment, towards those we are trying to help in such a way that it is actually detrimental to them? In the case of allowing children to choose their identity in the way this article describes, is it possible that a parent might misunderstand their child and enable a short-term change that could be detrimental to a child's development (socially, academically, etc)? I feel like gender identity is a hot issue right now, and people in general get caught up in the rhetoric and forget about the actual people.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > a short-term change that could be detrimental to a child's development (socially, academically, etc)? Why should letting a child explore their gender identity be any more detrimental to their development than letting them explore their sexuality? It'd be far worse to tell them to repress it and not let them come to understand themselves.
  - j4kp07 11y ago
    Note that the OP said "COULD be detrimental" while you shoot from the hip with a definitive "It WOULD be far worse [otherwise]". "Why should letting a child explore their gender identity be any more detrimental to their development than letting them explore their sexuality?" Because some kids, sometimes, make stupid decisions. Also, what 3-year-old (from the original article) needs to "explore their sexuality"?
- tomlock 11y ago
  I think the article is quite aware of that over analysis - and even mentions that a high amount have been found in some studies to not transition in later life. I guess the question is, what are we more willing to risk? Is it worth risking higher rates of suicide and self harm versus, at least in the case of blockers, a delayed puberty? Should people get tattoos if they are confident now that they should?
SN76477 11y ago
I feel like we are confusing children with people that have actual gender identity issues. My 5 year old can decide what her favorite color is, much less what gender she wants to be the rest of her life.
- ludamad 11y ago
  IYHO, what do you suggest to do with a child that cries when dressed as their apparent gender, or called by their apparent gender's pronoun?
  - aninhumer 11y ago
    Treat them however makes them happy, but don't read anything into it. Children are often upset by things for reasons that aren't obvious.
- faitswulff 11y ago
  I think the issue is one and the same, actually, and it's not really their problem, whether children or adult; it's ours and the way that we see them. Regardless of their age, if someone decides to act or dress like someone not of their physiological sex, who are we to judge them? The parent in this article did the humane, considerate, and respectful thing in accepting Tom's decision, not only in the moment that the decision was made, but also in perpetuity. And if Tom were to make a different decision in the future, I think the lesson his mother would learn (has already learned) was that she would love him regardless.
- ogig 11y ago
  Just my experience: My wife worked in contact with a child that, years later, happend to be one of the earliest officialy recognized trangender of the country at the age of nine. My wife realized this child was a transgender, very probably earlier than their parents. She saw it clearly in the behaviour, preferences, movements. Is not that someone asked the child about it, but that the child acts and strongly feels so.
  - angersock 11y ago
dang 11y ago
Some users flagged this submission, but the article is substantive, so we're going to try turning flags off. Since the topic is controversial, please keep this thread a thoughtful one. Edit: thank you all for keeping this thread a thoughtful one.
- monksy 11y ago
  How is this article considered to be ontopic for Hacker News? From the guidelines page: < On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. < Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
  - dang 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure that both the topic and the story gratify the intellectual curiosity of quite a few good hackers, so the lines you quoted are the answer to your question. Certainly not all of us are interested in this, but that's true of nearly everything on the front page, so the standard can't be that tight. Articles on divisive issues are often so tendentious that the threads inevitably become flamewars, so users have gotten in the habit of flagging them. That's ok in some cases, but we don't want it to become mechanical; the purpose should be to foster quality, not exclude topics. So it becomes important to keep an eye out for the exceptions. I think this was one.
- lmm 11y ago
  Substantive? Maybe. On-topic for HN? No. (I trust the rule that we're supposed to flag and move on rather than complaining about submissions being off-topic no longer applies since you've turned off flagging)
  - Sharlin 11y ago
    I don't know what your definition for "satisfies intellectual curiosity" is but this article definitely does it for me. Sexuality and gender issues are fascinating, as is developmental psychology.
imh 11y ago
Reading this article made me realize I have no idea what "gender" is. It used to be synonymous with what parts and chromosomes you have, where there are no questions of "I identify as XYZ," but now what the hell is it really? All the fluidity and tension created by gender makes me think why don't we just get rid of it? Stop making children conform to social norms/behavior/dressing/everything based on their sex. Drop all social expectations of gender and let people do whatever they naturally want to do. But then we're just left with sex, which is basically where we started. So what the hell is gender?
- motoboi 11y ago
  Bible talks about man and woman. I suppose this doesn't help. But there are some other religious topics that got to a point (after a long long painful way) where they are treated like metaphors or simplification (like the genesis) because science brought another explanation. Gender will probably get to this point. But not in the near future, I think.
- chipsy 11y ago
  Gender is - or was - convenient. With binary genders you have a convenient model to categorize people into different groups, in the same way that you can categorize by age, skin color, language, homeland, or religion. Politically, categories are mostly used to drive up the "us vs. them" tension factor that unifies groups, and pushing for harder-edged definitions of gender and gender roles is a convenient way to politicize just about everything in a human life. Further, it naturally works out that your voting bloc floats at around 50% when you appeal to the gender binary, which helps sustain the division in a way that you can't get with things like "race" or "religion". Of course, one of the truisms of data modelling is that it never captures 100% of the system, and it's guided by your expectations of what the system will look like. Our push to digitally model everything exaggerates all the points of breakage. In the same way that you end up with people whose legal name are flagged fake by Facebook, or reverse image searches that think black people are "gorillas", you end up with a lot of data points that are bad fits for a model of binary gender. This is not a huge surprise when humans are equated with other mammals in all their variety. But we have the problem of being emotional, well-socialized, and biased first, and smart second. So we're probably just going to have an extremely long culture war to rethink this categorization, with specious arguments trotted out at every turn.
orthoganol 11y ago
The elephant in the room for me during conversations like this is theory of gender. It doesn't seem like we have one. I sideline myself, or at least error on the side of compassion, because it feels like we just don't know how to think about gender, either in a scientific way, or if significant features of it are non-scientific, how to approach it then at all. I think more attention to it as a subject of serious research could help us all a lot.
gnah 11y ago
If I had grown up in a culture this accepting of transgender people I would have transitioned. That would have been the worst decision of my life. I've grown into my identity as a man since then and I'm thankful for my parents and society pushing me in the right direction. We need to be careful to avoid putting borderline cases like me into a group with such high rates of suicide and depression.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gbanfalvi 11y ago
  You would have only transitioned after lots (maybe years) of sessions with doctors and therapists where they would have made sure that it's really what you need. As the article mentions, the biggest change right now is delaying puberty for some kids so that if they _are_ trans, they get the chance to transition more easily later in life. Regardless, I'm glad that you're happy with your body.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Delaying puberty and sexual maturation is quite odd in this case. It's a bit hard to know what gender you identify as when you aren't even remotely sexually mature hormonal and neurological changes during puberty might be a very important factor. And while yes sex isn't equal gender in this case but it still means allot. If you pump a man full of estrogen and make him feel like a woman you'll might be able to push him hard enough to identify as one.
- empressplay 11y ago
  Conversely, had I grown up when it was more accepted, I wouldn't have ended up having to fight against internal self-hatred to see who I needed to be, would have transitioned much sooner, would have consequently had a much easier re-integration into society, and wouldn't have been scarred by abuse, discrimination, and frequent thoughts of suicide. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to...
- danieltillett 11y ago
retrogradeorbit 11y ago
Worth watching on this topic is a recent Louis Theroux piece on this (if you can source it). [1] When I watched this I couldn't help but wonder if some of these kids are actually intersex, have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or something similar [2]. There was no mention in the documentary about any chromosomal testing being done by these doctors. The testing seems to be behavioural. I wonder what the overlap is between trans kids and Sex Chromosome Abnormalities? [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qkzt2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qkzt2 [2] http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html
simplexion 11y ago
“I was wearing my Spiderman costume,” Tom, now five, remembers. I couldn't read past this. No... he doesn't remember that.
- Washuu 11y ago
  I remember being carried as a two year old up and down the long driveway at my parents' place so they could deposit poopy diapers in the trash bin.(Trash service was only available for a few years out there.) We all remember moments from our early lives that seem odd.
  - simplexion 11y ago
    No you don't.
- biot 11y ago
  My earliest memory was when I was about 2 years old, so it's not surprising that this could be true. Yes, it could be the case that the mother's retelling of the story is now the basis for Tom's "memory", but why abandon the entire article over such a trivial point?
- h_ar 11y ago
  Remember what? If you mean memories when people were that young, trust me, you'd be surprised about human memory. I still remember my 3.5-year-old self trying to type some simple first grade calculations with MS Word 97 and print them. And I didn't knew English back then.
  - simplexion 11y ago
    If he was 3.5 years old I wouldn't have said it wasn't believable.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Bold of you to say that, given that memories like this are not unusual. Children are much better at recalling early childhood memories than will be when older: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/29918944... Memory is also reinforced by recollection and rehearsal. Since this was a pivotal thing in both his and his mom's life, it presumably has been talked about more than just this once.
Uhhrrr 11y ago
The worrisome thing here is that batman outfits and swords are used as proof of the "boy" identity and pink princess stuff as proof of the "girl" identity. This is complete crap - gender roles are not dictated by which aisle of Toys 'R' Us you favor. I am willing to grant that the children profiled in the article aren't just in it for the toys, but the author is encouraging this perception, and I have seen more than a couple Bay Area parents buying into this, and rushing to call their kid gender-fluid as soon as they put on a dress.
- empressplay 11y ago
  And you're right; these are totally two separate things (cross-dressing, for example, is not much of an indicator as to whether someone is transgender or not.) Now, that said, kids should be free to wear whatever the hell they want, but nobody should take what they wear as an indicator as to what gender they would be more comfortable as.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    >Now, that said, kids should be free to wear whatever the hell they want I am none too keen seeing young girls wearing heavy make up. Children should be able to be children and not little adults.
    - gizmo686 11y ago
      What is inherently "adult" about makeup?
      - danieltillett 11y ago
        I am not talking about children playing with mum’s make up - I am talking about young girls being peer pressured into wearing heavy make up at an age they don’t need it. It is an arms race that no young kids need. On this topic I really hope men can continue to resist the cosmetics industry. I have zero desire to see it become the expected social norm like it has for women.

36 points by nsgi 11y ago

I think the fact that our society is being more thoughtful towards gender identity is a good thing. But is it possible in our attempt to be thoughtful we sometimes will over analyze individual situations and change our environments, interactions, and treatment, towards those we are trying to help in such a way that it is actually detrimental to them? In the case of allowing children to choose their identity in the way this article describes, is it possible that a parent might misunderstand their child and enable a short-term change that could be detrimental to a child's development (socially, academically, etc)? I feel like gender identity is a hot issue right now, and people in general get caught up in the rhetoric and forget about the actual people.

chimeracoder 11y ago
> a short-term change that could be detrimental to a child's development (socially, academically, etc)? Why should letting a child explore their gender identity be any more detrimental to their development than letting them explore their sexuality? It'd be far worse to tell them to repress it and not let them come to understand themselves.
- j4kp07 11y ago
  Note that the OP said "COULD be detrimental" while you shoot from the hip with a definitive "It WOULD be far worse [otherwise]". "Why should letting a child explore their gender identity be any more detrimental to their development than letting them explore their sexuality?" Because some kids, sometimes, make stupid decisions. Also, what 3-year-old (from the original article) needs to "explore their sexuality"?
tomlock 11y ago
I think the article is quite aware of that over analysis - and even mentions that a high amount have been found in some studies to not transition in later life. I guess the question is, what are we more willing to risk? Is it worth risking higher rates of suicide and self harm versus, at least in the case of blockers, a delayed puberty? Should people get tattoos if they are confident now that they should?

SN76477 11y ago

I feel like we are confusing children with people that have actual gender identity issues. My 5 year old can decide what her favorite color is, much less what gender she wants to be the rest of her life.

ludamad 11y ago
IYHO, what do you suggest to do with a child that cries when dressed as their apparent gender, or called by their apparent gender's pronoun?
- aninhumer 11y ago
  Treat them however makes them happy, but don't read anything into it. Children are often upset by things for reasons that aren't obvious.
faitswulff 11y ago
I think the issue is one and the same, actually, and it's not really their problem, whether children or adult; it's ours and the way that we see them. Regardless of their age, if someone decides to act or dress like someone not of their physiological sex, who are we to judge them? The parent in this article did the humane, considerate, and respectful thing in accepting Tom's decision, not only in the moment that the decision was made, but also in perpetuity. And if Tom were to make a different decision in the future, I think the lesson his mother would learn (has already learned) was that she would love him regardless.
ogig 11y ago
Just my experience: My wife worked in contact with a child that, years later, happend to be one of the earliest officialy recognized trangender of the country at the age of nine. My wife realized this child was a transgender, very probably earlier than their parents. She saw it clearly in the behaviour, preferences, movements. Is not that someone asked the child about it, but that the child acts and strongly feels so.
- angersock 11y ago

dang 11y ago

Some users flagged this submission, but the article is substantive, so we're going to try turning flags off. Since the topic is controversial, please keep this thread a thoughtful one. Edit: thank you all for keeping this thread a thoughtful one.

monksy 11y ago
How is this article considered to be ontopic for Hacker News? From the guidelines page: < On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. < Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
- dang 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure that both the topic and the story gratify the intellectual curiosity of quite a few good hackers, so the lines you quoted are the answer to your question. Certainly not all of us are interested in this, but that's true of nearly everything on the front page, so the standard can't be that tight. Articles on divisive issues are often so tendentious that the threads inevitably become flamewars, so users have gotten in the habit of flagging them. That's ok in some cases, but we don't want it to become mechanical; the purpose should be to foster quality, not exclude topics. So it becomes important to keep an eye out for the exceptions. I think this was one.
lmm 11y ago
Substantive? Maybe. On-topic for HN? No. (I trust the rule that we're supposed to flag and move on rather than complaining about submissions being off-topic no longer applies since you've turned off flagging)
- Sharlin 11y ago
  I don't know what your definition for "satisfies intellectual curiosity" is but this article definitely does it for me. Sexuality and gender issues are fascinating, as is developmental psychology.

imh 11y ago

Reading this article made me realize I have no idea what "gender" is. It used to be synonymous with what parts and chromosomes you have, where there are no questions of "I identify as XYZ," but now what the hell is it really? All the fluidity and tension created by gender makes me think why don't we just get rid of it? Stop making children conform to social norms/behavior/dressing/everything based on their sex. Drop all social expectations of gender and let people do whatever they naturally want to do. But then we're just left with sex, which is basically where we started. So what the hell is gender?

motoboi 11y ago
Bible talks about man and woman. I suppose this doesn't help. But there are some other religious topics that got to a point (after a long long painful way) where they are treated like metaphors or simplification (like the genesis) because science brought another explanation. Gender will probably get to this point. But not in the near future, I think.
chipsy 11y ago
Gender is - or was - convenient. With binary genders you have a convenient model to categorize people into different groups, in the same way that you can categorize by age, skin color, language, homeland, or religion. Politically, categories are mostly used to drive up the "us vs. them" tension factor that unifies groups, and pushing for harder-edged definitions of gender and gender roles is a convenient way to politicize just about everything in a human life. Further, it naturally works out that your voting bloc floats at around 50% when you appeal to the gender binary, which helps sustain the division in a way that you can't get with things like "race" or "religion". Of course, one of the truisms of data modelling is that it never captures 100% of the system, and it's guided by your expectations of what the system will look like. Our push to digitally model everything exaggerates all the points of breakage. In the same way that you end up with people whose legal name are flagged fake by Facebook, or reverse image searches that think black people are "gorillas", you end up with a lot of data points that are bad fits for a model of binary gender. This is not a huge surprise when humans are equated with other mammals in all their variety. But we have the problem of being emotional, well-socialized, and biased first, and smart second. So we're probably just going to have an extremely long culture war to rethink this categorization, with specious arguments trotted out at every turn.

orthoganol 11y ago

The elephant in the room for me during conversations like this is theory of gender. It doesn't seem like we have one. I sideline myself, or at least error on the side of compassion, because it feels like we just don't know how to think about gender, either in a scientific way, or if significant features of it are non-scientific, how to approach it then at all. I think more attention to it as a subject of serious research could help us all a lot.

gnah 11y ago

If I had grown up in a culture this accepting of transgender people I would have transitioned. That would have been the worst decision of my life. I've grown into my identity as a man since then and I'm thankful for my parents and society pushing me in the right direction. We need to be careful to avoid putting borderline cases like me into a group with such high rates of suicide and depression.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gbanfalvi 11y ago
You would have only transitioned after lots (maybe years) of sessions with doctors and therapists where they would have made sure that it's really what you need. As the article mentions, the biggest change right now is delaying puberty for some kids so that if they _are_ trans, they get the chance to transition more easily later in life. Regardless, I'm glad that you're happy with your body.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Delaying puberty and sexual maturation is quite odd in this case. It's a bit hard to know what gender you identify as when you aren't even remotely sexually mature hormonal and neurological changes during puberty might be a very important factor. And while yes sex isn't equal gender in this case but it still means allot. If you pump a man full of estrogen and make him feel like a woman you'll might be able to push him hard enough to identify as one.
empressplay 11y ago
Conversely, had I grown up when it was more accepted, I wouldn't have ended up having to fight against internal self-hatred to see who I needed to be, would have transitioned much sooner, would have consequently had a much easier re-integration into society, and wouldn't have been scarred by abuse, discrimination, and frequent thoughts of suicide. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to...
danieltillett 11y ago

retrogradeorbit 11y ago

Worth watching on this topic is a recent Louis Theroux piece on this (if you can source it). [1] When I watched this I couldn't help but wonder if some of these kids are actually intersex, have Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or something similar [2]. There was no mention in the documentary about any chromosomal testing being done by these doctors. The testing seems to be behavioural. I wonder what the overlap is between trans kids and Sex Chromosome Abnormalities? [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qkzt2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qkzt2 [2] http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html

simplexion 11y ago

“I was wearing my Spiderman costume,” Tom, now five, remembers. I couldn't read past this. No... he doesn't remember that.

Washuu 11y ago
I remember being carried as a two year old up and down the long driveway at my parents' place so they could deposit poopy diapers in the trash bin.(Trash service was only available for a few years out there.) We all remember moments from our early lives that seem odd.
- simplexion 11y ago
  No you don't.
biot 11y ago
My earliest memory was when I was about 2 years old, so it's not surprising that this could be true. Yes, it could be the case that the mother's retelling of the story is now the basis for Tom's "memory", but why abandon the entire article over such a trivial point?
h_ar 11y ago
Remember what? If you mean memories when people were that young, trust me, you'd be surprised about human memory. I still remember my 3.5-year-old self trying to type some simple first grade calculations with MS Word 97 and print them. And I didn't knew English back then.
- simplexion 11y ago
  If he was 3.5 years old I wouldn't have said it wasn't believable.
wpietri 11y ago
Bold of you to say that, given that memories like this are not unusual. Children are much better at recalling early childhood memories than will be when older: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/08/29918944... Memory is also reinforced by recollection and rehearsal. Since this was a pivotal thing in both his and his mom's life, it presumably has been talked about more than just this once.

Uhhrrr 11y ago

The worrisome thing here is that batman outfits and swords are used as proof of the "boy" identity and pink princess stuff as proof of the "girl" identity. This is complete crap - gender roles are not dictated by which aisle of Toys 'R' Us you favor. I am willing to grant that the children profiled in the article aren't just in it for the toys, but the author is encouraging this perception, and I have seen more than a couple Bay Area parents buying into this, and rushing to call their kid gender-fluid as soon as they put on a dress.

empressplay 11y ago
And you're right; these are totally two separate things (cross-dressing, for example, is not much of an indicator as to whether someone is transgender or not.) Now, that said, kids should be free to wear whatever the hell they want, but nobody should take what they wear as an indicator as to what gender they would be more comfortable as.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  >Now, that said, kids should be free to wear whatever the hell they want I am none too keen seeing young girls wearing heavy make up. Children should be able to be children and not little adults.
  - gizmo686 11y ago
    What is inherently "adult" about makeup?
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      I am not talking about children playing with mum’s make up - I am talking about young girls being peer pressured into wearing heavy make up at an age they don’t need it. It is an arms race that no young kids need. On this topic I really hope men can continue to resist the cosmetics industry. I have zero desire to see it become the expected social norm like it has for women.