tweakabelle
Posts: 7522
Joined: 10/16/2007
From: Sydney Australia
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kaliko
The article says the child was diagnosed with gender identity disorder at 7 and then started transitioning at 8. If this is true, then regardless of what "started transitioning" specifically means, that's an awfully short span of time to jump from diagnosis to acceptance. I really have trouble believing they attempted to provide adequate mental health treatment to try to address the child's issues.
Yes, perhaps fully transitioning really is the right answer for this specific person. But why wouldn't a parent exhaust other possibilities before going down that road? Kids are all kinds of fucked up. My niece was cutting herself. My other niece overdosed (and then called for help, thankfully). My friend's son stopped eating. The event that caused these parents to take action was when the child threatened genital mutilation. Yeah...kids do this shit. They don't have the skills yet to cope with stress and confusion. they seek control, and sometimes it results in self harm. Parents should be providing the resources to help their kids through it. I feel like, in this case, they threw their hands up and thought "Well, if you threatened to hurt yourself. I guess you must mean business." No. Man up (pun intended) and parent. Kids do this. It's the job of the adult to help them learn how to manage themselves, even when (especially when) it's really, really hard.
Reading your post, I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that, with a little research, the answers to your questions would be answered. Here's one TV program that explores the issue in depth without sensationalising it:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2014/11/17/4127631.htm
Having researched this area as part of my degree, I can assure you that parents only agree to their child transitioning after all other options have been tried and failed. TG life is not something any loving parent would force on a child - it is a hard lifestyle choice for adults, let alone children. Again and again, I encountered parents reporting that they accepted their child's TG nature only when the child threatened self harm or actually self harmed. It is not a choice for the child, their gender is set in concrete in their own consciousnness - the choice is the parent's and the choice is whether they accept the child's nature or not.
As you can imagine, these are excruciatingly difficult decisions for parents. They are decisions that most parents don't want to make, they are decisions that are made only after all the options have been tried, failed and exhausted. If you put yourself in a parent's position I am sure you would agree that it is not a decision you want to take, nor is it a route that you would find attractive for your child. Most parents try everything they can possibly think of, and then more, before agreeing to transition and no doubt you would be no exception.
So how should a parent express their love for a child when all the other options have proved to be failures? If the child's sense of their own gender is immovable, then how should a parent react? Do they support the child, or do they defer to social expectations, imposing them on their child? There is a growing understanding of gender as a social phenomenon, that gender is not a binary phenomenon or a phenomenon of opposites, that it occurs along a spectrum or continuum.
You might not find a child's location on that spectrum to be ideal, but this is about the child, not the often poorly-informed expectations of those around the child.
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