“children do not begin life with a sense of body permanence”
“At first they don’t even see their future as species specific. Gradually during their first five years or so, they come to understand that, except for increasing in size, their bodies will not change into something utterly different”
“Sometimes instead of obsessing about blenders, dinosaurs, or ponies, a child obsesses about gender. Consider JeongMee Yoon’s pink-obsessed daughter who inspired the Pink and Blue Project. The child’s obsession led her mother to create an art project, but neither Yoon nor the mother of the girl who wanted to be a pony took their children to see a psychologist. If, however, the pink-obsessed child had been born with testes, a scrotum, and a penis, he might indeed have been brought to a therapist. This is because gender obsessions are often medicalized in a way that other obsessions are not.”
“Anti-trans activists sometimes argue that trans teens and adults have an unformed or even whimsical sense of identity. Such a view wrongly uses the metaphor of choice, misunderstanding how implacably imprinted gender identity (trans or cis) becomes as children develop.”
“But what interests me in this essay is the less clear-cut issue of how best to nurture very young (ages 3–7) gender-nonconforming children when the boundaries between evolving and settled self-knowledge are not yet fully formed.”
“absence of solid knowledge creates a blank field on which arguments rage about what kind of care parents should give to gender-nonconforming children”
“Treatment for adolescents is a quite different matter, with an urgency shaped by a high risk of suicide and self-harm among trans teens (caused by the heightened confluence of the same risk factors that cause many teen suicides: rejection by friends and family, discrimination, physical abuse, low self-esteem, intersecting minority identities, and more).”
“Among professional organizations, the most widely accepted Standards of Care for children with gender dysphoria was published in 2012 by the World Professional Association for Transgender Heath (WPATH), an organization of transgender activists and advocates as well as professional researchers and therapists. WPATH’s advice does not differ dramatically from the common-sense approaches found in parenting magazines. The Standards document urges mental health professionals to help families reduce a child’s stress. It insists that seeking to make the dysphoria disappear by, for example, refusing to buy pink clothes or Barbies for a dysphoric boy is both unethical and ineffective. WPATH also believes that counselors should encourage clients to explore a range of possible gender expressions, not just the binary of male or female.”