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An article on trans kids
Here.
Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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 mother’s 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.”
The prospect of cross-dressing kindergartners has sparked a deep philosophical divide among professionals over how best to counsel families. Is it healthier for families to follow the child’s lead, or to spare children potential humiliation and isolation by steering them toward accepting their biological gender until they are older?
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.
Girls with gender-variant behavior, who have been studied less, voice extreme unhappiness about being a girl and talk about wanting to have male anatomy. But research has thus far suggested that most wind up as heterosexual women.
Although many children role-play involving gender, Dr. Menvielle said, “the key question is how intense and persistent the behavior is,” especially if they show extreme distress.
Dr. Robin Dea, the director of regional mental health for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, said: “Our gender identity is something we feel in our soul. But it is also a continuum, and it evolves.”
Dr. Dea works with four or five children under the age of 15 who are essentially living as the opposite sex. “They are much happier, and their grades are up,” she said. “I’m waiting for the study that says supporting these children is negative.”
But Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and head of the gender-identity service at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, disagrees with the “free to be” approach with young children and cross-dressing in public. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Zucker has treated about 500 preadolescent gender-variant children. In his studies, 80 percent grow out of the behavior, but 15 percent to 20 percent continue to be distressed about their gender and may ultimately change their sex.
Dr. Zucker tries to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender” until they are older and can determine their sexual identity — accomplished, he said, by encouraging same-sex friendships and activities like board games that move beyond strict gender roles.
Though she has not encountered such a situation, Jennifer Schwartz, assistant principal of Chatham Elementary School outside Springfield, Ill., said that allowing a child to express gender differences “would be very difficult to pull off” there.
Ms. Schwartz added: “I’m not sure it’s worth the damage it could cause the child, with all the prejudices and parents possibly protesting. I’m not sure a child that age is ready to make that kind of decision.”
The B.’s thought long and hard about what they had observed in their son. They have carefully choreographed his life, monitoring new playmates, selecting a compatible school, finding sympathetic parents in a babysitting co-op. Nevertheless, Ms. B. said, “there is still the stomach-clenching fear for your kid.”
It is indeed heartbreaking to hear a child say, as J. did recently, “It feels like a nightmare I’m a boy.”
The adjustment has been gradual for Mr. B., a 43-year-old public school administrator who is trying to stop calling J. “our little man.” He thinks of his son as a positive, resilient person, and his love and admiration show. “The truth is, is any parent going to choose this for their kid?” he said. “It’s who your kid is.”
Families are caught in the undertow of conflicting approaches. One suburban Chicago mother, who did not want to be identified, said in a telephone interview that she was drawing the line on dress and trying to provide “boy opportunities” for her 6-year-old son. “But we can’t make everything a power struggle,” she said. “It gets exhausting.”
She worries about him becoming a social outcast. “Why does your brother like girl things?” friends of her 10-year-old ask. The answer is always, “I don’t know.”
Nila Marrone, a retired linguistics professor at the University of Connecticut who consults with parents and schools, recalled an incident last year at a Bronx elementary school in which an 8-year-old boy perceived as effeminate was thrown into a large trash bin by a group of boys. The principal, she said, “suggested to the mother that she was to blame, for not having taught her son how to be tough enough.”
But the tide is turning.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, requires that students be addressed with “a name and pronoun that corresponds to the gender identity.” It also asks schools to provide a locker room or changing area that corresponds to a student’s chosen gender.
One of the most controversial issues concerns the use of “blockers,” hormones used to delay the onset of puberty in cases where it could be psychologically devastating (for instance, a girl who identifies as a boy might slice her wrists when she gets her period). Some doctors disapprove of blockers, arguing that only at puberty does an individual fully appreciate their gender identity.
Catherine Tuerk, a nurse-psychotherapist at the children’s hospital in Washington and the mother of a gender-variant child in the 1970s, says parents are still left to find their own way. She recalls how therapists urged her to steer her son into psychoanalysis and “hypermasculine activities” like karate. She said she and her husband became “gender cops.”
“It was always, ‘You’re not kicking the ball hard enough,’ ” she said.
Ms. Tuerk’s son, now 30, is gay and a father, and her own thinking has evolved since she was a young parent. “People are beginning to understand this seems to be something that happens,” she said. “But there was a whole lifetime of feeling we could never leave him alone.”
Deniz has a friend Jonathon. And she was telling me the other week how "Jonathon says he's a girl sometimes, but I know he's really a boy". (We'd been talking about hair length.)
And here I was trying to explain that sometimes kids say that and it's just pretend, and sometimes they say that and it's that we're wrong about whether they're a girl or a boy - but I don't know, I may have gone right over her head.
*frowns a bit*
Come to think of it, it was when she was playing with Jonathon all the time she'd say things like "You can't be a pirate, girls can't be pirates" (or superheroes, or firefighters, or whatever), nevermind that *she* was pretending to be a pirate (or whatever). Of course it was a coincidence - kids do play with this sort of thing at that age, they're sorting it all out - but now I've got it stuck in my head.
Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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 mother’s 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.”
The prospect of cross-dressing kindergartners has sparked a deep philosophical divide among professionals over how best to counsel families. Is it healthier for families to follow the child’s lead, or to spare children potential humiliation and isolation by steering them toward accepting their biological gender until they are older?
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.
Girls with gender-variant behavior, who have been studied less, voice extreme unhappiness about being a girl and talk about wanting to have male anatomy. But research has thus far suggested that most wind up as heterosexual women.
Although many children role-play involving gender, Dr. Menvielle said, “the key question is how intense and persistent the behavior is,” especially if they show extreme distress.
Dr. Robin Dea, the director of regional mental health for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, said: “Our gender identity is something we feel in our soul. But it is also a continuum, and it evolves.”
Dr. Dea works with four or five children under the age of 15 who are essentially living as the opposite sex. “They are much happier, and their grades are up,” she said. “I’m waiting for the study that says supporting these children is negative.”
But Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and head of the gender-identity service at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, disagrees with the “free to be” approach with young children and cross-dressing in public. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Zucker has treated about 500 preadolescent gender-variant children. In his studies, 80 percent grow out of the behavior, but 15 percent to 20 percent continue to be distressed about their gender and may ultimately change their sex.
Dr. Zucker tries to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender” until they are older and can determine their sexual identity — accomplished, he said, by encouraging same-sex friendships and activities like board games that move beyond strict gender roles.
Though she has not encountered such a situation, Jennifer Schwartz, assistant principal of Chatham Elementary School outside Springfield, Ill., said that allowing a child to express gender differences “would be very difficult to pull off” there.
Ms. Schwartz added: “I’m not sure it’s worth the damage it could cause the child, with all the prejudices and parents possibly protesting. I’m not sure a child that age is ready to make that kind of decision.”
The B.’s thought long and hard about what they had observed in their son. They have carefully choreographed his life, monitoring new playmates, selecting a compatible school, finding sympathetic parents in a babysitting co-op. Nevertheless, Ms. B. said, “there is still the stomach-clenching fear for your kid.”
It is indeed heartbreaking to hear a child say, as J. did recently, “It feels like a nightmare I’m a boy.”
The adjustment has been gradual for Mr. B., a 43-year-old public school administrator who is trying to stop calling J. “our little man.” He thinks of his son as a positive, resilient person, and his love and admiration show. “The truth is, is any parent going to choose this for their kid?” he said. “It’s who your kid is.”
Families are caught in the undertow of conflicting approaches. One suburban Chicago mother, who did not want to be identified, said in a telephone interview that she was drawing the line on dress and trying to provide “boy opportunities” for her 6-year-old son. “But we can’t make everything a power struggle,” she said. “It gets exhausting.”
She worries about him becoming a social outcast. “Why does your brother like girl things?” friends of her 10-year-old ask. The answer is always, “I don’t know.”
Nila Marrone, a retired linguistics professor at the University of Connecticut who consults with parents and schools, recalled an incident last year at a Bronx elementary school in which an 8-year-old boy perceived as effeminate was thrown into a large trash bin by a group of boys. The principal, she said, “suggested to the mother that she was to blame, for not having taught her son how to be tough enough.”
But the tide is turning.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, requires that students be addressed with “a name and pronoun that corresponds to the gender identity.” It also asks schools to provide a locker room or changing area that corresponds to a student’s chosen gender.
One of the most controversial issues concerns the use of “blockers,” hormones used to delay the onset of puberty in cases where it could be psychologically devastating (for instance, a girl who identifies as a boy might slice her wrists when she gets her period). Some doctors disapprove of blockers, arguing that only at puberty does an individual fully appreciate their gender identity.
Catherine Tuerk, a nurse-psychotherapist at the children’s hospital in Washington and the mother of a gender-variant child in the 1970s, says parents are still left to find their own way. She recalls how therapists urged her to steer her son into psychoanalysis and “hypermasculine activities” like karate. She said she and her husband became “gender cops.”
“It was always, ‘You’re not kicking the ball hard enough,’ ” she said.
Ms. Tuerk’s son, now 30, is gay and a father, and her own thinking has evolved since she was a young parent. “People are beginning to understand this seems to be something that happens,” she said. “But there was a whole lifetime of feeling we could never leave him alone.”
Deniz has a friend Jonathon. And she was telling me the other week how "Jonathon says he's a girl sometimes, but I know he's really a boy". (We'd been talking about hair length.)
And here I was trying to explain that sometimes kids say that and it's just pretend, and sometimes they say that and it's that we're wrong about whether they're a girl or a boy - but I don't know, I may have gone right over her head.
*frowns a bit*
Come to think of it, it was when she was playing with Jonathon all the time she'd say things like "You can't be a pirate, girls can't be pirates" (or superheroes, or firefighters, or whatever), nevermind that *she* was pretending to be a pirate (or whatever). Of course it was a coincidence - kids do play with this sort of thing at that age, they're sorting it all out - but now I've got it stuck in my head.
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And blocking the hormones, I don't agree with that either.
But if there is a safe way for kids to explore their gender issues so they can come to terms one way or the other, I am all for it. And it's not my own prejudices here that are speaking as much as knowing how mean other kids are. Not just to the kid exploring, but to their siblings, too. Remember, one of the reasons my daughter got assaulted on the school bus was because she has a retarded brother. (She got punished for this crap. AGAIN. Just got the letter from the transportation company. Grr.)
Well at least in NYC you have one high school that has no problems with trans students. :)
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Personally, I wasn't generally comfortable changing in front of others and often chose to change in the bathroom. I'd be more in favor of giving more kids the option of changing privately, even though I support people being less self-conscious physically, it's hard to put that burden on kids.
I'd also support not having to change for gym, as often their assumptions are faulty. Although I often wore gym-appropriate clothes all day on gym days just so I wouldn't have to change.
I'm sorry your daughter got assaulted. I hope measures were taken against those who did it. Assaulting people is simply not acceptable. And kids shouldn't have to curb their actions for fear of physical violence. Even though in her case there was clearly nothing she could do, so it's not entirely an example of that, but still - people need to learn that such behavior is simply not acceptable.
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My daughter's locker room, the poor thing, even has a window to the female coaches/gym teachers office. It's supposed to be for their protection but it also rattled my daughter a lot.
Maybe it is a 'silly cultural thing' but that just shows you have no respect for other cultures, and the children who live like that. That's sad. Everyone screams about tolerance but only if it is tolerance for their ideals.
I guess they should just 'get over it'. Dismissive and disrespectful, I think.
And knowing the safety issues for women and girls out there? I would like to know that they have at least an option for segregated rooms.
Mind you I've been in mixed sex locker rooms in Germany, that was ok, plus it had stalls. But I wouldn't want to force that on anyone. Not in this culture, and not on children. They deserve protection.
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you're right, I have no real sensitivity to someone's notion that they are "unsafe" because someone with a penis is minding her own business changing for gym. All that kid is trying to do is live her life as normally as possible. There is no natural reason men attack women...any risk is purely a result of cultural ideals and socialization practices, and those can't change unless we try to do something about it. Regardless, I don't think you need to worry about that sort of thing on a grade-school level, especially if the child in question believes she is a girl and wants to change with the other girls...it's worse in the long run to deny that and make a girl who is incredibly uncomfortable at most times change with the boys, then to force some other girls to be more understanding and actually learn something about someone else's life and the differences between people.
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Maybe because I have a young daughter now going through this, and I have a good memory for certain things, that I can remember the feelings at the time, how hard it was as it is...and have talked with friend and even had recent talks about such things (when choosing a gym, what was and was not ok, locker-room wise). I can't be dismissive of the feelings of so many people.
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The important thing to remember is that in this school, these people would be her classmates-some her friends. They would know her, and hopefully by the time they're changing for gym(we didn't until 5th grade) they would know how she felt and why she was in their locker room, not the boys'. If we teach our children to understand situations like these, they won't be threatening to them.
I know it seems contradictory for me to say that men are not inherently more violent and then turn around and say that the girl is at risk in the boys' room...but she is. That's entirely a result of culture and socialization though, not innate violence. I'd rather see a few girls have to get used to the idea of something innocuous than have one girl beaten up when her life is going to be hard enough as it is.
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I'm trying to be realistic here, going by what I see in the world and what I have known. And you know what? You call it cultural and stupid. Sorry you find my culture and morals stupid. That's really not fair to call names because you have a more liberal view of sexuality than I do. Why don;t you just call me an uptight prude whilst you are at it? And then I think of the number of girls who have been sexually assaulted, and how they have to confront this even more and it really rubs me the wrong way. But hey, for the sake of political correctness, let's force a group of people to be uncomfortable and maybe even traumatized (not unusual) for one person. Great idea. You can't shove your morals down someone's throat and expect them to just be all happy about it. The hypersexuality of kids today is bad enough, and they are losing their innocence at a younger and younger age. I don't think this is a good thing, at all. I don't want them to think sex is dirty but I don't want the world of in your face sexuality either.
Kids DO curb actions for fear of violence. Every single day. Do you have an answer for it? Because damned if I do and I have been fighting this for a while now. For now, we have to understand that this happens and until it can be safe, we have to make sure children are safe. They are not some sort of sociological experiment that we can screw around with in the hopes everything comes out ok. They can do that when they are older.
The real world is a horrible, nasty, dirty place. It has its good points but I am not going to let my kids be part of someone's project in the hopes of saving the world. Their well being comes first. If we can change the world safely for children, great. Otherwise let us grownups hash it out and pass it on.
It really took moving out of a liberal city to see how deeply rooted bigotry and hatred can be. I feel foolish for being so idealistic, instead of realistic. I learned to roll up my sleeves, instead of standing on a soapbox. It's not fun and I don't get to show off so much, but I'd like to think some of it helps.
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What makes you think an all-female locker room is better? That was my question. Why are men dangerous and women safe? And doesn't spreading that view only encourage the problems you're trying to prevent? It teaches men that men are expected to be predators, and it teaches women that they should live in fear.
Yes, I think some cultures and morals are inferior. I think, for example, that medically unnecessary circumcision of males or females as infants is inferior to not mutilating the genitals of people unable to consent. I think forcing someone into a role that doesn't fit them is wrong. And I think there are much, much better solutions than making someone whose mind and body don't match change in a sex-segregated locker room where they feel they don't fit.
And I think it's the people who insist on maintaining such things that cause the attitudes that cause the trauma when people change things. The sooner we get people used to it, the sooner it won't be traumatic.
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Don't people realize that all the objections are based on how other people might react? Whenever that is the case, that means that other people should learn to act better, because clearly there is nothing inherently wrong with it.
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and they separated the sexes to do a one or two day talk on puberty, which I think was a mistake as they only told us females what happens to females, and I think it'd be good to know, in general, what is going on with your agemates.
*giggles*
In the 5th grade, they sort of did this, giving out sex-specific pamphlets - but after we read ours, we all traded anyway.
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There's a lot of social evolution needed by the entire human race.
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The arguments made on why boys shouldn't wear dresses or whatnot is that other people might comment or even attack them. And if other people are doing so in negative ways, then they are bad people. People shouldn't be bad people. If you don't like the way other people live their lives - tough. You get to choose all sorts of things about how you live yours. And if other people don't like what you choose - tough. Your life, your call. Their life, their call.
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They separated us in 5th grade and told us what happened to us; then again in 6th grade to tell us what happened to the boys; then from 7th grade on (when you really got into the stuff like sex and contraception and STDs and all that) it was always mixed.
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And blocking the hormones, I don't agree with that either.
But if there is a safe way for kids to explore their gender issues so they can come to terms one way or the other, I am all for it. And it's not my own prejudices here that are speaking as much as knowing how mean other kids are. Not just to the kid exploring, but to their siblings, too. Remember, one of the reasons my daughter got assaulted on the school bus was because she has a retarded brother. (She got punished for this crap. AGAIN. Just got the letter from the transportation company. Grr.)
Well at least in NYC you have one high school that has no problems with trans students. :)
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Personally, I wasn't generally comfortable changing in front of others and often chose to change in the bathroom. I'd be more in favor of giving more kids the option of changing privately, even though I support people being less self-conscious physically, it's hard to put that burden on kids.
I'd also support not having to change for gym, as often their assumptions are faulty. Although I often wore gym-appropriate clothes all day on gym days just so I wouldn't have to change.
I'm sorry your daughter got assaulted. I hope measures were taken against those who did it. Assaulting people is simply not acceptable. And kids shouldn't have to curb their actions for fear of physical violence. Even though in her case there was clearly nothing she could do, so it's not entirely an example of that, but still - people need to learn that such behavior is simply not acceptable.
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My daughter's locker room, the poor thing, even has a window to the female coaches/gym teachers office. It's supposed to be for their protection but it also rattled my daughter a lot.
Maybe it is a 'silly cultural thing' but that just shows you have no respect for other cultures, and the children who live like that. That's sad. Everyone screams about tolerance but only if it is tolerance for their ideals.
I guess they should just 'get over it'. Dismissive and disrespectful, I think.
And knowing the safety issues for women and girls out there? I would like to know that they have at least an option for segregated rooms.
Mind you I've been in mixed sex locker rooms in Germany, that was ok, plus it had stalls. But I wouldn't want to force that on anyone. Not in this culture, and not on children. They deserve protection.
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you're right, I have no real sensitivity to someone's notion that they are "unsafe" because someone with a penis is minding her own business changing for gym. All that kid is trying to do is live her life as normally as possible. There is no natural reason men attack women...any risk is purely a result of cultural ideals and socialization practices, and those can't change unless we try to do something about it. Regardless, I don't think you need to worry about that sort of thing on a grade-school level, especially if the child in question believes she is a girl and wants to change with the other girls...it's worse in the long run to deny that and make a girl who is incredibly uncomfortable at most times change with the boys, then to force some other girls to be more understanding and actually learn something about someone else's life and the differences between people.
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Maybe because I have a young daughter now going through this, and I have a good memory for certain things, that I can remember the feelings at the time, how hard it was as it is...and have talked with friend and even had recent talks about such things (when choosing a gym, what was and was not ok, locker-room wise). I can't be dismissive of the feelings of so many people.
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The important thing to remember is that in this school, these people would be her classmates-some her friends. They would know her, and hopefully by the time they're changing for gym(we didn't until 5th grade) they would know how she felt and why she was in their locker room, not the boys'. If we teach our children to understand situations like these, they won't be threatening to them.
I know it seems contradictory for me to say that men are not inherently more violent and then turn around and say that the girl is at risk in the boys' room...but she is. That's entirely a result of culture and socialization though, not innate violence. I'd rather see a few girls have to get used to the idea of something innocuous than have one girl beaten up when her life is going to be hard enough as it is.
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I'm trying to be realistic here, going by what I see in the world and what I have known. And you know what? You call it cultural and stupid. Sorry you find my culture and morals stupid. That's really not fair to call names because you have a more liberal view of sexuality than I do. Why don;t you just call me an uptight prude whilst you are at it? And then I think of the number of girls who have been sexually assaulted, and how they have to confront this even more and it really rubs me the wrong way. But hey, for the sake of political correctness, let's force a group of people to be uncomfortable and maybe even traumatized (not unusual) for one person. Great idea. You can't shove your morals down someone's throat and expect them to just be all happy about it. The hypersexuality of kids today is bad enough, and they are losing their innocence at a younger and younger age. I don't think this is a good thing, at all. I don't want them to think sex is dirty but I don't want the world of in your face sexuality either.
Kids DO curb actions for fear of violence. Every single day. Do you have an answer for it? Because damned if I do and I have been fighting this for a while now. For now, we have to understand that this happens and until it can be safe, we have to make sure children are safe. They are not some sort of sociological experiment that we can screw around with in the hopes everything comes out ok. They can do that when they are older.
The real world is a horrible, nasty, dirty place. It has its good points but I am not going to let my kids be part of someone's project in the hopes of saving the world. Their well being comes first. If we can change the world safely for children, great. Otherwise let us grownups hash it out and pass it on.
It really took moving out of a liberal city to see how deeply rooted bigotry and hatred can be. I feel foolish for being so idealistic, instead of realistic. I learned to roll up my sleeves, instead of standing on a soapbox. It's not fun and I don't get to show off so much, but I'd like to think some of it helps.
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What makes you think an all-female locker room is better? That was my question. Why are men dangerous and women safe? And doesn't spreading that view only encourage the problems you're trying to prevent? It teaches men that men are expected to be predators, and it teaches women that they should live in fear.
Yes, I think some cultures and morals are inferior. I think, for example, that medically unnecessary circumcision of males or females as infants is inferior to not mutilating the genitals of people unable to consent. I think forcing someone into a role that doesn't fit them is wrong. And I think there are much, much better solutions than making someone whose mind and body don't match change in a sex-segregated locker room where they feel they don't fit.
And I think it's the people who insist on maintaining such things that cause the attitudes that cause the trauma when people change things. The sooner we get people used to it, the sooner it won't be traumatic.
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Don't people realize that all the objections are based on how other people might react? Whenever that is the case, that means that other people should learn to act better, because clearly there is nothing inherently wrong with it.
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and they separated the sexes to do a one or two day talk on puberty, which I think was a mistake as they only told us females what happens to females, and I think it'd be good to know, in general, what is going on with your agemates.
*giggles*
In the 5th grade, they sort of did this, giving out sex-specific pamphlets - but after we read ours, we all traded anyway.
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There's a lot of social evolution needed by the entire human race.
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The arguments made on why boys shouldn't wear dresses or whatnot is that other people might comment or even attack them. And if other people are doing so in negative ways, then they are bad people. People shouldn't be bad people. If you don't like the way other people live their lives - tough. You get to choose all sorts of things about how you live yours. And if other people don't like what you choose - tough. Your life, your call. Their life, their call.
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They separated us in 5th grade and told us what happened to us; then again in 6th grade to tell us what happened to the boys; then from 7th grade on (when you really got into the stuff like sex and contraception and STDs and all that) it was always mixed.
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