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.
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.
It seems very odd to have any notion of real gender issues until you've at least gone through puberty and have actually developed the sexual characteristics of your biological sex.
I'm admittedly skeptical about a 9 year old being trans.
I'm very much inclined to consider anecdotes like this as simply hindsight and confirmation bias.
They most likely had a slight suspicion, which has been amplified in their memory. They may also have had similar suspicions about other children, which have been forgotten after they came to nothing.
At 5, one of my kids loved to flirt with the girls. My other son played with a girl who was a tomboy because they liked rough and tumble and both gave as good as they got.
There are so many ways that young kids can identify strong characteristics, even at 5 years old. I can't guarantee they won't change (although my kids haven't changed as far as I can recall).
The first incident I remember (while not gender related) was my son when he was 6 months old. He HATED scratchy fabric from the scarf from a bear. We had to cut the scarf and the tag off this bear. Over a decade later, he still has that same fussiness with fabrics. This tells me that some preferences are there from a very young age.
I could very well imagine some kids feeling at odds with their birth gender from a very young age.
> much less what gender she wants to be the rest of her life
But why are you assuming it's necessarily the rest of the child's life?
The whole point of the current legal and medical structure using hormone blockers is to delay actually-permanent decisions to the point where (a) the child is legally competent to make a life decision like that and (b) the child has shown to the satisfaction of parents and medical professionals that they won't regret the decision.
> My 5 year old can decide what her favorite color is,
> much less what gender she wants to be the rest of her
> life.
I think you may be confusing gender dysphoria with people waking up one day and thinking "Heck, it'd be kinda cool to be another gender!", rather than a pervasive and persistent deeply held belief that their body is wrong.
>rather than a pervasive and persistent deeply held belief that their body is wrong.
There have been cases of children and young teenagers who have such beliefs, and then change their minds when they're adults. This may not be the norm, but I think it's important that children and teenagers don't undergo irreversible transition treatment. Thankfully, I believe there are many reversible treatments, like puberty blockers.
Why would you compare a decision on a favourite colour to an innate feeling surrounding identity? It feels like you didn't really think about this at all.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
I find the subject fascinating (and, FWIW, extremely personally relevant). But I didn't find this article at all satisfying; too much is anecdote, the Guardian is too far from neutral (and I say that as a reader and fan of a lot of their work), and parts of it ring false in terms of my own experience (contrast e.g. e.g. Wandering Son (Hōrō Musuko), which felt very true-to-life for me - though I guess it's possible things have changed in the years since I was a schoolchild). To satisfy intellectual curiosity requires a level of intellectual honesty that I don't think is here.
This is a perceptive comment that is a fine addition to the thread. You could make it even better by expanding on what parts of the article ring false in your experience. But an article having bias or other weaknesses isn't enough to convict it of offtopicness, the capital offense of articles. Many on-topic articles have that degree of weakness, especially when the topic is poorly understood.
Nor would I call anecdote a weakness. Anecdotes are legitimate, fascinating, and indispensable to good conversation. Half if not more of the best material on HN is anecdotes. That's how communities function, so it's deeply ok.
Then conversely, what is it that makes a political or gossip article off-topic? Many such articles are just as fascinating, just as curiosity-satisfying, as this one. (To my mind objectivity and generality is what separates intellectual curiosity from the regular kind; if not that, then what?)
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Sex/gender together cover, as I see it, three main areas; all of which are complicated, but misery of which haven't been recognized as such (or even recognized at all) until fairly recently.
The first is biological (usually called "sex"), chromosomes and various traits. This is often percieved as being strictly binary, but it's not: the genetic traits and other features typical of one sex or the other don't always spread together, and often the most superficially obvious ones don't match the ones that have broader impact. So that's complicated in ways that are often not recognized.
Then there is socially ascribed roles (this is ones of the things usually labeled "gender"); these are the expectations put on someone by society related to masculinity or femininity.
The there is one's own perception of one's own masculinity or femininity (this is sometimes also referred to as "gender", but often, and more clearly, "gender identity").
This is complicated, because it shaped by lots of things, including social gender stereotypes, and whether they align our conflict with ones current socially ascribed gender.
'Gender' does not have consistent usage in the English language, aside from the grammar sense of masculine/feminine words.
Aside from that, it's sometimes used to describe a performed social role, or more broadly anything that communicates "masculine" or "feminine". Sometimes it's used to describe an objective, distinct axis of male/female from the "parts and chromosomes". Sometimes it's used as a synonym for "sex", either out of puritanism or to stop people from answering "yes, please". Some assert that applying "gender" to people or any non-grammar usage is an error.
Just to make things more complicated, large groups of people have attached political significance to one or another of these definitions and assert that the others are Wrong and/or Ignorant.
It's a mess of recent vintage that apparently only English speakers have to suffer from.
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.
You may be interested in a book titled The medical invention of Sex. One wonders just how much this is a social notion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is interesting. Given the drastic and irreversible nature of surgical gender reassignment, if gender identity is not fixed then we need to be aware of this. Does anyone have any idea what proportion of people who feel they are the wrong gender change their mind over time?
You know, I haven't seen any good evidence that transitioning causes high rates of suicide or depression. I'd be very surprised if suicidal inclinations aren't present in people that go for physical alteration to a much higher degree. The reason is, if you're happy, there's no need to take such a risky course of action. If you're unhappy, this is one way you might try to fix things. Then you're still unhappy, and you've run out of options.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I felt a level of jealousy in school because of the freedom boys had (ex. girls were made to stay indoors to learn where babies came from, whereas boys were sent out to play) but never wished for a "winky".
I have also loathed pink from childhood and fashion crap. I see a little girl's room looking like a Peptobismal explosion and I want to take a flame thrower to it. And anything sparkly. And anything encrusted with fake gems. And anything cutsy really.
I see these assemblages of abhorrent things being passed off as gender "girl" and it's very hard to separate my loathing for cutsy pink crap, and the transgirl wearing the cutsy pink crap. It may come off as transphobia, but I sort of hate non-trans women wearing crap like that too.
55 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadMy 5 year old can decide what her favorite color is, much less what gender she wants to be the rest of her life.
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.
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.
I'm admittedly skeptical about a 9 year old being trans.
They most likely had a slight suspicion, which has been amplified in their memory. They may also have had similar suspicions about other children, which have been forgotten after they came to nothing.
There are so many ways that young kids can identify strong characteristics, even at 5 years old. I can't guarantee they won't change (although my kids haven't changed as far as I can recall).
The first incident I remember (while not gender related) was my son when he was 6 months old. He HATED scratchy fabric from the scarf from a bear. We had to cut the scarf and the tag off this bear. Over a decade later, he still has that same fussiness with fabrics. This tells me that some preferences are there from a very young age.
I could very well imagine some kids feeling at odds with their birth gender from a very young age.
And my 5-year-old used to like raw lemons. This tells me some preferences change from a very young age. What is your point?
But why are you assuming it's necessarily the rest of the child's life?
The whole point of the current legal and medical structure using hormone blockers is to delay actually-permanent decisions to the point where (a) the child is legally competent to make a life decision like that and (b) the child has shown to the satisfaction of parents and medical professionals that they won't regret the decision.
There have been cases of children and young teenagers who have such beliefs, and then change their minds when they're adults. This may not be the norm, but I think it's important that children and teenagers don't undergo irreversible transition treatment. Thankfully, I believe there are many reversible treatments, like puberty blockers.
Since the topic is controversial, please keep this thread a thoughtful one.
Edit: thank you all for keeping this thread a thoughtful one.
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.
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.
(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)
Nor would I call anecdote a weakness. Anecdotes are legitimate, fascinating, and indispensable to good conversation. Half if not more of the best material on HN is anecdotes. That's how communities function, so it's deeply ok.
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.
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.
"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"?
Should people get tattoos if they are confident now that they should?
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?
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.
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.
The first is biological (usually called "sex"), chromosomes and various traits. This is often percieved as being strictly binary, but it's not: the genetic traits and other features typical of one sex or the other don't always spread together, and often the most superficially obvious ones don't match the ones that have broader impact. So that's complicated in ways that are often not recognized.
Then there is socially ascribed roles (this is ones of the things usually labeled "gender"); these are the expectations put on someone by society related to masculinity or femininity.
The there is one's own perception of one's own masculinity or femininity (this is sometimes also referred to as "gender", but often, and more clearly, "gender identity").
This is complicated, because it shaped by lots of things, including social gender stereotypes, and whether they align our conflict with ones current socially ascribed gender.
Aside from that, it's sometimes used to describe a performed social role, or more broadly anything that communicates "masculine" or "feminine". Sometimes it's used to describe an objective, distinct axis of male/female from the "parts and chromosomes". Sometimes it's used as a synonym for "sex", either out of puritanism or to stop people from answering "yes, please". Some assert that applying "gender" to people or any non-grammar usage is an error.
Just to make things more complicated, large groups of people have attached political significance to one or another of these definitions and assert that the others are Wrong and/or Ignorant.
It's a mess of recent vintage that apparently only English speakers have to suffer from.
You may be interested in a book titled The medical invention of Sex. One wonders just how much this is a social notion.
I think more attention to it as a subject of serious research could help us all a lot.
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.
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.
You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to...
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
[2] http://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html
I couldn't read past this. No... he doesn't remember that.
We all remember moments from our early lives that seem odd.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am none too keen seeing young girls wearing heavy make up. Children should be able to be children and not little adults.
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.
I felt a level of jealousy in school because of the freedom boys had (ex. girls were made to stay indoors to learn where babies came from, whereas boys were sent out to play) but never wished for a "winky".
I have also loathed pink from childhood and fashion crap. I see a little girl's room looking like a Peptobismal explosion and I want to take a flame thrower to it. And anything sparkly. And anything encrusted with fake gems. And anything cutsy really.
I see these assemblages of abhorrent things being passed off as gender "girl" and it's very hard to separate my loathing for cutsy pink crap, and the transgirl wearing the cutsy pink crap. It may come off as transphobia, but I sort of hate non-trans women wearing crap like that too.