My view is this.

If you want to have your penis cut off and tucked inside to become some semblance of a women, go ahead. If you want to take hormones so your clitoris becomes a small penis and you want to call yourself man, who cares.

DO NOT EXPECT ME TO PAY FOR IT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM. It is YOUR choice, and you do not need to announce it to me as though I even care.

Ohh I am transgender, or I am Gay or I am straight, SO FREEKING WHAT!!!. Do your damn job, keep the place you stick your genitals to yourself and do something productive, i.e. add some value.

As a pediatrician and child abuse doctor I would not hesitate to hotline this... It is horrible what they are doing from a developmental aspect and socially. Political correctness be damned...

A lot of these transgender cases can be the result of being born the opposite gender to what one or both of one's parents wanted. Another source is when one or both parents have a hatred for the baby's gender. A lot of these cases would clear up with some in-depth, preferably Jung-inspired, counselling, not the pissy superficial CBT shit that seems to be all the rage today.

When she was five, our daughter was enrolled in a Montessori school run by Christians. I do not know what happened in school that day, but she must have had a hard time. Anyway, on the way home, she said, "I wish I was dead." Why?, I asked. "So I could be in heaven with Jesus." I did not grant her wish.

I do believe that gender cues are more subtle than some here seem to realize, and I accept that if a child is persistently happier in a different role, then that would be integral to their personhood. However, a chance comment by a child is not the basis for drastic action.

I do point out that a boy dressing up like a girl is more strongly disapproved of than a girl being boyish. That's cute. It reflects the male domination in our society, that men are a standard for women to live up to. We have not come close to sociological equality. Equality is an issue when a woman wants to be a firefighter or a jet pilot. Equality is not a problem when a man wants to be a chef or a tailor. Men hold a status that can be challenged. Women do not.

My wife once said that sometimes in meetings, she views people as brains on spinal columns, like seahorses. It may come to that, but we have a long way to go…

Forcing transgenderism on a child is both physical and mental abuse. Any parent who does that to their child should be punished most severely. On the other hand, you wanna change your gender? Be my gues but don't expect me to pay for it.

Remember Rand's own essay on the molding of children to fit a ruling agenda? "The Comprachicos." The child buyers.

I mean no offense to transgender people, but I do not understand it. It seems like boys could do have traditionally female hair and clothing style without changing their names. Saying they have to officially change gender gives too much importance to gender. Gender is just the cultural things surrounding being male/female. We give gender too much power if we have to assert someone as a girl because he like to do stereo-typically female things.

I categorically reject what the author says about gender roles being important. I say they should be abolished. Just treat people equally. Don't look at their group. If they're into things normally associated with the opposite gender, who cares. Contrary to what the author says, following gender roles has not led to human greatness. Human greatness comes from allowing individuals to express their own unique attributes without regard to group membership.

I cry bullshit. You cannot make someone transgender or unmake that state if they are transgender. A is A. Gender is not so simple as some wish it was. Sorry about that. But reality is what it is.

And when he's not accepted by everyone, the child commits suicide, which is blamed on Society, rather than his parents...go figure.

Transgenderism is a serious mental disorder (see the DSM for details), projecting it on a little boys may be a greater mental disorder (Munchausen by proxy ?). Besides, the boy protests he is a boy, which shows the complete inanity of his parents' charade.
It is, definitely, child abuse.

Thanks for dredging up the memory of witnessing the horror of a movie called Sleepaway Camp.

The only thing worse than that movie was the fact they made sequels.

While I agree with your assessment of the original story, I question the mindset of the blogger you linked to. He wrote: "It’s a good thing I was a child of the 80’s. While I certainly have my disagreements with how my parents handled a lot of things in my childhood and beyond, this was one of their better decisions. Boys need to be taught by their fathers how to be men. Girls need to be taught by their mothers how to be women. My father wasn’t the best of role models, but he taught me to work, he taught me that a man sometimes had to fight, he taught me that a man often had to put his emotions aside and do what was necessary."

(1) The challenges to gender roles are not post-millennial inventions. Simone de Beauvoir THE SECOND SEX (1949). Betty Friedan THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE (1963). MS. MAGAZINE (1971). This has been a long time coming.

(1A) It parallels the civil rights movement in the USA, and properly so. (It is deeply meaningful that Major League Baseball was integrated before Brown v. Board.) Some see the present course as decadent but to me, it is an Age of Reason built upon a Renaissance. The post-industrial society and information era were constructed on the foundation of 19th century capitalism. (Yes, I know about the Federal Reserve and the Income Tax, just as after the Renaissance, we had intervening wars of religion, before the Enlightenment.)

(2) What does it mean to be a "man" or a "woman"? Those roles are socially constructed, and they changed over time and place. As I pointed out before Karl Marx wrung his hands over the way capitalism took women out of the home. Isaac Asimov called the typewriter the greatest liberator in history. I point out that the first telephone operators were boys, but women replaced them for all the right reasons. I have written here also about women telegraphers. Is there any reason that a man cannot stay home and raise the kids while the wife who earns more works outside the home?

(3) More deeply, consider that blogger Christopher Cantwell believes that being a man means stifling his emotions. In the first place, that repression is a blanking out, a refusal to identify reality. Your emotions are the sum total expressions of your lifelong ideas. Negate them and you deny yourself -- which many men do -- with disastrous psychological consequences.

(3A) Alternately, I grant that not letting your emotions run away with you is often a good path. Heroism is overcoming your fears. Do women not get to enjoy the same strength of character? Would she not be a "real woman". History is replete with women who showed courage on the battlefield - and who were no less wives and mothers.

(3B) Is womanhood then synonymous with wifehood and motherhood? Must a man be a husband and father to be a man? These questions are over 50 years old. Mostly, they have been answered by two generations who reject the Victorian role models.

(4) Those role models were eroded by capitalism. The machine age removed the advantage of physical strength and delivered the advantage to intelligence. Since women are statistically more intelligent than men, it follows that a truly free society would be a mirror image of ours, with women in marginal control of most things and men marginally in supportive roles, a world of Dagny Taggarts and Eddie Willerses.

(5) A couple of months ago, I read through 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel was flawed on several grounds, but I accept his sociological assumption that gender and sex would be fluid. By analogy, you could not go back to 1715 and explain America today as a land without five grades of nobility and no royal house. … A land not just with no national church, but one where 20% of the people express little or no religious affiliation. … A land where most people spend many hours each day writing letters to each other…

The state should certainly not pay for transgenderism. But the rest of this piece is Luddite BS, and we've heard it before.

As for the decision being made by a child -- I would not go along with doing the surgery until the subject is an adult and makes his/her own choice. But just dressing and living as the new identity is harmless, and it's stupid to call it child abuse.

Perhaps there are some people born into the wrong
sex; it might have something to do with hormones,
or body chemistry. I don't know. But that decision
should not be made by a child. A sex change oper-
ation should not be done until the person is an a-
dult, and decides. And such a person should
not be allowed to go into the bathroom of the
other sex, (other than as a janitor or plumber,
etc.) until such operation has been performed.

I think it's ridiculous to let a 3 year old make that sort of a life changing decision. I let my kids try on my dresses, and make up, but quickly remind them that we're just playing and that they are boys and should be very proud of who they are. I also have let them play with dolls at other's homes. But at the end of the day my children know which restroom stick figure most closely resembles them. If at an older age they decide to change that, more power to them. But I will teach them about their God given body until that day. Just my opinion.

What a bizarre article. I agree with CircuitGuy - if a child wants to have an identity outside of some arbitrary pigeonhole...that is just fine.

I should not have to argue on this list that it is OK to sidestep societies dictates and create your own definitions.

Jan

Flamer. -1
:)