Reference to Quora - by Dansby Parker - Should trans kids be taken seriously

 Should very young trans children be taken seriously?

- by Dansby Parker (Graphic Designer)  

Published in 2017

Kids don’t just “roll with” the gender their parents assign them. We know this from multiple cases of children who were born intersex and raised as the wrong gender. Have you ever heard of the case of David Reimer? His penis was badly damaged during a surgical procedure at 6 months of age. His parents and doctors decided it would be easier to raise him as a girl than to raise him as a boy having to deal with reconstruction and the possibility of never having a normal sex life. So his male parts were removed and they changed his name to Brenda.

This happened in the 60s and 70s. Back then they didn’t know much about gender and the psychologist who was treating David thought that kids would just conform to whatever gender they were assigned and be happy that way if they never knew the difference. What we learned from this case and others is that is not true. Despite surgery and hormones, David never felt like a girl. At age 14 his parents told him the truth. At age 38, he committed suicide.

Children who are transgender aren’t just playing a character. The difference will be obvious to any halfway attentive parent. Transgender children insist they are the gender they are 24/7. It’s not a part-time thing, a game or a character. They feel great distress if they can’t express their proper gender identity and when they are forced into their assigned gender roles.

You also have to remember that transitioning pre-puberty is just a social transition. It’s only clothing, hairstyles, first names and pronouns. This is nothing permanent. The hormone blockers given at puberty are not permanent either. And as we know from decades of case studies, it will be obvious if a child is unhappy with their gender identity. It causes great distress to them whether their current identity is the one they were born with or one that was assigned by a parent or doctor.

Children cannot get surgeries or in most cases added hormones until they reach the age of majority (16–18 depending on the country). Most doctors will not do any surgeries even at that age. It takes most trans people years of counseling before doctors will do surgeries. Even procedures like breast augmentation/reduction that cis people get with little to no counseling all the time are much harder for trans people to procure. Estrogen (in birth control pills) and spironolactone (androgen blocker) are prescribed for cis women all the time with little question, but for trans women it’s much harder to get a prescription for the same things.

With all these barriers in place, it’s highly unlikely that a child would be allowed to make any permanent transition no matter how adamant the parents are. This actually does happen to intersex children all the time, so you should probably worry more about them. Doctors are pretty hesitant to change “normal” genitalia and secondary sex characteristics, but if they are perceived as “abnormal” or “indeterminate” for some reason doctors and parents think they are doing the right thing by flipping a coin and determining a child’s future with no input from the child.