It’s called a phase if it goes away at some point. If that phase seems to last more than a couple years, then the next time you buy school cloths for the kid, you should get them the kind they want. Even if it’s skirts and dresses.

Many times exploring our gender role IS a phase, don’t get me wrong. But you can’t just go telling kids, “Sorry, you explored and made the wrong decision. Wait till you’re grown up.”

As for myself, I was secretly crossdressing in elementary school and I was suicidally depressed. I’m a 26 year old married woman now… but I attempted suicide 3 times in my teens. Those of us who grew up trans would err on the side of letting the child dress as they please.

As part of a diversity week at my school we had a transgendered person in who used to be a girl and is now a boy. He claims to have known as a three year old girl that he was actually a boy.

And I don’t blame you. The media can’t capture the experience of parenting these children, and they studiously avoid a whole segment of gender variant children who are not identifying as ‘born in the wrong body.’

But as the parent of gender variant nine year old, I would suggest that if you haven’t listened and watched one of these children grow, for years, and years and years and years, you aren’t qualified to have a strong opinion on the matter.

Your queasiness is your own. Own it yourself, and leave the ‘trans’ kids out of it. Trans makes you queasy. It scares you.

I understand, because it sure scares the shit out of me.

We have two sons. One is gender normative. One isn’t. The gender variant child, from the moment he moved his hand, from the moment he spoke his first word, has been screaming gender variance, every minute of every day for nine solid years.

I have stacks, and stacks of drawings–literally, we have bins, of thousands upon thousands of drawings–of girls. All girls, Everyone one a girl icon. A trillion variations of the womens room door symbol. Every waking moment of every day spent in an attempt to communicate something about gender identity. A child that scours the landscape for anything girl. As a toddler he was a magnet of hair ties, lipsticks, glitter. He found them on the street as we walked along.

Children with GID this extreme have an interesting reaction to the puberty you gleefully look forward to for Jazz.

They often commit suicide. I’m sorry if this subject makes you feel queasy. Imagine your child committing suicide, and we can talk about queasy really is.

There is a real controversy here, which the mainstream media is doing a bad job of covering. Are these kids really just ‘pre-gay’ children (which many professionals believe) or are they genuinely transgender? how do you tell? Who decides? What if we make a mistake?

By the time hormonal intervention may be necessary for these children, many will have be struggling for ten solid years with these issues. Parents have binders of photographs, from age 2 or 3 up.

My own son isn’t dysphoric; he accepts his body at thsi moment and he accepts male pronouns. He looks like a girl, moves like a girl, is never mistaken for male. We’re not going to go there, give him a girl name and pronouns, unless he makes us, unless he pushes us there. No parent wants to sterilize their children, lose the possiblity of every having grandchildren, marginalize and sign their child up to be a member of the most despised minority on earth.

They do it because the only option they see to embracing thier kids as they are is suicide and death.

The one thing I do know is that no parent goes to this place willingly, on a lark, as you seem to think. We don’t set up the freak show tent on a whim. Parents see suicidal children, basket cases, transformed from tiny tortured little demons into relatively happy, productive, normally developing children, when they allow their children to express their gender.

It’s not science; yet. it’s a collection of anecdotes. But so far the data on early transition from Holland looks good. There have been, to date, in the few studies that look at outcomes five years out, no regrets.

What you need to ask yourself, is how many children are you willing to see commit suicide, to save you the experience of watching the freakshow?

The media is trying to do a good thing. They simplify, they’re maudlin, they lose nuance, they revel in the controversy, there’s an ugliness there, but underneath this there is a very real phenomena. And it is to a degree, new.

Our willingness to tolerate a gay outcome has led to the discovery of these feelings in children that we don’t understand, that may have always been there, or they may be emerging now for other reasons.

Our environment is currently awash in endocrine disruptors (google it youself.) We may be facing an epidemic of this down the road.

Although I understand that some of these news programs may go about it the wrong way, I appreciate the fact that they bring light to such a sensitive issue.

I suggest you strongly research the subject, you may have more sympathy for it than you think