via Advocate, by Diane Ehrensaft
During the past few months, the media has been replete with accounts of both children and adults who do not fit neatly into conventional gender roles: a Canadian baby, Storm, whose parents kept the baby’s gender secret; the child of a prominent celebrity, Chaz Bono, who attracted controversy as a trangender man on primetime television; and two children, Tammy and Mario, who announced to their parents that they were not their biological gender and began living as they wanted to be.
As a developmental psychologist who spends my days working with both children and young adults who are transgender, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender queer, and more, none of these stories has been a surprise to me.
They simply reinforce my observation, made in my book Gender Born, Gender Made, that it is increasingly difficult to define gender as a strict biological binary.
What took me more by surprise was the ensuing tsunami of hostile, antagonistic, and hateful responses toward both these individuals and, in the children’s cases, their parents.
In response to Bono’s casting on Dancing With the Stars, Dr. Keith Ablow, psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-team, offered these words of wisdom: "The last thing vulnerable children and adolescents need, as they wrestle with the normal process of establishing their identities, is to watch a captive crowd in a studio audience applaud on cue for someone whose search for an identity culminated with the removal of her breasts, the injection of steroids.”
For this comment, Albow received 33,000 Facebook recommends. In the eyes of thousands of Americans, it is as though transgender people are a disease that could contaminate and pervert our “normal” children.
Read the rest
During the past few months, the media has been replete with accounts of both children and adults who do not fit neatly into conventional gender roles: a Canadian baby, Storm, whose parents kept the baby’s gender secret; the child of a prominent celebrity, Chaz Bono, who attracted controversy as a trangender man on primetime television; and two children, Tammy and Mario, who announced to their parents that they were not their biological gender and began living as they wanted to be. As a developmental psychologist who spends my days working with both children and young adults who are transgender, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender queer, and more, none of these stories has been a surprise to me.
They simply reinforce my observation, made in my book Gender Born, Gender Made, that it is increasingly difficult to define gender as a strict biological binary.
What took me more by surprise was the ensuing tsunami of hostile, antagonistic, and hateful responses toward both these individuals and, in the children’s cases, their parents.
In response to Bono’s casting on Dancing With the Stars, Dr. Keith Ablow, psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-team, offered these words of wisdom: "The last thing vulnerable children and adolescents need, as they wrestle with the normal process of establishing their identities, is to watch a captive crowd in a studio audience applaud on cue for someone whose search for an identity culminated with the removal of her breasts, the injection of steroids.”
For this comment, Albow received 33,000 Facebook recommends. In the eyes of thousands of Americans, it is as though transgender people are a disease that could contaminate and pervert our “normal” children.
Read the rest
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