LG2, in partnership with Gender Creative Kids Canada, spent two years creating Sam, a Russian doll that tells the story of a transgender child’s life– from the early stages of gender questioning, to the sometimes difficult teenage years.
CTV News present the project here.
LG2 has more about the doll here.
Florence Ashley and Alexandre Baril look at a new term that has appeared in the transgender debate: “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”. There is no such thing. The term is made up by people who feel a need to invalidate transgender people, and not by scientists who know anything about the issue.
Gender-affirmative therapy’s motto is: “Follow the child.” If that means following them to social transition and, in due time, medical transition, then so be it. But only if that’s what they truly want.
Transgender children are in good hands. Therapists aren’t acting hastily in ignorance of scientific evidence. On the contrary, their approach is one that’s been built over decades of research and of following trans children.
The unfounded idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a poor attempt at manufacturing a new moral panic — based on the same old idea of “contagion” — over children who couldn’t be in safer hands.
Cristan Williams writes:
//Having learned that the mainstream publication The Atlantic has paid professional anti-trans concern troll Jesse Singal to write about trans issues, I want to address his well-worn arguments before he can make them. To do so, I will assert and then substantiate a few things:
Megyn Kelly of TODAY presents the story about Chazzie Grosshandler.
When she was in fourth-grade, she summed up the courage to tell her parents that she was not a boy, as she was designated at birth, but a girl.
My wife and I watched a wonderful Japanese movie yesterday, called Close-knit. It is touring film festivals world wide at the moment, which was how we found out about it.
Close-knit (Karera ga honki de amu toki wa) is a heartwarming movie. It does not in any way hide the pain and suffering transgender (and gay) people go through, but at the same time it shows us that nearly anything is possible, if there is love.
Nikkei Asian Review writes that the film was inspired by a story in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper of a Japanese mother whose tenderness toward her transgender teenager led her to knit a pair of breasts for her kid to use before gender reassignment. Director Naoko] Ogigami was struck by the woman’s gentle acceptance of her child and she expanded the story to include what she thought could have happened to the young trans kid after she transitioned.
National Geographic Magazine Puts Young Transgender Girl On Cover
Logo reports that the January 2017 issue of National Geographic, focusing on “the gender revolution,” features a 9-year-old transgender girl, believed to be the first trans person on the 128-year-old publication’s cover (or at least one version of the cover).
See also: National Geographic TV documentary with Katie Couric looks at transgender lives
This has been my most popular tumblr post ever. To all you transgender kids and teenagers out there: A lot of adults care about you and want to help. Here are a few comments that prove my point:
(via crossdreamers)
The Washington Post has an amazing story this week about Zephyrus Todd, who – under the name of Sylvia – amazed America as a natural science child prodigy.
It started with a web show on making robots. It got very popular and soon Todd was invited to the White House to meet the president. There were science fairs, interviews and TV appearances.
But “Super Awesome Sylvia” wasn’t really a Sylvia.
He finally came out to his family in the end, and was accepted as who he was.
“Do you want to just shut it down?” [his father] James asked Zeph one day. He meant the show, and Super Awesome Sylvia. To erase and move past that whole chunk of a life.
But Zeph didn’t want that.
“I was this girl role model at one point,” he said. “I didn’t want it to just end.”
So he decided to keep Sylvia alive, as art — a drawing, a brainy girl character who both is him and is not.
Zeph drew her into a comic strip, explaining his transition. He sends it to people who still write to him, asking Sylvia to make an appearance.
Now, you may be tempted to see this as an affirmation of gender stereotypes. To be a natural science geek you have to be a boy.
What I found especially interesting about this article was therefore that Zephyrus isn’t really so much into the natural sciences.
His love of robots also points in a more artistic direction. He created the WaterColorBot, a collaborative project from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and him — a friendly art robot that moves a paint brush to paint your digital artwork onto paper, using a set of watercolor paints.
When Zephyrus painted his pink girl’s room blue that was a strong symbolic act, but boys and girls are not wired for art and science respectively. Girls and boys, trans or non-transgender, may be wired for feeling and living as a girl or a boy (or something in between), but not for specific interests or abilities.
Comic by Zephyrus Todd.
The current attacks of transphobia are not about facts. Not really. They may find a story about a gender variant kid or adult detransitioning and make it that the main part of their narrative. The story might be true, but the message isn’t.
The fact is that nearly all transgender people who transition, legally and/or physically, thrive after they come out. Given the complexity of human life, and the enormous pressure to conform, the fact that some make “mistakes” is to be expected. Moreover, many of the kids included in the studies the transphobes refer to were never transgender in the first place.
Thinkprogress writes:
Kristina Olson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington, is pioneering a new wave of research about transgender kids that aims to avoid these pitfalls, and as such, she’s also been one of the most outspoken critics of the conclusions drawn from desistance studies. In a 2016 critique published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, she explained succinctly, “[C]lose inspection of these studies suggests that most children in these studies were not transgender to begin with.”
For example, in two of the studies, “[w]hen directly asked what their gender is, more than 90% of children with GID [gender identity disorder, a term that is no longer used in American Psychiatry] in these clinics reported an answer that aligned with their natal sex, the clearest evidence that most did not see themselves as transgender.” Essentially, a tomboyish girl would say she still identified as a girl, but would be counted as transgender in the study.
For the study, University of Washington researchers Anne Fast and Kristina Olson recruited 36 transgender 3- to 5-year-old children who had socially transitioned.
The Daily Beast writes:
Ultimately, the researchers found that the transgender children were remarkably similar to their cisgender peers, discovering that “young transgender children were just as likely as [cisgender] children to (a) show preferences for peers, toys, and clothing culturally associated with their expressed gender, (b) dress in a stereotypically gendered outfit, © endorse flexibility in gender stereotypes, and (d) say they are more similar to children of their gender than to children of the other gender.”
“These findings suggest that, in many ways, the basic gender development of socially transgender children is quite similar to that of other children,” they concluded.
I get why the researchers chose to focus on socially transitioned kids, but I am sceptical as regards the journalists’ argument that
Journal Reference:
Stef Sanjati is a trans girl with some great parents. In this video they andwer questions about how to talk to your parents about being transgender. What an amazing family!
