Pink blankets and salivating doctors: A look at the transgender children phenomenon

Pay attention to stories about children who are transgender. Without fail, they are filled to the brim with gender stereotypes. Kids are being diagnosed for playing with the “wrong” toys and liking the “wrong” things. In many of the stories, it is clear that either the parents, or the community, has put great importance in dividing things and interests into “for boys” and “for girls”. Children have a limited understanding of what it means to be a boy or a girl. For example, it’s not uncommon for children to think that the length of someone’s hair is what makes them a boy or a girl. If a child who likes dolls or long hair is told “those things are for girls”, their response might very well be “okay, then I want to be a girl”.

In this story, the mother of a boy tells us how “Instead of toy soldiers and trains, he asks for princesses and dolls for Christmas and birthdays”.

The mother of the child in this story talks about how her child said “I boy” as a toddler, and “rejected anything frilly or stereotypically girly”. The child themselves says the following:

Evan Singleton has now been living five years as a boy but remembers the pain of pretending.

“All the girls were doing Barbie dolls and nail polish, and I just wasn’t one of them,” he said. “All the boys were doing skateboards and helmets, and I wanted to do that stuff. I never felt right in that body.”

Why this kid thinks that you need a certain type of body to be interested in skateboards is not elaborated on.

The father of this male child who likes to wear dresses, calls the child “gender-fluid”. The father is quoted:

‘In truth, the realization that one of my children identifies with a gender that is opposite the sex she was born with was, and remains, absolutely unremarkable,’

While the father means well, the implications of this statement are not as progressive as it would seem. Liking “sparkly shoes and dresses” like this child did is somehow “opposite” from being a boy?

This male child expressed desire to “marry a prince”, and dressed up “as a girl” at home. The parents told the child  “[y]ou can go home and live as Danielle, or you can go home and live as Daniel”. Going home and living as Daniel AND wearing dresses was apparently not an option.

The parents of this male child tell this story:

At 5 months, she took a pink blanket meant for her sister Lily. Later, she showed little interest in toy cars and boy clothes with pictures of sports, monsters and dinosaurs on them. She refused to leave the house if she had to wear boy clothes. After her parents accepted her identity, they said, Coy come out of her shell.

A five month old baby reaches for a pink blanket. An infant, who does not even grasp that objects exist even when they are out if sight, is capable of understanding that they are the “wrong” sex, capable of understanding that pink is a color more often worn by girls, and reaches for a blanket to somehow communicate all of this. And when the parents lets the child wear the same thing that the other children in the family wear, the child seems happier. Very mysterious.

Another article about the same child tells a story about a boy whose parents had strict rules for clothes and hair styles:

At three and a half, Coy turned sullen. He’d spend days on the couch, wrapped in the fuzzy pink security blanket he’d commandeered from his sister. He didn’t want to play, or talk. He especially didn’t want to go outside; any enthusiasm Coy might show for a trip to the playground would disappear as soon as he’d catch sight of the boys’ clothes he was expected to swap for the dresses he wore at home. The only thing Coy hated more was the prospect of getting a haircut; the last time his parents had suggested it, Coy had taken to his bed for days, listless and tearful.

And:

Little by little, Kathryn began letting Coy leave home dressed in a pink shirt – anything to pry him from the house with minimal fuss – and soon enough, with pink sneakers to match. Jeremy drew the line at letting Coy wear colorful hair clips outdoors. “I was trying to avoid a negative experience,” recalls Jeremy, who is even-tempered and stocky with rimless glasses. “Someone going, ‘Why are you dressing your son up as a girl?'”

“Letting” Coy wear a pink shirt – as if the color of a shirt is so important that you literally have to be a girl to be allowed it. And note the father’s statement. God forbid someone thinking he’s letting his son dress up as a girl! A girl dressing up as a girl however, is much more  acceptable.

This story tells us that “the number of primary school children referred to the NHS with transgender feelings has quadrupled in five years”. What happens to these kids? According to the guidelines of World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), found here, in most children with “gender dysphoria”, the feelings will disappear before they become adults.

Gender dysphoria during childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood.V Rather, in follow-up studies of prepubertal children (mainly boys) who were referred to clinics for assessment of gender dysphoria, the dysphoria persisted into adulthood for only 6–23% of children (Cohen-Kettenis, 2001; Zucker & Bradley, 1995). Boys in these studies were more likely to identify as gay in adulthood than as transgender (Green, 1987; Money & Russo, 1979; Zucker & Bradley, 1995; Zuger, 1984). Newer studies, also including girls, showed a 12–27% persistence rate of gender dysphoria into adulthood (Drummond, Bradley, Peterson-Badali, & Zucker, 2008; Wallien & Cohen-Kettenis, 2008).

What treatments are these kids typically offered? Many of them are being given “puberty blockers”, drugs that prevent the body from going through puberty, putting maturation on hold. This is supposed to give them time to think, and decide whether they want to live as the sex they were born, or go on to take the hormones of the opposite sex. But how are these kids, many of whom have an extremely simplified and immature understanding of sex and gender, supposed to take this choice when their brains are being prevented from maturing? Lupron, the main drug being used for this purpose, can lead to permanent loss of bone density. It also has depression as a common side effect.

Doctors are now performing sex change operations on minor children:

Dr. Christine McGinn estimated that she had done more than 30 operations on children under 18, about half of them vaginoplasties for biological boys becoming girls, and the other half double mastectomies for girls becoming boys.

In the same article, Dr. Norman Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital, says that he was “salivating” at the prospect of giving puberty suppressing medications to pre-pubescent children:

Dr. Spack recalled being at a meeting in Europe about 15 years ago, when he learned that the Dutch were using puberty blockers in transgender early adolescents.

“I was salivating,” he recalled. “I said we had to do this.”

Children, who cannot legally get tattoos even with parental consent, are being sterilized, for a condition that seems to rely heavily on sexist stereotypes, by doctors who salivate at the thought of giving this treatment.