fucking hell! Since when is being trans still considered a disorder?

Oh jesus. Ok, reading whole article now.

This sentence makes me awfully suspicious:

And Jonah just came running up and said, 'Why do you have to tell! Why do you have to say anything!'"

No two year old I have ever met has sentence structure that sophisticated. I call bullshit on the parents - I think they just want their son to stop being so girly.

Edited at 2008-05-08 03:04 pm (UTC)

yeah, I figured that out - I guess they just have a really linguistically gifted kid?

I guess. I think it was a bad idea to print it as a quote, though - it comes of as disingenuous to anyone whose ever spent time with a two-year-old.

Ha! Fair!

It's like the end of that bit in Creepshow 2 where we think because they trapped the monster in a box with chains on it and sunk it deep in the ocean, everyone is safe... but then broken chunks of the box bob up to the surface of the water and just as it ends you are like OH NO! A DANGER LURKS!

Seriously. I think I roared like, and drew nothing but, dinosaurs for two years around that age.

1. Do any of these kids want this "therapy"? A psychologist can only change a lightbulb that wants to change.

2. Can these parents please die in a fire with all their transference, narcissism, dependence on social judgment and unexamined prejudices? "We put him in therapy because he got a gash in the playground. It's for his own good." Yeah, right.

Pre-kindergartners in therapy? I see NPR has slow news days too.

I hate people.

I don't really agree with either of the therapists. Mainly because I think the whole idea of gender roles and identities are not beneficial in these sorts of things. I think that we should use sex to define who is a boy and who is a girl and allow boys to like 'girl' things and girls to like 'boy' things and not force them into any specific gender.

Sex is easy to identify, you are clearly male or female, gender on the other hand is not a two option thing, it's a whole lot of seemingly connected traits and likes that form the perception of what is 'male' and 'female'.

I do agree with Zucker about how identifying boys as girls at such a young age could cause problems later on, it could cause a similar problem that forcing a boy who wants to play with dolls to play with trucks will cause. I think the parents should let the kid play with the toys he wants, and wear what he wants and be whoever he wants without pigeonholing him into a specific 'gender'.

Of course this is not how our society works, we really do force people to pick a gender. What we really need is a societal shift away from the importance identifying with a specific gender.

The last bit quoted is a spurious analogy - kids aren't coming into his office and asking to be made any gender. Also since it's a matter of conditioning identity through behavioral patterns, he's basically intimating that if that pretend black kid DID come in, it was going to be imperative that he start speaking in slang, listening to rap and r'n'b and eating collard greens and cornbread STAT. Immediately curtail his exposure to emo bands or he's just going to grow up and need surgery to look white.

A thousand stabs to start with. I'm really scared for the wellbeing of kids that wind up treated by anyone like this Zucker.

I love how two 10-year-old boys throw this woman’s child off a piece of playground equipment and she interprets that as her son being the child who hasn’t learned to play with other children.

Also…I’m not a psychologist, but the whole reasoning behind Zucker’s therapy seems to be that the child will have a difficult life and mental anguish because others won’t accept him for who he is. And so his solution to that is to have the child’s parents make it clear to him, at a very early age, that they don’t accept him for who he is and that he must conform entirely to their expectations. That sounds to me like a whole lot more mental anguish waiting to happen.

Also:

Good god! I couldn't even finish reading that crap.

Do you know that the Diego character on Dora the Explorer was introduced so that boys would a character to identify with? Boys were wanting to be/buy Dora and parents weren't happy... or so I hear.

One of my roommates is a PhD student and could talk for hours about this stuff but I'm not going to ask her for her opinion, for precisely that reason.

Kids in therapy at FOUR? I think we have a larger, more pervasive problem to deal with than one kid's gender role preferences if his/her parents actually think it's a GOOD IDEA to send him to a THERAPIST. I can't even *imagine* being forced into attending therapy at that age. It probably would have fucked me up for a good long time.

This is so... I mean... doesn't anybody learn anything? Ever? When has forcing people to be something they aren't ever been a path to good mental health?

I hate everyone right now.