Child abuse!
I've heard of such a thing before (actually, I think here at FR was where I first read of such a thing).
What if you have a child who simply and consistently insists from infancy that he is a girl. What if you try to gently prod him in the direction of being what he is biologically, but no matter what you do, he insists he's a girl and not a boy, and won't be cast into a male identity no matter what you say or do? What do you do then?
It seems to me that such children do exist - like children who are born with Down's Syndrome, or autistic, or without feet, or as conjoined twins.
I think they are rare, but I think some do exist. And for those it seems to me that there is no way parents will ultimately force them to live as their biological gender.
So what do you do?
More from the article:
Coy was identified as a male at birth, but since age 18 months has insisted she is a girl, and has attended school as a girl since December, 2011. Her teachers referred to her as a girl, and she dressed like one and used the girls bathroom, her mother says.
“At 18 months of age Coy gravitated to girl things and very much disliked boy things,” Mathis said. She liked tutus and makeup and dresses. Coy’s brother was all boy, who liked monsters, and trucks and roughhousing.
“We had two boys with the same clothes and toys and they were so different. Coy was growing up very much a girl. We could compare the two and knew that we weren’t causing Coy to like certain things. We decided to let her just be who she is.”
When she was two and a half, Coy was anxious if she left the house dressed as a boy. She wanted princess dresses and hair bows. “If it was jeans and a polo shirt you could just see the happiness drain from her face,” Mathis said.
At age four, she asked them to take her to a doctor “to fix her body,” Mathis said.
By then, Mathis said she was expecting that conversation. “I was sad. It’s not something an innocent four year old should think of.” They told her she could go to the doctor, but that she couldn’t alter her body until she was an adult. That satisfied her.
Mathis said her husband, who is a former Marine and disabled veteran, “took more time to accept it.”
But then they decided that not letting Coy be who she was would cause her harm.
They consulted a psychologist, doctor and other parents of transgender children and support groups.
The article says Coy was born a boy. Genetically and outwardly Coy is male. But inside, mentally and most likely physically (with brain structure), Coy is a girl. That is what transgendered is: you are genetically one gender, but feel completely as the other gender. They are *not* hermaphrodites - they have fully formed sexual organs for their genetic gender. But some studies have shown that the brain structure is that of the opposite gender, leading to the person feeling as if they were born the wrong gender.
I'm not a doctor, and frankly don't know anything about it. I'm just thinking out loud. What if in rare instances there are people whose brain structure is so opposite that they simply are never going to accept being their biological gender? Like the various kinds of people I mentioned before, or like (as some others have mentioned) people born with both sets of organs?
What does one do then?