From somewhere pure and certain inside her
In the months before she started nursery, my four-year-old daughter would often say she was a boy.
Little kids say they’re lots of things.
It came unprompted, bubbling up from somewhere pure and certain inside her.
Little kids can be certain of all kinds of things that aren’t true. Certainly is almost always a bad thing, and in a child of four it means nothing.
But the obstacles to her sense of self have started looming, ever since she started nursery in September 2021.
After she’d been attending for a few weeks, she said to me again she was a boy. But then she looked troubled and added that her teacher told her she’s a girl, that she’s always a girl.
Teachers are not there to lie to the children they teach.
I suspect her teachers don’t think she’s ‘old enough’ for gender nonconformity, despite published research confirming that children as young as two to three recognise their gender, and can identify their own transness.
Published where? TikTok?
Sometimes she still broaches the topic of wanting to be a boy. She’s pointed to male characters in books and said she looks like them. We say teachers can’t tell her who she is, but she comes back with the same contradiction – if my teacher said this, it must be true.
Well, ya know, in this case, given that the kid’s parents have mush for brains, she’s right – the teacher is more likely to be right than the parents are.
No matter how much you’ve taught them yourself, in the end their teachers become their educational authority. My child’s already learning from her teacher to doubt her thoughts and fear her mind, her very self.
Or maybe she’s learning from her teacher not to believe her daydreams are all true.
Plot twist:
Anti-bullying policies aren’t cutting it. Not for my daughter, or for anyone in the trans community – as a trans man, I know this firsthand.
Ohhhhhhh – you should have said.
No wonder the kid started saying she was a boy.
This poor kid is going to have one confusing childhood.
“Unprompted” my ass.
The conflation of gender non-conformity with “transness” is almost as disturbing as the glurge. Which is less disturbing than the thought of this poor kid’s possible future.
(Thank goodness for the teacher. I hope Mr. Birthing Parent doesn’t try to get her fired.)
An excellent lesson. Too bad transdad never learned it.
No, that she’s learned from her transdad.
So “he” refers to her as she, as daughter, every time. No affirming he? No “my son”? Sounds like this “dad” recognizes what is really real – the child is a girl. The girl child is a daughter. The proper pronoun to use in describing the girl daughter is she.
“He” has committed thought crime by using wrongspeak and failing to affirm appropriately. What if the poor little boy…girl…giraffe should happen to see what her “birthing parent” has written? She/he/giraffe might commit suicide! The very thought!
@4 I was wondering about that myself. Even more confusing than this kind of thing normally is.
The parents keep asking if she’s a girl or a boy? That’s coaching. It’s a big deal to her because she can see that it’s a big deal to her parents because they keep bloody asking. I bet they never asked repeated follow-up questions after that one time she said she’s a cat and rolled a ball of wool around for half hour. This is how you teach them things, isn’t it? When they get it wrong, you don’t just yell “WRONG! “, you say “are you sure about that? Have another think” and you guide them to the right answer. She knows they are not totally happy with the answers she’s giving so she says whatever seems like a good thing to say in the moment and she’s waiting for her parents to go”That’s it! Well done you! ” That poor child.
Also, the teachers are OBVIOUSLY the only people in this situation supporting the girl’s gender-nonconformity. They are the ones telling her she can be a girl who likes “boy things” . It’s her parents who are desperate to know if they need to cram her into the blue box or the pink box based on her personality, and who are showing a preference for the blue box for ideological reasons.
Catwhisperer:
This is, of course, true. Most people don’t even realize the power of leading questions.
Very well put! This reminds me of something I once read in a book about “witness psychology” and the countless problems with eyewitness testimony in court cases. Many of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern history have been cases of suggestive interview techniques run amok, often driven by preconceived suspicions from well-meaning interviewers. E.g. back in the 1990s the tiny Norwegian village of Bjugn was torn apart by an alleged child abuse scandal. It was eventually concluded that the whole thing was almost certainly a moral panic akin to the Satanic scare, and the case was dropped, but only after countless lives had been ruined. I remember the author quoting large sections of the many interviews to extract the truth from supposedly abused children, and the obvious fishing for the “right” answer is one of the most shocking things I have read in my life. The author specifically emphasized the problem of repeating questions over and over again even if the child had already answered them, thus conveying to the child that the interviewer is not satisfied with the answer and the child needs to “do better”.
@6: This is what Sierra from Exulansic calls “the Clever Hansel Effect”:
#8, that is so true. Much of transness seems to be the same situation, They wander into a trans site. They’re a bit confused about something, maybe depressed, and the trans community moves them in the “right” direction until they become convinced, and they are sure that nobody else told them, they just knew it. Like the one girl I read about that went to a therapist. She didn’t feel right about who she was (possibly lesbian, or maybe just gender-non-conforming). When asked, she said she wasn’t a boy. By the time she left the first session, the therapist had convinced her she was a boy. And the therapist was proud of it, because she was sure she guided her correctly. A therapist should be very careful about guiding…in any direction. Their job is to help the patient guide themselves.
Meanwhile, the whole Satanic panic and child abuse scandals and recovered memory nonsense has hurt those of us who really don’t fit that pattern, but were abused. We never recovered our memory because we never lost it, but all you have to do for some people (Dr. Laura, for instance) is say you are accused by a sibling/friend/etc of sexual abuse, and she will fill you to the ears with the “reality” that it is a lie because recovered memories are false…even when the caller never mentioned recovered memories and the accuser never forgot and “recovered” the memory, it has burned through them forever. Then, of course, the accused remembers that the accuser was talking about recovered memories, and they go confidently about their way, knowing they have a smug way of dismissing anything. I know, because Dr. Laura said that to my brother.
At least my parents never tried to trans me when it became obvious I had other things on my mind besides becoming wife/mother. Now, any girl wanting to be a scientist is probably instantly declared a boy.
I just read a short article about Emily Noether.
With her immense talent in math & physics she still had great difficulty getting paid positions in those fields in the early 20th century. However, at least it doesn’t look like anyone declared her to be a man in woman’s body.
I’m flashing on a (true) story of a linguist who did an experiment. He and his wife had a baby. He only spoke Klingon to the child, and his wife only spoke English to it. The first thing the linguist discovered is that Klingon lacks many common words that come up in conversation with toddlers, like diaper.
Anyway, the child did what children do: it spoke English to its mother and Klingon to its father. For a while. But at some point–fairly early, like 3 years–the child simply stopped responding in Klingon and only spoke English.
Maybe the child realized that the Klingon thing was bogus. Or perhaps the child simply found that Klingon wasn’t useful.