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Pediatric gender medicine came crashing home for me this week. My neighbor's youngest, older than my oldest but close, started public pre-K this month as a boy and came back this week a girl. The mother of the family seems to think the school knows best and they're both well educated and well equipped to deal with this.
I have thoughts, but I don't want to post in the culture war thread because I don't want a war here. I like my neighbors. I like their boys. But I believe this is a social contagion, and now I have thyphoid Mary living next door. I also believe that kids emulate each other.
What the hell do I do? I don't want to upset my neighbors but don't want to call him she or a girl, and I don't want them telling my kids to do that either.
As of yet, nobody has made any requests of me, but it's consuming my thoughts. I've lost friends over contentious topics recently, like the last year, and I don't want that repeating with people I see every day and can't avoid.
But not an organic one. That one's pretty obviously top-down. That'll teach him to get along with the girls and choose the dollhouse or toy stove over the blocks and trucks in centers, I guess- or at least, it'll certainly teach him how idiot adults see those things. Certainly an important lesson, best learned early.
Nothing, or however you'd nominally handle the general form of "but his mom lets him X and Y" if and when your kid asks why he can't be a girl too. Your way of doing that may be productive, or it may not, but that's up to you.
As for "what's he called today?", well, you'll likely be sorting that out with him directly (as will your kids, in their own way). I'm sure you have enough social grace to figure out how to confirm someone's name if you forgot. Preferably when there's nobody to answer that question for him present, of course.
Ah, but kids also question each other, especially if it's about something particularly unusual. You might not find the answers to those questions satisfactory, but I assure you they do eventually get asked.
I think honestly, I’d distance my family especially children from these people. You can be personally nice, but don’t let your kids hang around that family as the child is likely experiencing social contagion and his parents seem unwilling or unable to question it or do anything about it.
Another +1 for the "adults are all Last Thursdayists" hypothesis. I get that it's very convenient to model kids as basically unthinking robots but they do have their own motivations and internal reasons for doing things. Those reasons are usually simple enough to be trivially back-propagated but that's naturally difficult when your robot's also giving you lip.
The follow-on comment to that one kind of confirmed my suspicion. Just because he's likely pretty girly already doesn't make him a girl, for various reasons; and there's a productive and unproductive way to handle that fact.
The relevant authority figures have selected the unproductive, destructive, and selfish way to deal with that, and "being too stupid or actively going along with those things for social reasons"... well, that's what molesters do and how they work, and pulling back is likely justified on those grounds.
But it's not the kid, lol.
He's not even that girly, he likes to run fast and he like big trucks and he likes adults to watch him when he does stuff and he likes watching me when I work with tools. The most I've seen prior to this was some painted nails and using backwards pronouns for himself and others. Apparently there was a meltdown at/coming home from/because of? school that had something to do with going with the other boys to the bathroom.
I just don't think the correct response is to let him wear dresses at home, and to wear his hair like a girl at school.
And so his authority figures, on a hair trigger for trans, see trans in every GNC behavior a 4 year old exhibits. They're in a hurry to validate it, partially because they've been told they should be, but also because having a social token is just the greatest, isn't it?
What, did he decide to take a piss sitting down and the other boys made fun of him for doing that? (Or for the more obvious 'being present in the boy's bathroom while looking like a girl'[1]?) You know, opposed to the way you are Supposed to, which is to casually whip that private part out, piss all over yourself and the floor and otherwise make a big mess, and that's assuming you don't have other people actively fucking with you. I don't remember if they mount the pissers low enough to be used by a kid of that height, though maybe it doesn't matter.
And maybe if we didn't spend the last 15 years playing stupid social games about this, this wouldn't trigger that absurd overreaction. Yes, I'm sure a 4 year old doing that means the same thing as it does when a 24 year old does that. He's not even old enough to natively know why writing "yes" or "no such luck" in the form that asks for your "sex" is funny yet.
And yet from your description he has hair long enough to 'wear it like a girl', and is not only patient enough for someone (probably a girl he gets along with) to paint his nails, but not be troubled by what it means. Sounds pretty girly to me, and perhaps more importantly, [1]I bet it probably sounds pretty girly to the average teacher, and the average 5 year old boy.
But then, it's not like that's really a bad thing... until you put him an environment that's actively trying to "encourage him to express his true feminine identity" as a consequence. That's just plain old sexual interference, and his folks really do need to protect him from teachers who insist on doing that, because they are as incapable of policing themselves as the Church was.
There's a difference between 'I think I'll wear [girl clothes] because I feel like it today' and 'I think I'll wear [girl clothes] because it validates my identity as a girl'. (There are some sensory considerations here that will result in boys actively preferring dresses under certain conditions, so that may be less connected with some sense of gender identity than might otherwise be apparent. Of course, I would say that, wouldn't I.)
My impression is that the class was doing a bathroom stop on the way back/to from some out of class activity (PE? Music?), and he was told to line up with the boys. This really upset him, although I'm not sure if it was at the time or he exploded when he got home.
To be fair, I had long hair until this year, and his older brother has even longer hair, never cut down his back, which he never wears like a girl. I figured that was enough to demonstrate that long hair isn't just for girls.
It's his mom who does his nails, I'm not sure there are 4 or 5 year olds I'd trust with nail polish.
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