Transgender Kids: What Parents Need to Know
By Valerie Isakova, Shine Parenting Editor | Parenting – Fri, Aug 10, 2012 2:36 PM EDT
http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/transgender-kids-parents-know-183600707.htmlThe question is "What's so bad about a boy who wants to wear a dress?"
That's the teaser for a story in this weekend's New York Times Magazine.
There's no way to write about this subject without acknowledging that for probably 99 percent of Americans, the answer is self-evident: Boys don't wear dresses. A boy in a dress will be ridiculed by his peers and it's mom and dad's job to protect him from that. Even assuming you're in favor of (or indifferent to) adult men in a free society wearing dresses if they're so inclined, it doesn't seem like a choice a child is ready to make. And so on.
All of that makes sense, but, increasingly, as the Times article reports, this conventional wisdom is going out the window when real parents are confronted with real children who don't conform to the gender identity they are born with. (This is mainly a problem for boys, since little girls being "tomboys" is much more accepted.) The story introduces us to Susan and Rob:
