Posted on Advocate.com October 07, 2011 04:00:00 AM ET
Op-ed: On Trans Kids, It's Us Who Are Confused
The creative gender cases of Storm, Chaz, Tammy and Mario revealed our society's knee-jerk and crushing reaction to nonconformity.
By Diane Ehrensaft, op-ed contributor

http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Commentary/Oped_When_It_Comes_to_Trans_Kids_It_Us_Who_Are_Confused/

During the past few months, the media has been replete with accounts of both children and adults who do not fit neatly into conventional gender roles: a Canadian baby, Storm, whose parents kept the baby's gender secret; the child of a prominent celebrity, Chaz Bono, who attracted controversy as a trangender man on primetime television; and two children, Tammy and Mario, who announced to their parents that they were not their biological gender and began living as they wanted to be.

As a developmental psychologist who spends my days working with both children and young adults who are transgender, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender queer, and more, none of these stories has been a surprise to me. They simply reinforce my observation, made in my book Gender Born, Gender Made, that it is increasingly difficult to define gender as a strict biological binary.