(March 9, 2021 at 8:44 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote:(March 9, 2021 at 6:39 pm)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: If you have a young boy who identifies more with female things or female dress, this should be discouraged as well, and hopefully they grow out of it. No one should want their child to be transgender, given the suicide rate and all the problems they will face in life. You try to point them in another direction, but if the trans thing sticks long term, then you accept it and love them how they are. You still gotta try to put them in the best position to succeed in life though.
No, discouraging this is a bad idea. If you at the very least, tolerate it, they can feel free to explore it, and they can then decide for themselves how they want to express gender. They might become trans, they might just lose interest in female things in the same way they lose interest in building sand castles, or they might just decide they're a guy who just likes to wear women's clothing sometimes. You discourage it, there's a good chance he won't stop. He just won't do it in front of you, and if it turns out the kid does become trans, the fact that she has to pretend to be a he for you just makes it worse for them.
You mention that there's a huge suicide rate among transfolk. That is true. The thing is, literally every study done into the issue says that this is because of social factors, namely discrimination. And one of the biggest factors, one stated in big orange letters in one of the studies I linked before:
"Respondents who experienced family rejection were also more likely to report attempting suicide."
And it's not just disowning then once they come out. It can also come from the sort of discouragement you mentioned. Suppose you had a son named Glen. Then imagine that you see him trying on one of his mother's dresses. You tell him in no uncertain terms he shouldn't do that. Now imagine that he explores these interests in private, and eventually it reaches the point where your son Glen realises he should have been your daughter Glenda. Glenda knows what you thought of her wearing her mother's dresses. She knows you'd rather see her as a boy. She starts to feel imprisoned in this "Glen" identity that doesn't feel real to her. As far as she knows, there's a good chance that if she comes out, at the very least, her relationship with you will be strained and there's a distinct possibility that you'll disown her. If that happens, she'll probably end up on the streets. And then, she starts to decide that the best thing would be to end it all. You may say that you'd support her if she comes out as trans, but if all you do before then is discourage it, there's no reason for her to believe that.
And another thing that pretty much all studies of transgender suicide rates note: The one thing that's guaranteed to decrease suicidality in transgender people is accepting their chosen gender identity. All that shit you've described as an political correctness gone mad in previous posts is the sort of thing that helps make them less suicidal. If you actually gave a shit about trans suicide, affirming their chosen gender is the sort of thing you'd need to do to lower it.
And on the off chance that anyone here thinks trans people are just mentally ill and that, with therapy, they can just get over it, I have to ask: if that actually worked, don't you think that they'd actually be doing that? \
You can discourage it while they're super young, but still at some point make it known to your child that you support trans identities and just don't think people that young should be making that decision. Then when they're a bit older, they shouldn't feel too uncomfortable coming to you and talking about it because you've already let it be known that you're accepting of those kinds of people. Maybe you're right and in some cases it could backfire. I don't know.
