As some of you well know, Jill of Feministe mixed it all up at the Personal Democracy Forum conference when she asked why weren’t women invited to some of the most important plenary panels, especially the ones involving the future of tech and grassro…

I’d indulge it to the extent of not insisting on gender, but I’d not permit any physical changes until a *lot* later.

If my child comes out as trans to me early on, I’ll support that. But I’m not going to permit surgery/hormone therapy before the end of pubescence. I think it’s unethical.

Again: This is not how it works. No five-year-old is going to undergo hormonal or surgical changes. Even setting aside ethical issues, which are legion, there are logistical ones. The hormonal differences don’t exist at that age, and the surgery cannot be undertaken. What happens in these cases is that the kid is allowed to delay physical adolescence until they’re sixteen or eighteen. Then they’re allowed to start taking hormones. Alex was allowed to go on estrogen-blockers at twelve. He’ll be allowed to start testosterone at sixteen.

The problem is, once you go through puberty in your original gender, it can be really hard to go back. This is particularly true of transwomen. Testosterone causes one to grow an Adam’s apple and facial hair. Estrogen doesn’t take those away.

If my child comes out as trans to me early on, I’ll support that. But I’m not going to permit surgery/hormone therapy before the end of pubescence. I think it’s unethical.

You say she has decided she is transgendered.

At five, if she decides to go to bed at midnight, drive the family car, or try to leave home, her opinion is not going to sway those whose job it is to prevent these things.

I’d indulge it to the extent of not insisting on gender, but I’d not permit any physical changes until a *lot* later.

Do you have a view as to how that will play out? Will doctors be willing to trust what the amnio says rather than their interpretation of what they see, and will parents have the nerve to interpret the results in ways that the doctors don’t immediately accept?

You raise good questions. I think if people are willing to accept that facts change over time, that scientific facts are political in nature then interpretations of medical tests can be far more open ended, in theory at least.

But that open-endedness will be largely the purview of the wealthy – those folks optioning regenerative medicine and at home designer enhancements we can hardly imagine now – and the lower and lowest classes will probably continue to be screwed.

My ability to reconstruct my body is the result of my class and my race. I had both the access and education to navigate the highly politicized arenas of insurance and medicine. Plus, my quest for reconfiguration nicely confirmed many doctors genders, so they were happy to confirm mine.

Go out to a local park and ask a five year old their gender. When they tell you, do you doubt it? Then why do you doubt Nicole?

Feminism, at its best, is letting people be who they know themselves to be–not having to live stereotypes or get some kind of permission to be the way you are. I don’t think Nicole should be pushed or rushed into feminity at all. I think her self-knowledge should be respected rather than dismissed and belittled.

The day I was born, the resident attending the birth leaned over to my mom and said, “Mrs. Ellett, you have a fiiiiine baby boy!”. The OB/GYN who had delivered me quickly leaned over her too and said “um, that’s a girl.” My mom said for many years “honey, you’ve been confused ever since.”

Except that I was never confused. It’s not that I knew I was a girl; I never really thought of it. I was just little Q. In the majority of settings that I was in, people of all ages assumed I was a boy. Even kids who knew me for years and knew my first name, which is uniquely feminine. One young boy got hopping mad at me when I fell down on my bike’s cross bar and he insisted that I had “racked my balls!” and I kept countering “NO. I didn’t.”

Now, I don’t look particularly masculine, unless I’ve got the crew-cut and am sporting my men’s dress shirt ensemble with wingtips. But yet I’ve been called “sir” when wearing a full-length, flower-print dress with heels. I’ve been chased out of public restrooms by frantic older women and suspicous 7-year-old girls. I’ve been hit on by gay men who thought I was the latest fresh chicken to walk into town.

And so I’ve spent a great deal of my life being gendered, by others, as both.

Which, believe it or not… was not confusing. In a way, it really highlighted the disutility of gender and our rather arbitrary social application of gender rules. My internal identity was never “I am a girl”, but it was certainly never “I am a boy” — I was usually bigger, faster and stronger than the boys, so it made no sense to me to want to be one! My internal identity was simply “I am Q” and it wasn’t until I was in my 30′s that I even had an inkling of what it meant to “feel like a woman.” And that was only after my uterus decided for me that it really, really, really wanted a baby and I had to tell it NO.

The thing is, as far as I know about myself, I never doubted my belonging in the body I had; I never felt that it betrayed me and was disconsenant (sp?) with my identity as “Q”. And because of that, it really, really, really didn’t matter that folks were continually switching my gender up on me. At least it didn’t matter in so far as making me uncomfortable or making me feel like a freak. Everyone had always switched it up on me. Even my dad went through a phase of calling me “George” because he wasn’t sure if I might like that more than “Q”. [of course, at the time I sorta believed I should have been a dog and he let me hang my head out the car window and pant in the wind, but, well, that's another story.]

I guess what I’m saying is that adults freak over gender, but they make mistakes ALL the time about children’s gender without even knowing it. Let Nicole map her life, it is her’s to do so anyhow. Even at five. My feeling is that if I were transsexual or transgendered, I would have known so at that age. I would have felt that something was off with me, rather than thinking that adults were clueless and easy to fool.

p.s. FWIW, for those hung up on testosterone levels and masculinity, I have unusually low levels of testosterone for a female.

“As a young toddler, he wouldn’t let me snap her onesies together because she wanted to wear a ‘dwess’ like his sister,” Lauren says, mixing pronouns like he and her interchangeably.

I get the impression that if gender neutral pronouns were common in English, there would be a lot less confusion surrounding this kid.

They’re treating her gender as “whatever it is”… frankly, it seems that her parents are taking a more genderqueer accepting position than a “the child is a girl! Conform!” position. It seems they’re letting N choose her own path. I hope that continues and that, whatever it is, she manages to follow it with a minimum of trauma.