my son wants to be a girl

My impressions of Raising My Rainbow , to which I was referred by a commenter on this blog. I showed it to my son, age 7, because his interests are a lot like CJ. Make up, hair and feminine clothing. Yet CJ knows he is male, knows he is a boy, and doesn't have a problem even since he's been allowed to present as he wants without being bullied. Although I think that this level of obsession with appearance is not cool for either boys or girls (me and my friends didn't sit around playing with makeup when i was 11), my son really liked CJ, and he knows that there is at least one other boy like him in the world. So for that, I thank CJ and his parents. But other things about the blog bother me. Why is CJ classified as LGBTQ? He hasn't even reaced puberty yet. At age 11 he was chosen marshal for the pride parade. Why is clothing styles being conflated with sexual orientation???? Seems that is a bit oversexualization for a child. In fact, many pride

Things have changed and so has my approach. In the past I pretty much let D. do what he pleased without intervening. Play princess as much as he wants and so forth. But now that school is out due to Corona, D. was playing princess and mermaid pretty much every day. Sometimes, he'd just play "girls" and "sisters" with his little brother. But not just a girl- and adult woman. He wanted a bra.  I don't think this is normal for little girls either as well as little boys.  The "girl" he wants to be isn't a real life girl either. Not one like me who wears baggy jeans, does not wear revealing clothes, hikes, debates, and engages in political activism. His girl is a disney princess who preens in front of the mirror wears party clothes, and well, dances and parties. A caricature. A barbie or Arielle (who has a bra of course).  In addition to the absence of peer pressure, which is a good thing I think, there is now the media binge, which

This is a very long article  with lots of food for thought. I'm only commenting on one, relatively minor piece of it:  " Separation from the mother is an important part of the infant’s psychological development. However, the psychological and physical separation can be experienced as trauma. This in turn can lead to either a wish to possess the mother in some way, or a grievance toward the mother, as the infant finds it hard to give up the ideal relationship represented by the primary maternal preoccupation. In a recent paper entitled   Time and the Garden of Eden Illusion , psychoanalyst John Steiner describes the common fantasy of returning to an imaginary, idealized relationship with one’s mother.....   American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard coined the term autogynephilia to describe a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. But even in cases where such sexualized impulses are absent, a trans woman may be impelled by a desire t

So now that my son wears typical boys clothes most of the time, why am I still occupying myself with this topic? Because I have a feeling that he is cutting off a part of himself. I've offered to buy him pink stuff, but he insists thats for boys. Last year for Purim (a bit like Jewish Halloween) I offered him a tutu skirt, although his dad was not in favor. He declined, and chose red lady bug wings instead, which i found a creative compromise on his part. But this year, he's asked to be Spiderman. (like at least 5 other boys in his class). So whats bothering me? I see that hes expressing his interest in girl fashion vicariously. As most immediately available female, he tries with me. I'm a jeans and ponytail kind of gal, but he often asks me to put on make up, he wants to style my hair, or tries to convince me to wear some of my formal occasion wear stuffed in the back of  my closet. His still plays princess at home with makeshift old clothing and headgear, althou

One of the more successful pieces of my approach, has been to provide accurate and consistent information about the mechanisms of reproduction. Absent this information, it can truly seem arbitrary to have two different categories of people. My son knowns that one day his body will develop to look like his dad's, not like mine. And he knowns that part of that is that his body will create sperm. And that with that sperm he can, if he finds a female partner, create a child, that will have the same relationship with him as he does with his dad. He has a sort of understanding, if somewhat vague, of the concept of DNA. He sort of gets the concept of sexual intercourse. I've also told him about sperm donation, as he has a friend with two lesbian moms. (this derailed my program a bit, but we got past the hump) I began at age four, by trial and error, by what I thought he could grasp. I made mistakes- sometimes I had to repeat the same information a few months later. But at his ag

We were attending synagogue with some relatives a couple of weeks ago, when a transman (a female transitioned to male) announced "children's service downstairs in ten minutes!" I happened to know she was trans; because I had seen her a few years ago leading a woman's group, and had been told as much (should a female presenting as male be leading a woman's group is a question for another time). At the time, she had looked like a teen boy, being small and slight, but with a masculine voice, hair and clothing, and very, almost exxaggerated, masculine mannerisms. She had still had a deep masculine voice and had grown some facial hair. She was wearing masculine clothing. She was still small and slight, but as her hair had begun to gray, it was obvious she wasn't a young boy. If you were looking, as I was,  you could detect the outline of a waist and hips.  I found it somewhat ironic that she was leading the childrens group, a position that tends to be