How can you help a 3-year-old to stop misgendering family friends who are transwomen? She isn't trying to insult them deliberately, but just doesn't perceive them as women and won't remember being corrected the next time she sees them. -Quora
First of all, as per further information in the comments, this is not your child and it is NOT your place to be interfering in how this family handles the issue unless they have specifically ASKED for your advice. This is something for the offended friends and the parents to work out, and if you value your friendships you will back out of what isn’t your problem. The entire fact that you feel entitled to force your personal beliefs on other people’s children and intervene in their parenting and other social relationships is extremely disturbing. I suggest you get a good book on Co-dependence recovery.
Secondly, this is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” problem. There is NOTHING “wrong” with this toddler (who at 3 is actually a preschooler), so there is nothing the parents can do about it. You can’t fix what isn’t broken. This reminds me of medieval parents getting the idea in their heads that crawling was too animalistic and ungodly, and strapping their children to little roundabouts to force them to skip crawling and go right to “proper human” walking. Crawling is developmentally necessary for most children and they rarely skip over it, and their lower leg bones and muscles are not yet ready to bear their full weight, leading to possible bow-leggedness. You cannot force children to skip developmental stages because it offends people based on some ideology they have. It has consequences. It is grown-ups here who must accept the natural development of children however inconvenient it is. This is called ACTING LIKE AN ADULT.
This is a normal stage of neurological development. At a certain point in the developing brain it starts to categorize things as a means to understand them. The ability to understand who is biologically male and producing sperm and who is biologically female and producing ova is self-evidently crucial to the survival of every species on the planet that has sexual reproduction. Even for species that can literally morph from one sex to the other, it is still crucial to recognize which members of their species are in which sexual form, and to have that skill locked well down before puberty hits. Therefore that ability is hard-wired into us, just like our ability to acquire language is. This child has reached a stage where they can now identify key markers of biological sex in people’s body shapes (hip to waist ratio, shoulder to hip ratio) and faces (relative size and placement of eyes, nose and philtrum lengths, chin length and width etc) but they have no idea yet what “gender” is as a concept because their brain is not mature enough to entertain a concept that still confuses many adults, apparently.
Children are notorious for mis-gendering everyone, not just trans people. I was mis-gendered by two preschoolers yesterday when I appeared at work in a skirt instead of my typical jeans. There was even a story decades back in Reader’s Digest illustrating how they mix up and conflate sex and gender roles. It was submitted by a parent who allowed their 4 year old to go to JK wearing his sister’s barrettes, only to have the teacher overhear him arguing with another boy about whether he was a boy or a girl. The boy eventually became exasperated and pulled down his pants to show the other boy his penis to prove he was a boy, to which the other boy dismissively said, “Everyone has a penis, only girls wear barrettes.”
Here I will suggest that you also need some good books on child development and evolutionary biology.
This situation would not have been a problem even a few years ago, before “transsexual” was turned into a dirty word and transgender was foisted on us, instead. Once upon a time you could just tell a child that:
A) not everyone who is male or female fits neatly into the typical or average appearance for their sex (or behaviour, for that matter)
B) some people who are born into one sex are unhappy about it for reasons we don’t yet understand. They feel strongly that they are the other sex internally (in their mind/brain) and are much happier if everyone just lets them live as the sex they feel inside as much as possible, and they can have hormones and surgery to help them do so. Since most of those people don’t fully understand themselves until past puberty, they develop outwardly like their biological sex and it can take a lot of time and money to change that.
C) It’s impolite and unkind to make personal remarks, or to draw attention to physical features or other differences which people have no control over.
We don’t yet fully understand the biological working of things like gender development, gender identity, or sexual orientations, but there is more than enough evidence that they are “real” events with correlates in the material world. We know that people with conditions that are known to affect the structure and function of their temporal lobes are much more likely to be GLB (including sudden shifts in their sexual orientation after events like head injuries, strokes and seizures) and much more likely to identify as trans or otherwise not conforming to the gender binary (including again, sudden changes to their sense of self-identity in the wake of neurological events). Obviously the majority of people who are LGBT haven’t had a head injury, stroke or seizure, so being LGBT is not “caused by” those things, they’re just some of many things that can “flip the switch”; genetics, pre-natal hormone exposure, birth order, and developmental life experiences have all been tentatively cited as having a role to play.
*People on both the Right and Woke Left will be determined to misunderstand me here as saying that being GLB or T is evidence of a “sickness” of some sort…either agreeing and using this information as “proof” that it’s so or becoming angry at me for equating the two. So let’s just head off that nonsense at Go. ALL MANNER of changes can happen in the wake of neurological events in the temporal lobe or elsewhere. One man who had a head injury suddenly became a mathematical genius…do you think that’s evidence that being good at math is a “sickness”? One person finds they become more emotional, another less so (neither is a pathology unless taken to extremes that prevent the person functioning). Some people who develop Temporal Lobe Epilepsy suddenly take up writing or (less often) the visual arts. Is being a writer or artist a biological flaw? Obviously not. The linkage of any trait with an area of the brain is not evidence that the trait is pathological (it might be, it might not), it is merely evidence that one or more neurological substrates that control that trait resides in that particular part of the brain. As regards gender identity, it tells us that there is some part of our brains where sexual self-identity arises and therefore the person’s experience may be subjective (only they experience it, others cannot perceive it unless told of it) but is not imaginary.
In the past children gradually acquired the ability for more complex categorization and learned to differentiate between someone’s biological sex, their gender presentation (how closely they match others of their sex), and societal gender roles. Children are remarkably accepting of diversity and exceptions to rules when they are presented matter-of-factly. More so than adults who apparently can’t accept facts which don’t fit with their ideologies on the Left, any more than Evangelical Young-Earth Creationists on the Right can, and feel the need to tie themselves into mindless, slogan-droning intellectual pretzels as a result.
The fact that we now view even toddlers with suspicion of “transphobia” and seek to indoctrinate their natural neurological development out of them should be a GIANT F*ING RED FLAG that we are NOT becoming more aware of diversity and more accepting, we are becoming LESS able to see the full extent of how diverse humans really are and are being forced to pigeonhole them into categories that the average five year old is supposed to be outgrowing. What we are seeing is an extremely judgmental, rigid and abusive cult that denies an obvious reality that even a child can see, that biological sex is real and important, and cannot be replaced by or conflated with gender identity or roles, even if we also agree that gender presentation and gender identity are also important biological realities. It used to be only children who foolishly did so, but now we have adults telling children that everyone can have a penis and only girls wear barrettes.
In the original story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the child’s lack of indoctrination into social hierarchies left them nonconformist, and free to state what they saw with their own eyes with impunity. The child was not punished because children are not expected to be politically correct. In fact, it led the adults to realize that they had let fear and desire to conform and be thought clever blind them to obvious reality. It is the adults in the end who feel foolish and ashamed, and change their ways. We’re not yet at the end of the story of The Emperor’s New Gender, but based on the current trajectory the “adults” are going to double-down and I will soon be looking for a new career, as I will be expected to throw away everything I know about child development so that daycares can be run like Orwellian indoctrination camps. I will not participate in the ideological and developmental abuse of children so that a tiny minority of adults can live in a fantasy world in which they deny an aspect of reality when it has the temerity not to give a shit about their ideology.