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Theres something to be said about how progressive and ostensibly accepting areas push androgyny on young transfems. There was always this sense for me that while I would be allowed blockers and later even estrogen because I wasn't a man it was also not socially acceptable for me to be a woman (this is not to say I was not treated as a woman, a corollary to transitioning young is passing decently without being super feminine). I never learned makeup because none of the ciswomen in my life felt like teaching me and further any exploration myself would be punished with strange looks and isolation, the same goes for feminine clothes. It feels like transitioning as a child denied me the chance of having the "baby trans" experience because I was still controlled by the cis people in my life when I started to transition. Of course not transitioning would've been exponentially worse and I doubt I'd even be alive. But now I can't really be feminine in the way I want to be because what the fuck kind of woman who's been a woman since 4th grade doesn't know how to do makeup or dress femininely. It's embarrassing but worse than that its embarrassing in a way no one I know in real life or online can actually relate to. I've never met anyone who transitioned as young as I did in real life and everyone I've ever seen online who did is the perfect caricature of their gender because they grew up in the suburbs of fucking wherever with the most feminine mom on earth who taught them how to do their nails and makeup.

Apologies for rambling, I understand that this probably just comes off as the whining of someone who had the immense privilege of transitioning as a child. I also understand cognitively that it is not that weird to still be figuring out how to express my gender at the age of 18 but nonetheless it still upsets me.

#trans #transfem #trans kid #trans child #transgender

I don't really know how to reconcile the idea of "male socialization" with my own lived experience. Till 4th grade I was percieved as and treated as a slightly passive slightly feminine boy (so ostensibly here is where most of the male socialization juice would have been obtained). Then I learned about trans people and came out as a trans girl. Through middle school I used they/she pronouns (but everyone just used they/them because I live in a "progressive" area where "progressive" means that everybody does the bare minimum to perform respecting your identity without actually treating you as that identity) and I think about half of all people perceived me as a girl and the other half perceived me as a boy, so was I getting male or female socialization at that point? Because some people still perceived me as male, but other people didn't, and while due to this ambiguity I wasn't dealing with all the trappings of early teenage girldom, I certainly was dealing with some of them. Then by freshman year of high school I had changed my name, started estrogen, and was *basically* cis passing, so at that point was I being female socialized? does socialization extend into high school years?

This sort of confusion also extends to the idea of sex (as in Male/female/intersex/etc. not birds and/or bees). Yes, I do (probably, not sure though) have XY chromosomes. But I transitioned young enough that I got on puberty blockers and so never went through a testosterone puberty, further I'm on estrogen now. Because of this, my secondary sexual characteristics are somewhere in between that of a "typical" male and a "typical female". It feels sort of incomprehensible to categorize me as biologically male or female and yet I am not intersex.

In any case, I feel like pretty consistently people leave out people who began transition as a child when talking about literally anything other than using us as a talking point either as something to protect from the scary trans people or to protect from the scary cis people.

#transgender #trans #trans child #trans kids #trans femme

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By: prof_curiosity1

Published: Apr 30, 2026

In the 1980s, child development was a serious and well funded discipline. Piaget's legacy was still being actively debated. Attachment theory was being refined and tested across cultures. Longitudinal studies were following children from infancy into adulthood. Researchers from incompatible theoretical traditions were competing to publish novel findings about how children develop their sense of self, their understanding of the social world, and their relationship to their own bodies.

Nobody found the trans child.

This is not a small omission. If a significant proportion of children possessed an innate, fixed gender identity incongruent with their biological sex, identifiable in early childhood and resistant to change, the researchers of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s would have found them. These were skilled observers motivated by professional competition to identify and publish novel developmental phenomena. Cross-cultural studies were specifically designed to identify universal features of child development that transcended local social conditions. If the trans child existed as a natural developmental category, it would have appeared in that literature. It does not.

What does appear is something more limited and more interesting. A small number of children, predominantly boys, who showed persistent and marked cross-sex identification across multiple contexts and over time. Richard Green's longitudinal research, published as The Sissy Boy Syndrome in 1987, followed forty four feminine boys over fifteen years. The finding that the affirmative model has consistently declined to engage with is that the overwhelming majority of these children, by adulthood, did not identify as transgender. They identified as gay. The cross-sex identification of childhood was a developmental way station on the path to adult homosexuality, not evidence of an innate gender identity requiring affirmation and medical consolidation.

It is important to acknowledge rare historical cases of profound and persistent cross-sex identification that do appear in the medical literature from the early twentieth century onward. Clinicians such as Harry Benjamin documented a small number of individuals with severe, longstanding dysphoria who later transitioned. These exceptions existed, but they were exceptional in severity, prevalence, and developmental trajectory, bearing little resemblance to the recent surge in adolescent onset, predominantly female referrals with high psychiatric comorbidity. Holding both realities, rare longstanding cases and a dramatic demographically shifted increase, strengthens rather than undermines the case for caution and careful assessment.

The clinical category that existed in that period was gender identity disorder, understood as a presentation requiring careful psychological assessment rather than affirmation. Referrals ran to dozens per year, not thousands. The sex ratio was predominantly male. The presentation was typically longstanding and pervasive. It bore very little resemblance to the clinical population appearing in gender clinics from the early 2010s onwards, when referral numbers increased fifty-fold, the sex ratio inverted to predominantly female, and the average age of presentation shifted toward adolescence.

The affirmative model rests on the claim that trans children have always existed but were previously suppressed or unable to access care. This claim does not survive contact with the historical record. Children were not hiding from developmental researchers conducting longitudinal studies. They were not concealing themselves from clinicians in therapeutic relationships. The absence of the trans child from that literature is not explained by suppression. It is explained by the fact that the clinical category, as currently defined and applied, did not exist.

The cultural mainstream of the 1980s makes this evidential point in an unexpected and illuminating way. The early 1980s produced some of the most provocative and sustained gender nonconformity in the history of popular culture. Boy George appeared on British television in full makeup and elaborate androgynous costuming, watched by millions of children every Saturday morning. Marilyn was more explicitly feminine in presentation than most women in the charts. Annie Lennox performed in suits with cropped hair and a deliberately masculinised aesthetic. David Bowie's personas had already modelled identity fluidity that millions of young people had absorbed through the previous decade.

These were not marginal figures. They modelled, explicitly and unapologetically, the decoupling of gender presentation from biological sex, demonstrating that transgressing gender norms could be aesthetically powerful, commercially successful, and socially celebrated.

And the trans child did not appear.

If cross-sex presentation in culturally prominent figures were sufficient to surface a latent population of children with innate cross sex gender identities, the 1980s provided the conditions. What followed was not a surge in children identifying as the opposite sex. It was a generation who absorbed the lesson that gender presentation was flexible and who went on, in the overwhelming majority, to identify as the biological sex they were born while expanding their understanding of what that sex could look and feel like.

The gender benders of the 1980s were doing something genuinely radical. They demonstrated that biological sex and gender presentation could be separated without requiring a claim about inner identity. Boy George did not claim to be a woman. Annie Lennox did not claim to be a man. The affirmative model collapses precisely this distinction, insisting that cross-sex presentation is evidence of cross-sex identity and that discomfort with gender norms is evidence of gender incongruence. The gender benders suggested something different and developmentally more liberating. They suggested that the norms themselves were the problem, not the person failing to fit them.

The history of adolescent subcultures makes the same point in a different register. Punk, goth, and emo each provided identity frameworks for young people who did not fit comfortably into mainstream social categories. They attracted millions of genuinely distressed young people who found community, identity, and a sense of belonging experienced as deeply authentic and self-defining. And then, for the overwhelming majority, it passed. Not because the distress was insincere, but because adolescent identity formation is a process, not a destination. The subculture provided a holding environment, in Winnicott's sense, within which a provisional identity could be tried, inhabited, and eventually revised as development continued.

The population now presenting to gender clinics overlaps substantially, demographically and psychologically, with the populations that previous generations brought to goth and emo subcultures. Predominantly female. Disproportionately carrying anxiety, depression, autism, and trauma histories. Finding, in a new identity framework transmitted through peer networks and online communities, a vocabulary for distress that feels immediately like recognition.

The difference is not in the young people. It is in what the surrounding institutions do with the presentation. Goth and emo were not medicalised. Schools did not reorganise their safeguarding frameworks around them. Parents who were concerned were not characterised as abusive. The young people who inhabited those identities were left to continue developing, with the result that development continued.

Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework predicts that the institutional response is the variable that matters. A distressing experience that finds a subcultural home produces a subcultural phenomenon. The same experience meeting a clinical pathway embedded across multiple institutional levels simultaneously produces persistence, medicalisation, and the foreclosure of the developmental process through which the identity might otherwise have been revised.

Goth did not produce a fifty-fold increase in referrals to any clinical service. Emo did not invert the sex ratio of any diagnostic category. Boy George did not trigger a generation of children presenting to gender clinics. They produced a generation of adults who remember their adolescent subcultural identity and their gender bending cultural heroes with affection mixed maybe with some embarrassment, and who are grateful that nobody offered them hormones at the point of maximum intensity.

The trans child of the 1980s was not hiding. What was there, in every generation, was a population of distressed and searching young people who needed, and in most cases eventually found, their way through the developmental process that adolescence requires. What changed was not the young people, and not the cultural permission for gender nonconformity, which was more visible and celebrated in the 1980s mainstream than it has been since. What changed was what the institutions around distressed young people decided to do when they arrived. That decision, and its consequences, is what the developmental literature had the tools to predict and what the clinical record has now confirmed.

#Leor Sapir #gender bending #trans child #trans kids #gender nonconforming #gender noncomformity #gender identity #gender ideology #gender identity ideology #religion is a mental illness

HAPPY TRANS VISIBILITY DAY! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️⚧️

So let me take the change to elaborate on a character I posted about a while back

Meet Aras

A trans Enby Ghorman kid.

At 7 years old, they were beginning to feel uncomfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth, but they lost their parents in an accident before they could talk to them about it.

Their uncle then sold them to slavers, who not only treated them like the gender they no longer felt comfortable with, but never taught them them how to speak basic, only to understand it. Leaving them to feel like they didn’t had a voice.

Then they were rescued, and not only did the Jedi made feel like they were listening to, but let them open up to how they feel about their identity.

Aras isn’t their birth name, but they name they choose in memory of their parents, Aren and Asari. A name the chose when they were ask who they were right after being rescued. And now lives with a loving family. A family that understands them, and helps them communicate with others.

#star wars #trans day of visibility #tdov #trans enby #trans child #Star Wars oc #Star Wars fan fic #nonbinary #transgender

Woke up like this…..🥺💋

Children are stupid. They're very, very stupid.

#trans child #trans kids #gender identity #gender ideology #gender identity ideology #kids are stupid #children are stupid #religion is a mental illness

"More inappropriate than you know"

#transgender #dear abby #trans child #parenting advice #trans offspring

Vetted Calli update: thank you so much! Still far to go THIS IS STILL A NEED!!! – @chingaderita on Tumblr

(last post)

Note: Calli's meds on Monday's at half price instead of paying almost $300 every other day of week. They generally have to leave Internet cafe at 9: or 9:10 pm central to reach stores before they close . as they lack a car and have to walk

Donation methods: Paypal or Kofi(portfolio image

Donation methods: Paypal or Kofi((portfolio imag

Nov 23 My eldest son had one of the worst nights in his life. All I can say is we managed to keep him safe through the night, he is safe at home. He thought he could keep raw dogging his dysphoria but he clearly needs to start HRT and transitioning. He is very avoidant of asking for anything because knows we barely get the money for food and other basics. I don't want to lose my son because of money. I want him to have access to a happy life. What if I'm not there next time to stop him?"

THIS IS STILL A NEED!!!

Need to cover food expenses and a bill we hadn't considered!!!"

vetting: vouched for by @transgendz who is vetted by scam-buster kyra 45 (pictures below). transcript below cut

And another campaign vouching, (ignore misgendering as English not first language)