Genuine question here, and one which you may prefer not to answer given your own circumstances, as always I like to be clear that I am not intending to make you uncomfortable.
In cases like the above, where does one start with whether this is in fact a trans child, or whether this is a child with mental health issues and quite possibly parenting issues, who has been let down by the health service. I know from the posts from Monkers that your own childhood was extremely difficult, and I also know we know nothing about the child in this very sad news story. For yourself do you genuinely feel that it was something innate with you, or do you think that your circumstances contributed to your later decision to transition?
I think that this is probably one of the hardest things to understand, and many feel that transitioning at all should be banned and the matter treated solely as a mental disorder. I'm somewhere in the middle ground which says that it should be something considered as a last course of action after a great deal of consideration and therapeutic discussion although I do veer towards the thought that we shouldn't be offering chemical and surgical transition at all, in favour of working on a person accepting themself for who they are, whoever that might be.
See post 18168
Gender dysphoria is a condition of the mind, but is not the same as an illness. Every body has an inner voice, it is more developed apparently in some people than in others. We use it to read quietly, for private thoughts, for thinking especially strategic thinking like playing chess, and we use it for self-regulation of our own behaviour. When the brain does not accept it is own congruence with the expectations of others to live in the social role of the culture it finds itself in, it rejects that culture. From the time I was a toddler, I was protesting, ''I am not a boy''. I didn't know about genitals and the like, I knew that I was never going to fit in as a boy, or as a man. I wasn't going to able able to live a life in the gender role of a woman unless I changed. I knew that my gender role was that of a girl. Everything else needed to be adjusted to align with that. I made those changes, it was affirming.
I'm dismayed when I hear the ''born in the wrong body'' narrative. I guess it was a limited understanding at the time it used to be heard. I suppose on some level it served as a metaphor for not being comfortable in one's own skin. It's intention was to try to make others understand. However I dislike it as it has implications rooted in some supreme being in charge of an assembly line, an assembly of the wrong parts. It's my brain, it's my body. The adjustments are relatively minor. It is not cosmetic, it is reinforcing identity. Some women who lose their breasts to cancer, grieve for them, not because they require their function, but because it is bodily identity.
The narrative that trans women harm women by rape is pure nonsense - the biological truth is that hormones soon put a stop to any possibility of that. The allegation of sexual fetish are nonsense. There are people under the transgender umbrella that like kink, just as there are cisgender people that like kink. If one spends all of one's time lurking in 400 spaces in some belief that this passes as research, that is very dubious, and the question that must follow is, how much time to they spend in hundreds of cisgender kink sites. So people just love spending their life looking for something to object to, when all they need to do is exercise their right not to, and be doing something else.
For me, especially at the age, it wasn't at all about the body, but being told I must fit to the gender boundaries of being 'a boy'. The more I protested, the more my parents tried to enforce male stereotypes. My father would force me onto the floor and try to wrestle me into submission with twisted limbs to make me agree, ''say it, say it, you are a boy, and you'll grow up to me a man like me''. I never submitted to that agreement, and so I was beaten black and blue from the age of three - routinely. I was defiant - ''I am not a boy'' turned later to ''I will never be your son''. And now, I am not a man, I can never be a man, not physically, and not emotionally. It's this or death. Not hyperbole, literally that.
I recovered from the abuse of my parents, but some people in society can be so very cruel - vicious - the abuse of trans people in the UK is constant. It's to be seen on this platform, in not just one thread, but two.
It isn't like that in most of Europe. Though I can easily live in stealth, the incessant transphobic noise of the UK is impossible to avoid and long-term its effect is devastating. I don't believe the British people are inherently transphobic, there's just a lot of noise from a smallish band of transphobic gobshites. Their excuse is that there are women who have suffered abuse, and they believe that trans women are just like those who abused them. Not only is there not supporting evidence, there is evidence to the contrary.
VAWG cover the UK situation well in their documents. They set out who harms who. The facts are that women suffer terrible levels of physical and sexual abuse, but about 85% is in the home, visited upon them by men they know and can identify. The police don't have to go looking even, they are identifiable and findable. The system fails women and girls miserably time and again, just as it initially failed me as a child. I was eventually rescued at the age of nine, just not by the state. My treatment was paid for privately, so it was timely. Not all are so fortunate. I count my blessings.
