Anonymous wrote:
[Up]
Anonymous
I would be fine with it at any age.
I would be particularly happy if my child's school had transgender staff at the preschool and high school levels. At the preschool level, kids are exploring identity, they're learning to accept and to make their own decisions about who they like and don't like. So, providing them access to a wide diversity of people is important to me. At the high school level, so many young adults are struggling with identity. Again, having adults in the building that they can turn to is really important, so the diversity of the HS staff is particularly important to me.
But there is no age at which it would bother me.
I wonder if you'd feel the same way if your 4 year old tells you they want to change genders, too, just like the teacher.
My preschooler, like most preschoolers, did sometimes express a desire to be like a teacher or other adult that he loved. He told me at one point that he was going to wear a bra one day so he could be "just like me". He told me he was going to have brown skin and grow his very straight blond hair to be like Mr. X at gymnastics who wore long dreadlocks. It wouldn't surprise me that if he had someone he loved who changed their gender identity that he would want to explore and talk about that concept. He also at times expressed a desire to be a baby again, to be an adult, and even to be various animals. But for my kid, who wasn't transgender, these were fleeting desires. The same day he talked about wearing a bra, or spent 3 hours in the princess dress at daycare, might have been the same day he was thrilled to explore his ability to pee standing up. The same day he told me he wanted to be a dog, he happily demonstrated that he could go across the monkey bars, a process that requires opposable thumbs.
If he had expressed consistent gender dysphoria, that is if he had maintained that he was a girl, and was consistently unhappy when people forced a male identity on him, then we would have dealt with it. I would have worried, of course, because transgender people can have a difficult path to walk, but I would have supported him. If we had been lucky enough to have a transgender adult in his life, teacher or otherwise, who could support him through a transition, I would have been thrilled. I certainly wouldn't have thought that that person had caused him to be transgender.
|