Ugh! There are donor gametes out there for couples including a trans partner. My husband didn’t get to get anything frozen before he transitioned, so we used donor sperm. Adoption is way too invasive, exclusive, & expensive to be an option for everyone.

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This is the exact reason why I love Autostraddle and why I am hellbent on going to A-Camp in September. THANK YOU.

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-”girls tend to like piercings, and boys like shorter hair, so why not start there?” Gender norms are always a great thing to push on your kid right? Why not let them pick out clothing and/or a haircut that they want, with minimal influence from their parents?

-”Also, odds are your kid won’t want pronouns out of the gate” There might be some kid somewhere who won’t/didn’t, but I’ve known a lot of trans kids, and I have yet to meet one who, upon coming out to their parents, didn’t want them to use the pronouns of their correct gender.

-”new gender” is used a bunch of times. Yes, it may be new to the parents, but it goes back to the want thing. They’ve always been that gender, the parents just didn’t know.

-”Hormones can be a comfort for kids, but never let them be a crutch. If they’re younger, tell them that if their body starts making them too much like a girl or a boy, they can stop that if they feel comfortable with it. If older, only if they can come to you knowing everything good and bad these drugs do. It’s important that they understand their identity emotionally before they get too fixated on their identity chemically. (Hormones don’t fix the self, they just give it different wrapping paper)”

First, no mention of hormone blockers at all? Yes, they’re expensive, but going through the wrong puberty is one of the most unpleasant things. Plus, you would be saving money on top surgery/electrolysis in the long run. Second, the wrapping paper analogy is just terrible. Yes, they don’t change the “self” as the author puts it, but they can be a very big, life affirming thing for a lot of trans folks.

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I always believed in unconditional love when raising a family. I reinforced this over the years, along with raising my daughters to embrace diversity. When I came out to my daughters as being both pansexual and a woman of transsexual history, they both hugged me and told me that they loved me unconditionally and wanted me to be happy. If you give unconditional love and support, it will come back to you.

Growing up, I told my mother as early as 2 or 3 that I KNEW I was a girl. She was as supportive as a parent could be in the dark days of the early 1950′s, living under the shadow of the cold war and McCarthyism. I did have to keep quiet to my dad though and eventually when things came to light, he made my life difficult.

Thankfully today, more parents are embracing their kids differences and letting them explore. My best friend still (after 55 years) had many similarities in his childhood, and is today married to his husband six years (and together with him for 43). So although we had similarities in our childhood exploration, we ended up at two different places as adults. Which is why you want to let the child more or less tell you where they’re at and not try to rush conclusions.

I do note some misconceptions in many articles on the topic. For one, I would like to see writers use “cisgender” rather than “genetic”, “non-trans”, “biological”, or born”. Research has shown that our brains are actually the gender we KNOW (I’d rather say “know” than “feel” or “think” because those imply being less than positive or less than physical) that they are intrinsically, instinctively. The last time I checked, my (female)brain was physical, organic, biological, and genetic. I was never a boy/man. For me it is a matter of correcting a birth defect and bringing an errant body into congruence with who I truly am.

For noting birth in an article, I prefer CAMAB/CAFAB (coercively assigned male/female at birth). Essentially the attending person at a birth takes a quick look at genitalia and makes an educated guess as to the SEX of the baby. The only way you can know what someone’s GENDER is is to ask them what it is. As someone once pointed out “There are cis women and there are trans women, but they are both women.” (Same for cis and trans men).

The other misconception I see often enough to mention it, is the idea that in an ideal world of acceptance, we would not need to transition. I can say for myself that all the acceptance in the world would not change my need to transition and be as fully as possible, the person I truly am.

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http://www.amazon.com/The-Transgender-Child-Handbook-Professionals/dp/1573443182

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I find the idea of grieving for the child you don’t have when your child enters transition odd. I know its something people go though, but your kid is exactly the person they always were, you just had the wrong information about one part of their person. And they’ll probably change during the process but they’d be changing anyway because people do as they grow up and have experiences etc. (This may be because my own experience of gender is apparently odd – I find it to be something almost entirely externally imposed based on how other people percieve me)

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