Love would mean not condemning someone’s identity as “wrong” when it does no harm whatsoever. Not inflicting harm by teaching the clearly erroneous view that sex and gender are sorted into two neat, discrete sets. Loving UNCONDITIONALLY, and continuing to offer that love, whomever your child should turn out to be… straight, gay, bi, cis, trans, boy, girl, whatever. To love them enough to not harm their ability to love themselves simply to maintain an outdated, clearly erroneous view that sex and gender are sorted into two neat, discrete sets.

Speaking of which, why are there still segregated scout troops? Last time I checked the Victorian age had been over for about a century.

How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?

There are very interesting comments on the post as well.

I’m assuming that a MTF transsexual has that same innate feeling of being female, regardless of the external bits. (Please do correct me if I’ve got this wrong!)

In fourth grade (I would have been 10) I went to a K-12 private school and the phys ed class had to change in the locker room, sometimes crossing paths with the older boys who played on the athletic teams. (And one of them may have been – mirabile dictu! – Christopher Reeve, although I don’t specificcally remember him.) There was definitely sexual attraction forming by then.

I have no trouble believing that orientation and identity begin developing quite early.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. There are definitely lots of people who have non-binary gender identities. I was just trying to keep the discussion from moving in the direction of misinterpreting transgenderism as being about how well one does or does not fit into stereotypical gender roles, when such socially mandated things are quite beside the point of how an individual relates to their physiological sex. That confusion leads to misunderstandings like what were just exemplified in Paladin’s post: “wait… why does playing with dolls make someone a girl?” (answer: it doesn’t. Having an internal sense of self consistent with female-ness makes someone a girl, regardless of their assigned sex or relative “femininity”). So I tend to jump pretty quick whenever I see a conversation on trans issues straying in the direction of that tenacious misunderstanding. But yeah, I don’t in the slightest bit dismiss the existence of genderqueer, androgyne and non-binary identities and experiences, and think they’re just as valid as anything else. But accepting them won’t necessarily automatically lead to accepting binary trans identities, like with Bobby Montoya. And in certain corners of the gender movement, such identities are sometimes privileged above binary trans identities… with genderqueer folk being seen as radical and forward-thinking and sexy while binary trans women are often regarded as stuffy, boring, conservative, decidedly unsexy agents of patriarchy and binary outdated roles. Which sucks, because we’re all aiming for the exact same thing: being ourselves, whatever our selves may be.