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Thanks for that insight, Pam. I think you've nailed the key problems with child transitioning.
I also totally agree with this: 'Some people need to realize that it is okay to be an effeminate boy or a masculine girl.'
Absolutely. Bizarrely, we seem to have moved away from what was a growing idea that there are many ways to be male and many ways to be female and in some ways stepped back towards more fixed notions of masculinity and femininity, by default - if people who are simply a more masculine girl or a more feminine boy are identifying, or being encouraged to identify, as the other gender because they don't seem to fit comfortably into a standard notion of what male and female are like... it seems a retrograde step to me.
Many of us feel at various times, particularly when growing up, as if we don't entirely fit our gender - we see a particular way of being male or female on tv, in our schools, in culture generally and it doesn't reflect us and that can make us question ourselves in various ways. I think there is a danger in misreading that as somehow akin to the far more profound (as I understand it) sense of dislocation and wrongness that transgender people experience. And it speaks to a tightening of gender conceptions if to be a more masculine girl means you must therefore be male, or to be a more feminine boy means you must therefore be female.
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