097: How to support gender-creative children

Recently a listener posted a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group asking about research related to children who are assigned to one gender at birth, but later realize that this assigned gender doesn’t match the gender they experience.   Another listener recommended Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s book The Gender-Creative Child, and we are fortunate that Dr. Ehrensaft quickly agreed to speak. Listener Elizabeth co-interviews with me as we learn how to truly listen to our children when they tell us about their gender, and what we can do to help them navigate a world full of people who may know very little about – and even fear – children whose gender does not conform to expectations.   While we didn’t get a chance to discuss it (too many other topics to cover!), you might also be interested to learn about the “They-by” movement, which advocates for allowing children to choose their own gender when they feel the time is right, rather than the parents assigning a gender at birth based on the child’s genetalia.   Here are some especially recommended resources:   Human Rights Campaign’s Guide on supporting transgender children: https://assets2.hrc.org/files/documents/SupportingCaringforTransChildren.pdf?_ga=2.156922811.1499059672.1559845994-1938179427.1559845994   Recommended books for children – for ALL children, not just those actively exploring their gender identity (note: these are affiliate links): 10,000 Dresses The Adventures of Tulip, Birthday Wish Fairy My Princess Boy The Paperbag Princess Mama, Mommy, and Me Daddy, Papa, and Me Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity I am Jazz Julian is a Mermaid Introducing Teddy   Read Full Transcript Jen: 00:01:21 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a topic that originated from a question in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. Now, sometimes I have questions on my list for a long time, but other times when someone expresses an interest in a topic, they also point me toward a place to start the research, which really does speed things up and that's actually what happened with this episode. So, listener Elizabeth asked if I'd done an episode on children's gender identity and some other listeners chimed in with potential resources, one of which was Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s book, The Gender Creative Child. And after I read the book, I knew that Dr. Diane Ehrensaft was the right person to talk to about this topic. So, she's here with us today. Dr. Ehrensaft is a Developmental and Clinical Psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Director of Mental Health and founding member of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, a partnership between the University of California, San Francisco and community agencies to provide comprehensive into disciplinary services and advocacy to gender conforming and transgender children and youth and their families. She's an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco and the chief psychologist at the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Child and Adolescent Gender Center Clinic. Her research and writing focuses on the areas of child development, gender, gender nonconforming and transgender children and youth parenting, parent-child relationships and LGBTQI families. She also serves on the board of Gender Spectrum and National Organization offering educational training and advocacy services to promote gender acceptance for youth of all genders. Welcome Dr. Ehrensaft. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:02:52 Thank you so much for having me. Jen: 00:02:54 So, to help us understand more about the research on this topic as well as what to do with it practically in our real lives as parents, listener Elizabeth is here as well. Her child, John was assigned a male gender at birth. John is now 4 and has been telling his parents pretty insistently for a while now that he is a girl, even though he still likes to use the pronouns he, him and his as well as the name his parents gave him at birth. Welcome Elizabeth. Elizabeth: 00:03:18 Thank you. I am glad to be here as well. Jen: 00:03:20 And so I do want to say briefly before we get started that even if your child seems fairly convinced that the gender they were assigned at birth is the one they want to express, that you might want to listen to this episode anyway because I'd say there's a reasonable chance that somebody in your child's class is probably somehow exploring their gender identity. And so knowing the information we're gonna discuss today will help both you and your child be a better friend and ally. So, let's start off with some terminology please, Dr. Ehrensaft because I didn't know a lot about this topic before I started researching it. And even now I find I have to constantly revisit the definitions to remember what's what. So, can you kind of give us a crash course in some of the terminology we’ll be using today, please? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:04:00 Absolutely. So, we start out with what we call the sex designated at birth and the sex designated at birth is usually what you will see on a birth certificate and it's typically one or the other F or M and that essentially is based primarily on your chromosomes, whether you have XX or XY chromosomes. And it's usually determined by whoever delivered the baby, looking between the baby's legs and seeing what genitalia up here and then declaring the sex of the baby. It's often declared before birth these days in a sonogram, so that you can know early in your child's gestation what people think the sex of your baby's going to be. So it's just physical. Gender is the next thing. And that's very different than sex. We actually don't assign a gender at birth. We assign a sex at birth and that's the physical part. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:04:58 Then the world around the baby comes in to match that sex with the gender. And the gender is really how we live out being male, female or other in the world and it's based both on inside and outside. And certainly has a very strong social component, looks really different from one culture to another, but I don't know any culture in the world that does not use some organization around gender, not necessarily into boxes. And when we understand gender, let’s divide that up. There's a gender identity and that is who I know myself to be as male, female or other. It's just an inner sense of being. Your gender expressions have more to do with how you do gender. For a little kid that might be the clothes they wear, the toys they play with, the kids they want to play with, the activities that they want to do, how they move and so forth. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:06:00 And sometimes we lump the two together and it's really important to keep them separate. And those two things, again, needs to be kept separate from our sexual identities. And we often lump all three together, gender identity, gender expressions and sexual identity or orientation. They are absolutely different. Gender is one path, sexuality is another, then they cross, but really your sexuality is who you desire, who you are attracted to, who you want to be with. And it might be someone who is the same gender as you, someone who's opposite or different gender than you. All these things come in quite different combinations, which is the beauty of it all. Jen: 00:06:44 Okay. Already having a hard time keeping it straight in my head. So to summarize, I guess gender identity and expression is kind of about who you are. Is that a good way of thinking about it? And sexual identity and expression is about who you desire? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:06:59 Mm-hmm. Jen: 00:07:00 Okay. Okay, super. That helps then. And so then we start talking about things like cisgender, gender-expansive. Can you talk a little bit about those? Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:07:08 Yes. The cisgender people in the world are the people who are experiencing the gender they lived at, usually starting out with who their parents assumed them to be based on their sex. And so their gender is the same and matches the sex designated to them at birth. So, those are our cisgender people. And then our transgender or gender-expansive people, people who are saying, I have a different match. It's not based in our culture, the gender binary boy, girl, man, woman. So it might be, for example, a little person who says, you all have it wrong. You think I'm a boy, but I am a girl, I am a girl with a penis. I'm an XY girl. So, transgender means a cross that your gender does not match the sex designated to you at birth and those are transgender children. Dr. Ehrensaft: 00:08:14...