One of the more memorable scenes from To Kill A Mockingbird was the fist fight started by Jean Louise “Scout” Finch against Walter Cunningham on the playground. Facing the consequences with her father, Atticus Finch, Scout is not told that she should be ladylike or that girls should not fight. Instead, he tells her that he does not want his children to fight. Period.
A Tomboy is a Girl
Atticus (and the author, Harper Lee) knew an important fact that parents today must remember: It’s normal for some girls to be tomboys. While the term may seem archaic and even politically “incorrect,” it is a healthy representation of the wide range of roles and behavior which is, indeed, normal for a girl and should be celebrated as gender appropriate.
So if your daughter would rather shoot hoops or a BB gun rather than joining the other girls who are trying on make-up — congratulations. You have a normal girl.
If your daughter would rather wear long basketball shorts and a Cavs t-shirt instead of the short-shorts and midriff tops her friends prefer — that’s super. You have a normal girl.
If your daughter would rather sign up for ice hockey or boxing rather than ballet or gymnastics — that’s awesome. You have a normal girl.
And even if your daughter expresses a wish to be a boy so she can wear swim trunks or not have a period or not have to wear a bra — that’s terrific. She is a normal girl.
Transgenderism and Stereotypes
With the advent of the transgender movement for children, we are reverting to old stereotypes of what a girl should and should not be. Rather than considering a girl “not really” a girl because she chooses traditionally male activities or dress or wishes to be a boy at times, we should be celebrating the normality of her growing up and exploring the kind of woman she will become.
Just as women can perform “men’s” work and take on “men’s” roles (and vice versa), girls can participate in “boy’s” activities and explore “boy’s” roles. This is all within the range of normal girlhood, and healthy, normal womanhood. (Fr. Mike Schmitz’ video “Bruce Jenner and the Transgender Question” is excellent and appropriate viewing for pre-teens for discussion.)
Recently, the American College of Pediatricians stated, “Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait. The ACP urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts — not ideology — determine reality.” The physicians went further, and stated that sex changes are tantamount to child abuse.
We know that God not only created us male and female, but imbued each of us with unique gifts, attributes, and ways of expressing that complementary masculinity and femininity. There is more than one way to be a man or to be a woman.
So parents, your tomboy should be celebrated and affirmed as a normal girl who will grow into a healthy, normal woman. It is the way God made her to be.
9 thoughts on “Transgenderism and Girl Stereotypes”
I remember being about 7 years old and touching (ouch) the hot gas coming out the tailpipe of our car and asking my dad if this was going to heat up the whole sky. He laughed and said “ No “ then explained that nothing could fill up that much volume. New thoughts – old thought. About 5 years later I became aware of the still bubbling mess over a man named George W Jorgensen who had been drafted into the army and served out his hitch in WW II before going to Sweden in 1951 to have his penis removed and what was left fashioned into a vagina like body part – and for the life of me could not figure out what would compel someone to do (ouch) such a thing. As time and science and technology soared in ever increasing more than exponential leaps, and situations like twins being born with two heads sharing one body and Siamese twins sharing conjoined full body organs and mass, and people who had two sets of genitals and persons with multiple personalities who were not legally responsible for what one psyche did while the other was dormant – after all this documentary about woman and men being trapped in inappropriate bodies due to rerouted circuitry, I finally decided that if God wasn’t playing dice with the universe,. biology, psychology and mother nature was screwing up big time and that unless one walked in a pair of those shoes it was sinful (pride) to tell these malformed humans what they could and could not do based on my own subjective values. Of course, the people making these decisions have to live with what their free will ordains – and since we all make mistakes we all have been given the same Redeemer to share and confess, each and every time it happens.
Please….this article is totally misleading. Of course, since time immemorial there have been effeminate boys and masculine-traited girls. All variations on the identity continuum in God’s kingdom, to be loved and fostered for who they are. Transgendered people are simply God’s children who believe that they are in the wrong body. It is a condition and they need to be loved and nurtured as they are.
It is shameful to base argument on a statement and conclusion from the American College of Pediatricians . The ACP was an anti-gay splinter group which holds a membership of 60-200, hardly bearing any significance other than to spread of hatred and bigotry. The ACP is identified as a hate group by the Southern Law Poverty Center. Their original focus was to undermine adoption of orphans by gay couples and is based in Florida. They represent no one but themselves and base their agenda on non-science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_College_of_Pediatricians
https://thinkprogress.org/hate-group-masquerading-as-pediatricians-attacks-transgender-youth-544e755c6a20#.zggdsufvt
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/28/speaking-of-bad-science-never-trust-the-american-college-of-pediatricians/
The American College of Pediatricians is a miniscule hate group with few members’ the American Academy of Pediatricians is a professional and academic organization with more staff that the ACP has members. DON”T be taken in by one group masquerading as “real”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Academy_of_Pediatrics
Adam,
What transgender persons suffer from is a form of dysphoria. Their perceptions differ from reality. It is the same as anorexics who perceive themselves as fat, though they are dangerously thin, or persons with body integrity disorder (BID) who perceive that a limb should not be there (arm/leg) when it is. Do we tell the anorexic to continue to starve herself? Do we allow the person with BID to have a limb amputated? No. We know this is mental illness.
Ironically, transgenders use the very natural law definition of man (having a penis, etc) and woman (breasts, vagina) in arguing that they are not a man or a woman. So a woman in a woman’s body says she feels like a man and then surgically deforms her body to be like one (breast and uterus removed). A man in a man’s body feels he is a woman and deforms himself physically to become one.
Why must a man deform himself to look like a woman if gender is all in the mind?
With all respect and prayers to you, this is mental illness made politically correct. And while adults who makes these decisions suffer the consequences on their own, parents who put their children through this are indeed guilty of child abuse.
Truth is not a feeling.
I am quite familiar with BID and the DSM….if what you claim is true, then please provide some peer-reviewed scientific research that transgendered people can be cured … there is research about anorexia and bulimia and BID. Provide an unbiased reference….
http://www.religioustolerance.org/transsexu15.htm
Strange you did not address my serious concerns about the American College of Pediatricians as a fraudulent group.
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Adam,
The ACP is called “fraudulent” because it does not conform to the ideological leanings of the AAP. One example is that the AAP does not support parental notification when minors seek abortions. ACP does. Both entities consist of Board Certified Pediatricians.
And numbers mean nothing. The vast majority of physicians are automatically enrolled into their respective associations once they graduate and get certification as a gift to them. Then their office staff renews so that they will get magazines and info on trips and conferences. (My husband is a physician so I know this as a fact.) Membership does not represent anything more than that for the vast majority of doctors.
Good wishes to you.
Good article, Cynthia. However, referring to people who suffer from gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder as transgender persons or transgenders without at least putting such into quotation marks to indicate the lack of objective truth expressed by the terms alone grants such people a status of being they do not possess. In this regard, I disagree with the otherwise fine work of the American College of Pediatricians who maintain the following:
“No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one. No one is born with an awareness of themselves as male or female; this awareness develops over time and, like all developmental processes, may be derailed by a child’s subjective perceptions, relationships, and adverse experiences from infancy forward. People who identify as ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ or ‘somewhere in between’ do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.” (ACP)
This referring to gender as merely an awareness of oneself as male or female and not an objective stand-alone category not only plays into the hands of subjectivists and others who wish to promote the irrational claims of “transgenderism,” it’s also etymologically inaccurate and misleading.
The roots of the term gender come from the Latin genus, which means kind, or kind of thing. As such, gender is objectively understood as the classification of organisms based on their sex. This being so, everyone is indeed born with a gender, which is either the male gender or the female gender, and it does not matter what they are aware of at birth. For crying out loud, who is aware of much of anything when they are born? Very sloppy work here on the part of the ACP.
In addition, if the term gender stood for merely the awareness of one’s maleness or femaleness, what is the point of adding the term identity or awareness to gender, since gender is already recognized as identity or awareness based on the ACP claim? Taking this further, how could one have a gender identity disorder? Wouldn’t it simply be a gender disorder based on the ACP claim? Yikes! Contradictions and all sorts of confusion abounds when gender is not properly recognized as the objective category denoting male or female as it does.
One more nail in the coffin of the ACP’s notion of gender. When people not suffering from a disorder do become aware of their biological sex as claimed, do they become aware of their awareness since this is the circular nature of the ACP definition?
Or is their gender awareness an awareness that they are part of a particular gender (male or female) that they have been part of all along?
Keep up the good work.
P.S. The disorder you mention as BID is actually BIID, which stands for Body Integrity Identity Disorder. I have done some research and analysis into this disorder, and, sadly, more and more people are pushing for medical personnel to aid with such amputations, which is reminiscent of the euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide movement. The kinds of arguments used to support physician-assisted suicide are also being used to support BIID people in an effort to eventually compromise the medical profession to providing the desired amputations.
Thank you for your thoughtful letter. I was also interested to read an article by Ryan Anderson about extensive studies presented in the New Atlantis journal. Experts in the field essentially take apart all of the subjective and “scientific” claims re this topic as more. See Almost Everything the Media Tell You About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Is Wrong http://dailysign.al/2bufGIf via @ryantand @DailySignal
If 200 psychologists say “2 + 2 + 4” and those who want to change reality or impose their beliefs do not want to debate with them, the recently very successful ploy is to label what they said as “hate speech” and their assembly as a “hate group.” No further discussion necessary. This tactic has now been used all over America, especially on college campuses, to silence anyone who has any view that is not “progressive” or which questions a politically correct dogma. It is a totalitarian approach to non-truth.
Regarding “non-science” – this is another way to stifle debate-by assuming that “science” is acceptable while any mere “belief” system is bollocks, you call what you like and want to back up your position “science” and what you don’t like “non-science.” But “science” is itself based on a belief system. Science is the new amoral religion of the those in power. Much past “science” was simply error; much current “science” is wrong; many scientists are now changed from mere servants of power to fully-funded soldiers of power; and way too much of current “science” is totally fraudulent. . For a fuller treatment, see my CREDO SCIENTIFIC DOGMA at this site. Guy McClung, San Antonio, Texas
Guy, science is always tentative, it is understood to be extremely transitory because
it’s always evolving.- Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics. It boasts ‘no limits’ to knowledge and at the same time understand that some things are forever knowable. It doesn’t rest on its laurels – ever – unlike theology which is represented by institutions that declare inviolate truths with no peer review within the framework of religion(s) that defy each others belief systems. Science is humble in that it makes no promise that can be broken, aware that today’s empirical truth is tomorrow’s historic context. Just as the
church used its power to crush and condemn others so too has science reared an ugly head to subjugate and destroy life. Both disciplines are struggling to come to terms on what is possible between them so wish them peace..