4 year olds able to change gender in Scotland

Tbf,while ive no doubt your enjoying reeling in posters

Where do those,whom are born intersex fit in your worldview??

I think that's an eminently sensible way to raise a child, and agree that the most important thing to teach children is to be kind to others, and to be understanding of them. My boy loves unicorns, and pink is one of his favourite colours. But that doesn't make me think anything at all about his "gender". Unicorns are aesthetically very attractive, and pink is a bright, happy colour. It makes complete sense that a child—whatever their sex—would like those things. He also insisted for a little while last year on being called "Jeff" (not his name). So I obliged, and he was very amused, and then he decided he didn't like it and went back to tell me he was The Hulk. Had he insisted on being called "Jane", I would still have obliged—and I still would not have thought it had any bearing on his "gender". He will be a degree of masculine and a degree of feminine, and I will love him regardless of how much of either he is on any given day. But he will never be female.

I think adults can do whatever they want to do, so long as they're not harming anyone else. If a person suffering with gender dysphoria has their psychological pain eased by changing their body and presenting to the world as the opposite sex, they can go right ahead and I'm not going to be an asshole about it. But if my child comes to me and tells me they're suffering with gender dysphoria, feel that they are the opposite sex, or whatever, then I will continue my policy of being honest with them. It is impossible to change sex. A male person can never, ever become a female person and a female person can never, ever become a male person. Just as an intersex person, however they present, is lumped with being intersex forever, because it is written into the very code that creates them.

A person with gender dysphoria can take hormones and have surgeries and alter their male bodies to approximate the generally accepted view of what a "female body" is externally (or vice versa), but then they will be a male with an altered body, not a female. And in the course of altering that body, they will be committing themselves to a lifelong hormone therapy that can and does have severe long-term health consequences, because their biology will never stop being a part of the reality—and the body—they live in. And the hormone therapies and physical interventions that are offered to them cause lasting, often permanent changes, which will remain if they end up being one of the increasing number of desisters.

I'm frankly not surprised that the prevalence of "gender questioning" people is increasing. Partly due to the increased visibility of trans people allowing genuinely dysphoric young people to feel more comfortable, yes, but also because, for all our talk of equality and gender neutral this and that, Western societies are actually doing a bloody awful job with gender and sex. To look at our entertainment media—a huge part of any post-productivity culture—one would think that the only way to "be" a woman is to spend hours in the salon, getting haircuts and lash extensions, micro-bladed brows and lip fillers, dental veneers and fake tan. There seems to be little room in our culture—at least in the parts of it we hold up for display—for the shy, nerdy girls, or the dark, creative girls, or the book-smart butch girls. And in any case, we tell girls, you are weak and at-risk at every moment because you are female. As far as boys go, our cultural messages are all bout their "toxicity", their dominance, their easy life and privilege. It doesn't matter, in our culture, how you decide to "be" a man—you are a villain, and this holds true regardless of the actual level of privilege you enjoy, and no matter how kind and compassionate you may be. So I find myself completely unsurprised when an increasing number of girls and boys, young women and young men, particularly if they are steeped in an online culture that sees "not cisgender" as somehow superior or better, start believing in and playing with their "gender identity".

And I honestly don't see much wrong with young people playing around with their identity. Young people's job is to "find themselves" in the complicated mire of life, to play around with their personalities and experiment with different things. The issues arise when the adults in the room all decide to abdicate their responsibility and allow themselves to be pressured by Twitter mobs and extremely ideologically driven charities. When instead of seeing the "gender identity" play as a current-day subculture that runs parallel to the phenomenon of people with genuine and severe gender dysphoria—the same way society viewed other subcultures like punk, goth, emo, new romantics, and even the MySpace "list your phobias" lot that immediately preceded the gender identity subculture—they allow themselves to bullied into a position where the subculture gets to dictate policy, up to and including the irreversible medicalising of children and young people, and where any suggestion or attempt to treat the psychological issues of people within the subculture that do not comport with an affirmation-only model are treated as being identical to (horrific) homosexual conversion therapy as though they were one and the same.

Some of the most devastating stories I've read from desisters have involved young people who, a few years after starting hormones, sometimes after having irreversible surgeries, have come to the realisation "I will never be the opposite sex". I think we are failing those people by not being clear enough about sex and the behavioural spectrum from masculine to feminine, because we are failing (still) to decouple masculine from male and feminine from female, instead of making clear that "gender" is nothing more than a statement about whether a given behaviour or trait is more common in males or females in a given culture, which is subject to change over time. We need to be more robustly teaching children about the differences between male and female humans (a thing we have no problem with when it comes to any other sexually dimorphic species) and celebrating both, while also letting them know that their interests and preferences, however common they happen to be in either sex in our culture, are acceptable. Ultimately the goal (IMO) should be to greatly reduce the instanced of unnecessary gender confusion, be frank with young people about the path ahead if they transition, reduce "desisters" to a number as close to zero as it is possible to get by offering good, long-term support through the questioning phase, and give genuinely long-term gender dysphoric people the treatments they need to alleviate their psychological suffering (including, in the case of physical transition, tools to deal with the fact that they cannot control the minds of others, and that many people will not ever really see them as being the opposite sex).

Arguments about sex-based rights aside, the goal should always be to reduce suffering. Giving children facts about the immutability of sex and the nebulous nature of "gender" can only help, and telling Jeff, who now wants to be called Jane and wear a skirt in school, that he's now a girl, does not seem helpful. The guidance not to even question children's requests to change name or use a different toilet, even before they're at an age where they can tie their own shoe laces, seems to me to be a path that can only increase confusion.

As for telling the parents—I imagine that is open to legal challenge, should any parent decide to take that route. Teachers are not qualified to assess whether a child who wishes to present in ways more generally associated with the opposite sex are suffering from gender dysphoria, a DSM5-classified mental disorder, and would therefore be potentially interfering with the parent's ability to seek adequate psychological help and support for their child.