The Gender Creative Child by Diane Ehrensaft

“There are some things that are pretty universal. “Are you having daily battles about clothing before school?” Olson-Kennedy says. The important thing to ask is whether your child is in distress. I’m the boy who occasionally wants to wear girl’s clothes,” says Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. “If I’m a kid who occasionally wants to put on my mom’s high-heeled shoes or wear my mom’s princess dress, I’m not the kid who wants to live as a girl. I am girl.’ So why can’t that also apply to transgender children?” “It’s not something the child says one time and it goes away.”įor critics who question whether preschool-age kids should be allowed to “socially transition,” Ehrensaft says: “We expect a 2-year-old to know ‘I am boy. Transgender children will be insistent, consistent and persistent about their gender dysphoria, she says. “What we know is, you have a son who likes princess dresses. “My answer is, we don’t know,” says Diane Ehrensaft, a developmental and clinical psychologist, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center and author of “The Gender Creative Child.” The Associated Press spoke to gender experts to answer some of parents’ most commonly asked questions. How can a parent know if their child is transgender? What separates a young boy who might be transgender from one with a vivid imagination who likes to dress up in his sister’s dresses? What do you do if your daughter tells you she’s a boy?

The Gender Creative Child by Diane Ehrensaft