12-23-2024, 06:59 PM
(12-23-2024, 06:21 PM)Byrd Wrote: Look at it from the OTHER way -- investigating in a very subtle way HOW kids who say they are transgender think about social roles (without asking directly, because some kids will lie and some won't be able to say what they think because it's too complex.} And kids with brothers and sisters have already seen genitalia; I think what they'll be given reflects that kind of build -- a really generic shape that you can make male or female (or not bother with)
It also reflects what they think about their own roles in society.
For example, some girls of my generation didn't like the usual girls dolls and took apart their Barbies (while treating the Breyer model horses well, I should add) and modified them. Barbies just didn't represent what these girls were or what they wanted (I took to paper dolls, myself, because I could create a female figure that was different than what society wanted for girls.) If they'd given me a range of dolls to play with, I'd have dressed the girls in boys' clothes (I hated skirts) and put them in Range Rovers (to go adventuring) and so forth. My paper dolls always had paper horses (with tack) and hand-drawn adventuring things. Forget babies and tea parties -- I wanted dragon and dinosaur hunting and venturing out on safari!
So if a child creates a genderless doll and interacts with it, what they do and present may give a better idea of what is happening (such as...they know a trans person and wanted to play with the idea.) Or if they create a doll of the gender to which they want to transition, you can see how they think about that gender. Do the M-to-F group think that they will be more nurtured if they transition... do the F-to-M group think that they will be better accepted for some of their interests... etc.
Games would reveal a lot more than sitting down and asking questions that the child might not be willing to answer (or be unable to answer) --and could lead to information that would tell psychologists IF a child is doing this to escape some sort of home trauma.
I feel like I'm not in harmony with some of what you offer, I mean that respectfully.
It could be my own errant considerations but I'm not inclined to see the useful correlation between what can be observed in children's organic play with application to "society."
Children (presumably)) have some very distinct constraints in mimicry, which is part of the trinity of 'play' to my mind... mimicry, modeling, and synthesis. Kids operate from a truncated vantage point... their "society" can be fairly summed up with one word... "family." As a child's activities extend beyond family... to include friends and "adults," they haven't really experienced enough time to internalize "social order." This is natural, they are children. (Innocence is bliss... which children truly require to thrive.)
Perhaps I'm too simplistic, but I contend that "identity" is not a part of growing up; identity is the result of growing up.
Subjecting children to bizarre externalities and observing what happens seems to say more about the researchers than the research, to my uneducated mind.
But I admit, the results might prove useful to any willing to infer the narrative that in every child their is a crisis of gender brewing... (and there always has been.)
