Sir Xsarus wrote:
Given the number of suicides from trans people who've been told they are who they are and shouldn't try to change, seems to indicate there is a lot of harm in "educating them on societal norms for their own good".
It appears that this approach which you are advocating instead causes far more harm.
Not when you understand that the set of "trans people" is a very small subset of the set of "children who think it's fun to act like the opposite gender relative to their se.x". Attempting to impose the social norm where se.x and gender are aligned at a young age (any age prior to teens say) is minimally harmful to the 1 in 1000 child who will never adopt those norms (a true trans), while simultaneously being very helpful to the 999 other kids who will accept those norms without problem and live happy lives as a result.
The problem you are ignoring here is that we can't know which kids will never accept those norms and thus are going to be trans, and which kids will. In fact, the only way to know which ones are trans is to continue to reinforce the social gender norms and see which ones don't accept them once they get into their teen years. That approach is the one that causes the least harm. Yeah, it sucks for the rare kid who will never be comfortable with a gender role that matches their biology, but it's monumentally stupid to do anything else as a society, no matter how sad we do feel for that small group.
Babies and bathwater, right?
Edited, Jan 13th 2015 3:46pm by gbaji