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League_Girl
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11 Oct 2013, 1:39 am

Kids have said young as age two they were a boy or a girl, the opposite gender they were on the outside.


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stardraigh
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11 Oct 2013, 7:47 am

goldfish21 wrote:
twich wrote:
I think it has to do with the fact that it's more accepted now, so people don't have to feel like they have to hide something like that. I think it's awesome and hope it just gets better and more accepted as time goes on.


This.

I'm almost 31 years old, but I've known since I was ~5 - as far back as I can remember. If I grew up in a more open, tolerant & accepting society than I did (don't get me wrong, I don't come from a hate filled place - it's just that society is evolving and it's much more socially acceptable to be out than ever.) then I might have come out much younger/as a kid, too.


Same with me, although I'm a year older. I had many events and choices and things occur that should have raised a red flag with others like my parents. I'm on my 3rd attempt to deal with transitioning myself. The first time I realized what it was, was back in high school. I finally had enough info to put two and two together and be able to label that I was transgender instead of just going WTF is going on with my life and why don't I fit in as male.

Which leads me to my next point.

We have a lot more information out there in the world that pertains to being on any spectrum somewhere. It's basically in two ways; the quantity of info is greater as research and humanities knowledge base increases, and also that information sharing has increased on massive levels so what info there is is easily accessable compared to how it was 20+ years ago. This helps a lot with parents and with children, and medical and mental health professionals in figuring things out. This is only going to get better as the information pool grows and gets more accessible to those who need it.


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kittylover
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15 Oct 2013, 5:19 am

Maybe if I were able to come out as transgender at that age, I could have prevented this horrible monster body of mine from forming. I would have hope instead of having none at all. I'd be asleep instead of awake at 3 a.m. crying and wishing I were dead.



LouHusky
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26 Oct 2013, 1:59 pm

I think it's a sign that it's finally being seen as more acceptable, so kids don't feel they have anything to be ashamed of anymore and will talk to their families and friends about it.

Louis


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27 Oct 2013, 6:17 am

I knew I was straight at that age; I don't see why the same thing wouldn't apply to gay kids.


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31 Oct 2013, 10:25 am

It's great that LGBT kids feel society is more receptive to their needs and therefore feel able to 'come out' earlier in life.

But at the same time, I would really have to query a self-indentification as LGBT at the age of ten. At that age, you're still in the land of make-believe play and character identification -- they surely can't be regarded as capable of appreciating the nature of sexual attraction, and even if you think they can then you must surely accept that gender identity issues in children that young are far from fixed and definite. I think it would take a skilled child psychologist to ascertain whether such a child's professed identification with an LGBT 'lifestyle' was firmly-rooted.

I say this despite the fact that I want LGBT equality to advance and progress, enabling people to come out as soon as they feel ready, without fearing social consequences. But I think that (say) a girl who sufficiently identified as heterosexual to the extent that she thought she was ready to conceive would attract the attention of school psychologists,

Perhaps I'm wrong, and ten year olds are genuinely capable of knowing what floats their boat -- all I can say is that when I was ten years old, my interests, and the interests of most boys in my peer group, consisted of playing 'British Bulldog', conkers (in season) and imaginative fantasy character-based games. Sex and sexual identity couldn't have been further from our minds.

(Except for that time that M****** N**** flashed his willy at an eleven-year-old girl and got expelled, which was a major source of scandal throughout the school for some time)



equestriatola
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07 Nov 2013, 1:08 pm

I always wonder.... will it eventually come to the point when preschoolers come out as gay? You never know for sure, but it just might......

On another note, would I have a problem if I saw two 10-year old boys, or two 10-year old girls kissing each other? Of course NOT.


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CharityFunDay
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07 Nov 2013, 4:29 pm

I wouldn't do anything that might stand in the way of mutually-responsive underage experimentation of either polarity, but I think it will be a long time before homosexual tendencies and homoerotic behaviour between ten year olds (who I am assuming are generally not yet capable of having sex properly, either hormonally or .. er ... otherwise) is seen as a positive declaration of one's sexuality. Sexuality (male sexuality in particular( is very fluid during the years-long transition from squeaky naked boychild to gruff-voiced young man with hair where it wasn't before. Most boys go through a distinct homosexual (or at least homocurious) phase during this emotionally-disturbing adjustment

I would seriously advise against any attempt to define one's own sexuality before puberty has kicked in properly.

Perhaps, in an orientation-acceptant world (not that I will live to see it) all children would be brought up to regard themselves as gender-ambivalent, meaning that they were taught to recognise their male and female social potential. This would, as an initial and positive effect, cut down on the classic "Boys V Girls" rivalry which permeates the lower reaches of the education system in the UK.

In the rather longer term, it would encourage kids/young adults to take a more holistic view of their sexual awareness. Those children who are turning out straight will at least have had some socially-formative experiences in which girls weren't regarded as "Other" (and vice versa for straight girls). Simultaneously, developing gay children will have learned to recognise their inherent sympathies toward the opposite sex, not to mention their strongly-demonstrated tendency to associate with females rather than straight males. And the same goes for lesbian kids, who will have gained positive experience of some supposedly masculine characteristics, while also learning more about what they really want when playing with other girls.

And the great thing about this utopian school system is that since no pupil would grow up wholly anticipating his or her eventually-expressed sexuality, it's quite possible that the system would tend to turn out a greater proportion of self-defined bisexuals (male and female) who would then be able to carry their life experience as socio-sexually ambiguous (to individual degrees), thus helping to sustain and promote a society in which, however you defined yourself, the possibility for an unanticipated and potentially perspective-altering or enhancing encounter existed almost literally around every corner.

It's a lovely thought though.

I have always been sceptical about people (usually men) who claim that they were aware of being gay from an early age. I simply don't accept that the character of an individual (let alone his eventually-determined sexual orientation) can be regarded as fixed at such stages. Personality traits, yes, instinctive adult drives, no. I think that what happens in such situations as I am discussing is that individuals reach back through their memorial repertoire and fixated upon some key memories (usually those of a puzzllng or unresolved nature, since they tend to stick in the childish memory by the very quality of being inexplicable),. and then reinterpret some aspects of selected memories, imposing an adult interpretation on an utterly straightforward childhood memory, with the act of memory re-interpretation being justified with reference to one's social innocence (and implicitly their own childhood sexuality-naïvete). Thus adult and usually sexual motives are divined in the subject's personally-interpreted memories of the subject's own prepubescent behaviour. This is not really a recipe for accurate analysis.

I don't doubt that a few kids do become aware of their sexual orientation at an early age (we all go through a sexual 'false dawn' around five or six years of age, and sometimes experiment with these new feelings, privately or with other similarly-conscious or curious children). But I think that to propose that a fixed homosexual orientation at such an early age, let alone a self-perceived homosexually-defined identity, would be very irresponsible by current standards, and arguably detrimental to the child in question.

with regard to people's self-perception and reinterpretatation of childhood events that they now feel were early mainfestations of their homosexual nature, I'm not going to gainsay you (I don't have the ability to access your memories in an unmediated manner), but I will repeat a wise saying, which you may or may not find relevant: "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward."



Mainichi
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12 Nov 2013, 9:44 pm

equestriatola wrote:
I always wonder.... will it eventually come to the point when preschoolers come out as gay? You never know for sure, but it just might......

On another note, would I have a problem if I saw two 10-year old boys, or two 10-year old girls kissing each other? Of course NOT.


Same goes with me. I have no problem with transgender children. Some kids know at a very early age, It support them all the way.



equestriatola
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13 Nov 2013, 9:24 pm

Mainichi wrote:
equestriatola wrote:
I always wonder.... will it eventually come to the point when preschoolers come out as gay? You never know for sure, but it just might......

On another note, would I have a problem if I saw two 10-year old boys, or two 10-year old girls kissing each other? Of course NOT.


Same goes with me. I have no problem with transgender children. Some kids know at a very early age, It support them all the way.


There's a quote I have about kids coming out younger and younger nowadays:

Quote:
"The heart wants what the heart wants" - Woody Allen


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