The Transgender Children topic.

I really enjoyed the discussions this week and I'd like to thank you all for watching the documentary and then making the effort to understand it, question it and question yourselves and then reproduce your thoughts in English. The documentary altered my perception of transgender but I must admit that our discussions have refined them further. It's great to hear intelligent people who I know to be "good" and who I respect as humans giving their own subtly different points of view and then being able to think on these differences to adjust or alter my own.

If I'd been asked at your age "What is gender?", which I wasn't (and that is interesting in itself) I'd have answered that gender is male or female and dependant on the sexual organs that you have. Now I realise that Gender is far more multi-faceted than that and can be seen in so many different ways.

Firstly, Society adds so many conditions to being male or female, conditions which when dissected often fail to meet any reasonable thought or standard. The young children we saw weren't linking gender to male and female sexual organs, they were linking it to likes and dislikes such as clothing or toys or hobbies. Why should whether you want to wear a pink dress or a suit or a skirt make any difference? After all the warrior Scots wore skirts? Playing with a barbie and making a house rather than a GI Joe and fighting, wanting to dance or play football, putting colour on your eye lids or not? Why do any of those things really concern gender other than our societal conditioning. Males fight wars, females rear children ... If society didn't insist that boys don't wear dresses or girls can't play rugby would these children have any dysphoria? Would our communities be better?

Even at puberty or adulthood our genitalia are only important with regards to sex and procreation. who, unfortunately, hasn't seen some men with bigger breasts than women?

Secondly religion and other doctrines dictate our thoughts on gender. I think all the major religions are binary and have a very clear definition of male and female. Those of us who believe in a God will be more likely to make religious teachings our priority and therefore understandably follow the prescribed binary stance.

I also think our language has a far greater say in this matter. In English we have he/she but it only pertains to humans and animals and even then unless you have a particular attachment to the animal you wouldn't use he/she, you'd use it. We view the world through our language and therefore English speakers have this view of gender. In French you split everything into feminine and masculine, something I've never really understood, by consequence you have a different view and then a language like German has the three genders der/die/das giving another viewpoint . I think that Chinese can have 5 genders.

Many of you will have heard the myth about the number of words for "snow" in Inuit but it has been shown that in Scottish there are 421 different words for different types of snow. If that's the case for snow shouldn't we have thousands or millions of words to describe a person's gender? Having only 2 or 3 words automatically typecasts people and therefore makes the people outside the "norm", abnormal.

I've written more than enough and haven't even scratched the surface of my thoughts on the subject. So thanks for your input and feel free to add any of your thoughts here for me and the others mull over.

Hi,

I will always be very surprised and fascinated by your ability to take an interest in all types of subjects, and your intelligence to dig into them until you have your own opinion by learning from what others say, from the medias, or simply by your own observations.

I have the impression that our society, although very wobbly, is clinging to ancestral values. Everything is very easily binary, especially when it comes to sex.
This subject which particularly animates me has developed my empathy and my permanent questioning around all these people who, unlike us, don't have the chance to live in the body they wish to have, with the genitals they also prefer to have. I forgot to try to question this on Thursday during the discussion but it is interesting to ask myself how can we "classify" people who are born with a sex that is not definable at birth (or who have both): the intersex?
Many people are forgotten and therefore underestimated, even though they are great human beings and deserve to be rightly happy, like others.
Children, and we know this even more after seeing this documentary, always tell the truth and do not restrain themselves by being dishonest with themselves and with others: they say what they think, frankly. And if young children are already alarming adults that they don't like the gender norms imposed on them because it's like "it's always been like that", they say so. They are the future "makers" of the world tomorrow, and they will change it, open it up to more genders, more possibilities to be who we want to be at peace. Because not being able to express ourselves as ourselves and having to conform to things that frustrate us to the point of unhappiness should no longer exist. Things are moving forward!

Although religions have their own binary rules, they generally call for love of self and love of neighbour. We can therefore hope to see a sisterhood among all and accept our neighbour, no matter what he or she considers to be, as long as he or she is happy and feels complete.