Gender Transitioning, and Parents

I have written before about why I strongly dislike gender changing surgery for minors, and certainly for pre-pubescent children.  Many people who become parents don't seem to have the maturity to make life-changing decisions for their kids.  There's presently a case of a broken family, where one parent—who is transgender—has abducted their child, and taken it to Cuba, and it is suspected that the objective is to perform gender-altering surgery on the child.  OK, draw your own conclusions. 

Most of the difficulty with gender, in my view, it's because our society expects all of us to express our gender.  I mean that guys are expected to wear pants.  Girls, old enough to have breasts, are expected to wear bras.  In short, you're expected to dress according to whatever gender you "are".

In Catholic schools, for instance, the nuns are often severe on kids who prefer to cross dress.  If a guy is permitted to dress girly, and act girly, much of the psychological pressure for a little guy to want to be a girl will dissipate. 

Meanwhile, of course, young guys with hormonal urges tend to express their needs by bullying, shows of strength, picking on girls, and effeminate boys, all with a view to showing off how tough they are.  So a little boy who wants to dress in a skirt and pick daisies is going to be relentlessly persecuted.  And there are going to be girls who would rather die than dress like girls are expected to, and prefer to play boy sports, and beat people up just like the boys.  If the kids just left each other alone (without interacting with each other in gender- related ways), they could easily express themselves in anyway they wished, without wishing for gender-altering surgery.  I could easily imagine a time when little kids under the age of 9, say, could share common toilets, boys and girls, once our culture has proceeded beyond the taboos that are common today.  So it could very well be cultural imperatives that fuel much of dysphoria among little kids. 

A little second-grader girl who wants to dress like a boy can easily do so.  It's a little harder for a little boy to dress like a girl, and wear a ribbon in his hair, for instance.  And in Pennsylvania, I suppose, if that happens in a catholic school, the older nuns will freak out, because obviously God would not like his gender statistics ruined.  But the time can come, surely, where we could separate a person's preferred way of expressing their gender, from the morphology of their genitals?

Kay