Gender Nonconforming Children

Some parents have tried to raise their kids without gender stereotypes, only to get accused of being hippies at best and downright abusive at worst. Tell me what's abusive about not shoving your kid into a box that says, "This is how you're supposed to act given your genitalia."

These days, I'm mostly comfortable in my own skin. I enjoy being a man. But the embarrassed little boy who could never be himself will always be part of me. I try to carry him with tenderness, and tell him, always, that it's OK to be just who he is.

What gender-variant youth need are teachers who don't make assumptions, who ask lots of questions and then listen to the answers. Everyone is different. When a kid tells you what's important to them, that's what they want you to do.

I've encountered a barometer for the varying attitudes and preconceptions of the audience. An entire segment of the House of Lies audience dismisses Roscoe as gay. Another jumps to pushing him into a transgender role. Some just think he's weird. How about this: he's just Roscoe.

Two 5-year-old boys who would rather play princess, a 10-year-old out and proud lesbian, a 7-year-old boy who announces "I'm gay," and a little boy who wants to be Scooby-Doo's Daphne for Halloween. All five are amazing kids, and all have moms who write about their experiences online.

As we see the media's growing interest in transgender and gender-nonconforming children and their families, I can't underscore enough the responsibility of journalists who cover them and the issues related to these children and young people to get the terminology right.

Instead of assuming I am gay because I was abused, doesn't it seem at least three times more likely that I was abused because I was gay? To me, this is a no-brainer, but it's relieving to have this new science back up what I have been saying for years.

I disagree with Elisabeth Hasselbeck quite often, but during the Jan. 25 episode of The View, she brought me to tears with her eloquent support of transgender and gender-nonconforming children.

As a psychologist who spends much of my time working with children who don't fit inside neat, binary gender boxes, I applaud Showtime and the writers of House of Lies for bringing a new perspective on children's gender in a compelling and sympathetic way.

It became evident that I would have to address gender directly in order to make the classroom environment more comfortable for Allie and to squash the gender stereotypes that my first graders had absorbed in their short lives.