I hadn't already read the article. The tone of it is really irritating me. Do we think that the authors thought of this as a progressive stance on gender-variant kids? It's clear to me that the authors think gender variant kids are a problem that must be dealt with. At the end of the first page of text, there's some mention of parents' and mental health professionals' desire to protect gender variant kids from the "savagery" of other kids. But the proposed answer to the problem of protecting genderqueer kids is to encourage them to be "gender appropriate" (as if that isn't itself a form of [emotional] violence against that kid). There's no questioning of the culture that produces other kids' "savagery," no thought that other kids might be the problem rather than the genderqueer kid.

I saw the article on Sunday and was actually happy about the progess in areas such as the Los Angeles Unified School District where there are policies enforcing that the school staff refer to children in their chosen pronoun, etc. Juxtapose this, albeit slow, progress to an article also on nytimes.com about GLBT people in Egypt who are routinely tortured and forced to work as informants in the GLBT community. It is hard to see how far our country has come on these issues until you compare the U.S. to places like Egypt. I am in no way condoning the U.S. or accepting the status quo, but I would say the majority of people of the planet have never thought of or questioned the binary gender system. Every time my research prof brings up using gender as a categorical research variable, I always speak up and say, "Except for the people who don't define themselves as either of those choices" to which he replies, "The NIH (National Institute of Health) only recongnizes male and female and they are the ones funding the research." Gender variant people have a lot of educating to do.