The child is not confused, the adult is making an assumption
Dr Helen Webberley on TalkTV: the conversion therapy ban, with Julia Hartley-Brewer, TalkTV
A child's gender is a fact you can read from their body at birth. If a baby has a penis, that child is a boy, and anyone who says otherwise is confused, mistaken, or being misled.
What I was trying to say there is that the assumption is the problem, not the child. When a child grows up and tells you that the gender you assigned them is wrong, they are not confused. They are correcting a mistake that was made before they could speak. The body you saw at birth told you something about anatomy. It told you nothing about who that person is. I have heard this from so many children and young people over the years: not distress about who they are, but frustration that the adults around them are so certain about something only they can know. That certainty, held by the adult and not the child, is where the confusion actually lives.
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