Imagine battling your child over whether right now is the appropriate time for another cookie, dealing with the epic nap-time battle and then, after your youngster falls asleep providing some much needed parental quiet time, confronting the biggest, burning question of our age: Is your two-year-old transgender?
Luckily, you needn’t worry. The Associated Press graciously “spoke to gender experts to answer some of parents’ most commonly asked questions” regarding child sexual preference in a piece published this week.
This is news, folks.
Here’s an excerpt:

MY SON LIKES TO WEAR DRESSES. IS THIS A PHASE OR SOMETHING MORE?
“My answer is, we don’t know,” says Diane Ehrensaft, a developmental and clinical psychologist, director of mental health at the University of California, San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center and author of “The Gender Creative Child.”
“What we know is, you have a son who likes princess dresses. I would say get him the dresses. Have your child feel free to choose. Maybe they’ll stop wearing dresses. Maybe they’ll grow up to be gay.”
Transgender children will be insistent, consistent and persistent about their gender dysphoria, she says.
“It’s not something the child says one time and it goes away.”
For critics who question whether preschool-age kids should be allowed to “socially transition,” Ehrensaft says: “We expect a 2-year-old to know ‘I am boy. I am girl.’ So why can’t that also apply to transgender children?”

Geez.
So what are you to do if you happen to be some new-age egghead that is intent on convincing yourself that your unreasonable, wholly mentally immature and sexually unconcerned child was born with the wrong sexual organs?
Well, according to the AP’s “experts,” take some of the weird sh*t children sometimes say and do way too seriously.
Via AP’s top tips for dealing with your tranny toddler:

Though there are no set rules, Ehrensaft says some early signals can provide information about whether a child is transgender. They include:
— Certain actions at a very young age, such as toddlers pulling barrettes from their hair, grabbing for their sister’s dress and dolls, or throwing away their trucks.
— The use of verbs regarding gender. Instead of “I wish I was a girl,” a transgender child will say, “I am a girl.”
— Frustration over their genitals. By around age 3, children understand “penis equals boy, and vagina equals girl,” Ehrensaft said. “Often those are the kids who cry out, ‘Why did God get it wrong? Mommy, can you put me back inside so I can come out like my sister?’”
— Taking “gender expansion play” seriously. Many young boys like to play dress-up in their sisters’ princess costumes, twirling around and then moving on to other toys, Ehrensaft said.
A transgender child “also wants to get into his sister’s closet, but he’s not going to go for the princess dress — he’s going to go for her school uniform,” she says. “He’s going to put on her everyday clothes because he wants to be a regular girl, not a pretend princess.”

Or, you know, you could let your child do child stuff. Talk about some rudimentary biology– and how things sometimes just are the way they are. And set aside your own weird fantasies about your youngster being so hip to the times that he or she decided to be transgender before even developing proper motor skills.
No worries, the youngster will have plenty of time for confusion and and self-doubt outside the playroom later in life. Let em sort it out after they are capable of understanding consequence.
Earnest Hemingway, who by the end of his life had become a portrait of American masculinity, once said of his mother, Grace: “My mother is an all-time, all-American bitch; and she would make a pack mule shoot himself…”
She was demanding and manipulative, according to Hemingway  and a tell-all written by his sister Marcelline. But for Hemingway, the worst part was probably the psychological torture Marcelline revealed her brother endured as a child because his mother decided he ought to have been a girl. And no doubt, Grace convinced herself that he liked wearing girl clothing and being called “Ernestine” from time to time throughout the years he was too small to protest in any meaningful way.
That was a product of her mental illness, not his. Though the experience probably didn’t help Hemingway’s psyche later in life.
But his description of his mother is fitting. Anyone sick enough to help their child make a life-altering decision about gender identity before affording nature a good college try at taking its course because it’s somehow become laudable to nurture mental illness is selfish, misguided and unwilling to admit their own mental sickness.