Sunday Dialogue - Our Notions of Gender - NYTimes.com When a child identifies with the other gender, what to do? The writer, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, served on the D.S.M.-5 Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders. I empathize with children's need to be true to themselves. But when I hear 3-year-olds, who are famous for their fluid sense of fact, fantasy and fiction, being dubbed transgender, I worry that parents and doctors may be imposing the trans label on children to allay their own anxieties about gender expression (boys in tutus and so on). They feel compelled to locate children who are exploring possibilities of gender firmly on one side or the other of the gender binary. If a 3-year-old says she's a chicken, that doesn't mean you should start feeding her kernels of corn - or that you should diagnose "chicken identity disorder." Gender-nonconforming children need time to freely, safely discover who they are. Many grow up into happily gender-conforming adults. Some grow up to be transgender adults, but most transgender adults aren't transsexuals whose lives depend on gender reassignment: many are cross-dressers, gender fluid or gender queer. It takes years to sort out identities that don't fit easily into socially recognized categories, and even children who are transgender may be harmed by the imposition of transsexual identities and therapies. But because we live in a world still organized in terms of the gender binary, it's hard to create spaces in which our children can safely explore nonconforming gender identities. Parents who support their freedom of gender expression may face censure by families, shunning by neighbors and even state investigation of their fitness to be parents. Despite these harsh realities, our job is to help our children discover and become their wholest, truest selves. Whether or not we support medical treatment for gender-nonconforming children, the usual rules apply: children need to know that they are seen, held and loved for who they are. They need a rich array of possibilities to play with and explore, and we need to be patient and loving as they do so. JOY LADIN Hadley, Mass., June 26, 2013 The writer, a male-to-female transsexual, is the author of "Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders." So, a 6-year-old has the entire state of Colorado's school system in upheaval? Either Coy is one incredibly powerful first grader, or the educational system of Colorado is in serious need of repair. As someone who uses public facilities with great frequency, I can tell you that it's always been my practice to enter the bathroom, do what needed to be done with as much privacy as the setup allowed, and exit said washroom to carry on with my life. Whether those around me were girls, boys or folks who had yet to make up their minds had very little effect on my actions. And so, the question in my mind is: Why are we still enslaved by our shame of the human body?