Non-Gender Conforming Children

Tips for parents with gender-nonconforming children.

1. Create an affirming home: Ensure you have established a supportive and affirming home environment. You can’t protect your child from everything, but the buffer provided by a loving and supportive family who accepts their children exactly as they are is the absolute best thing you can offer your children. (Research bears this out. See recent studies published by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University &TransPulse)
2. Educate yourself: Read Diane Ehrensaft’s Gender Born, Gender Made , an accessible and powerful resource for families with children whose gender identity and expression is not what you expect. What she calls “gender creative”.
3. Educate your family: Find children’s books that model and affirm gender diversity and read them with your children and donate them to your child’s classroom library. Titles such as:
   1. My Princess Boy
   2. The Sissy Duckling
   3. 10,000 Dresses
   4. Are you a boy or a girl?
   5. The Different Dragon
   6. Pink! 
   7. The Paperbag Princess
4. Connect with groups online: Visit some websites of excellent organizations providing useful resources for families, schools, and their communities:
1. Gender Spectrum
2. Gender Creative Kids
3. Gender Odyssey
4. Welcoming Schools
5. GLSEN’s Transgender Student Rights project -
6. P-FLAG
7. Work with your child’s school: Don’t hesitate to meet with your child’s school to ensure their safety. It is not your job to monitor your child’s behavior to reduce chances of bullying; it is the school’s job to keep all children safe. Contact me if you are experiencing difficulties with your school. I can help you put together some documents that will gently, yet clearly remind/inform them that Title IX grants explicit protections from gender-based harassment in any federally funded educational institution.