She was born in a boy’s body
But nobody ever claimed that. Not ever. We were solemnly assured of it only yesterday. Nobody ever said trans people were “born in the wrong body.”
From the age of two and a half, Sasha has insisted she’ll grow up a girl. She was born in a boy’s body. In his tender observational documentary, film-maker Sébastien Lifshitz’s (Les Invisibles, Bambi, Adolescentes) spends a year following seven-year-old Sasha and her family as they struggle to navigate her gender dysphoria in their provincial French home town.
Maybe it’s a French thing? Everybody knows how zany the French are.
Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume captures Sasha in widescreen, his camera watchful as she pads delicately across the room in ballet class, growing in confidence and expressiveness with each purposeful step. Her teacher is less generous.
Meaning? The reviewer doesn’t elaborate. Perhaps the teacher was actually teaching ballet as opposed to being generous to the born in the wrong body segment of the class.
Also…children who are two and a half say a lot of things, and not all of them are necessarily true or accurate. That can apply even to things the children say about themselves.
“Also…children who are two and a half say a lot of things, and not all of them are necessarily true or accurate. That can apply even to things the children say about themselves.”
When my nephew was that age he thought he was a dog. He ate the dog’s food, napped in the dog’s box, and peed on the tree in the front yard. The barking when he was asked a question drove his mom nuts.
Oddly enough, he didn’t grow up to identify as a dog.
Don’t they remember being children? I love children’s logic; the wrongness of it is what makes it cute. For example, at about 5 or 6 years old, I was convinced that it was electricity — static electricity, to be specific — that made sweaters feel warm. Imagine the grownups treating that as unassailable fact.
I remember my baby brother insisting that he was a tiger, and continuing to insist even through floods of tears when I meanly (in typical toddler big sister fashion) told him he wasn’t. Almost sixty years later, I can still hear him. “I’m (hic) a tiger! (sob)Rawr!”
Fortunately, nobody has ever believed that furries really are the species they claimed to be, let alone that toddlers know that they were born in the wrong body and should be affirmed and given cross-species hormones and surgery as early as possible, or we’d be living in Dr. Moreau’s world.
Until kids are about 7 or 8, children think that putting a dress on a boy doll makes it a girl. If a boy likes to pretend play in a princess gown, he could easily conclude he must really be a girl. Young children tend to want to figure out rules and enforce them. They’ll do that with sexist stereotypes.
There’s a notorious lecture by a prominent gender identity professional during which she mentions that even babies and toddlers can try to signal that they’re trans. She gave one example of a baby girl who kept pulling the barrettes out of her hair, and another example of a toddler boy who’d unsnap his onesies so the legs would look like a dress. Turned out they were trans, and knew it even then. Breathtakingly stupid.
And dangerous.
Sastra, I remember that, too. I bring it up if people say that it isn’t about sexist stereotypes, it isn’t about what you wear or play with, it’s about knowing you’re trans, which they claim is not about enforcing gender stereotypes.
I remember thinking when I saw that lecture on video that instead of being pre-literate trans, the babies might be pre-literate feminists, or just pre-literate gender critical.
There’s a bit in, maybe one of Cordelia Fine’s books? where a little boy wears barrettes to school and the other boys mock him as a girl. The boy, miffed, points out that he has a willy, but this does not fly. Say the other boys, “EVERYONE has one of those. But only girls wear barrettes!”
At the time of publication, this was a funny story about kids and their faulty understanding of sex and gender. And somehow, in the meantime, it’s been turned into public policy?
My friends’ kid currently identifies as a Transformer (Optimus Prime’s brother, in fact) and has a whole stable backstory about how he was kicked out by the Deceptions and how his spaceship crash landed on the roof, etc etc. There’s a good reason why we don’t just accept kids’ own views of their identity.
We are very zany!