I wish to refer interested people to the August 12, 2012 issue of the New York Times where there is an excellent article on how parents should deal with young boys who want to wear dresses. Let them, but in a controlled way such as setting dress up days or nights. Let them explore that. In most cases that mode will last a little while and as they get older will fade away naturally. Some will continue and that behavior will gain strength. The worst thing a parent can do is tell the child, "No."

It has been well documented that preventing the child from expressing their feelings will create problems all their lives. It creates a desire to have the forbidden that often results in secretiveness, dishonesty, deep depression and suicide. Deprivation of any kind will create those problems to some extent. The person will satisfy their urges in private and hide their things from others. It can become a bit of an addiction-like driven behavior. It is not the behavior that is bad; it is the dishonesty, the secretiveness, the development of a kind of double life, and all of those kinds of things that do the damage. Sound familiar? It should. Just look around at all the marriages that have failed not because one of the couple cross-dressed in secret but because of the dishonesty and unwillingness to find compromises to allow each person to develop and grow in their own way. How many times have you read here of SO's being more upset with the dishonesty rather than the actual dressing? Being secretive about what is natural for you is a result of rigid deprivation of indulging in a behavior that is important to that person's identity.

If the child desires to continue with the dressing and their behavior shifts toward a more female-like pattern then do not prevent it from developing; get involved and guide wisely and with expert help if necessary. This gender reversal thing is only a choice in some, but in most it is a part of who that person is and keeping them from following their natural tendencies is about as cruel as making some people slaves. Prevention of free development with guidance but not prohibition allows people to become who they fundamentally are.

To a large extent, this politicization of gender variance is, in my opinion, mostly just a matter of finding a group that can be demonized so the politician can gain followers. Those efforts are doing far more damage to children that are naturally different from the expectation of what is normal which is actually nothing more than what is common. There isn't any normal - all there is is variation; everybody is unique and they are that way naturally. We should allow that to be followed, but with wisdom as to whether following what seems natural to a child is REALLY harmful or is it just that we think it is harmful because it does not fit some rigid, idealized concept of normal that really is nothing more than the common. Reaching the full potential of human ability is not achieved by idealized concepts of normality but rather letting those wish to fly, fly as far as they can. Don't tie a rope around an ankle and keep them grounded just because the collective thinks that what other people are doing is wrong simply because the critics refuse to make the effort of open their minds and try to understand why they want to fly rather than deciding they should not fly - period.