Transgender child’s mom: love your kids, period

I recognized the dress immediately. It had been his older sister’s — cast away, no doubt, in a donation bag that was never donated.

I didn’t race outside, tear the dress off and proffer admonishments. I watched, instead, as his makeshift wand of willow danced through the air — a little princess going from flower bed to flower bed casting enchantments over the marigolds.

I let our child continue playing undisturbed, but before I returned to my soup, I did what we all do when we see something adorable: I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo.

Later that night, my husband and I went to dinner with another couple we didn’t know well. As a fellow mom will do, the wife asked to see photos of our children, so I took out my phone and began swiping through recent family shots.

“Aren’t their children adorable?” she exclaimed, grabbing the phone out of my hands and showing photos to her husband.

Before I could get my phone back, they had discovered the photo from that afternoon.

I saw them exchange puzzled looks, then the wife said: “This is your son?”

‘Indulgence and permission are two different things’

Sensing their disapproval, I smiled and responded as calmly as I could, “Yes, he likes to play princess sometimes.”

“You really shouldn’t encourage that behavior,” the wife said with the grave compassion usually reserved for a potentially terminal illness. “When our son was little, he liked to play dress-up, too, but we didn’t indulge it. Not one bit. I even hired a male nanny! And now our son is completely normal! A strapping teenage boy — very popular with the girls — nothing odd about him at all!”

“You can’t indulge it,” the husband concurred. “That’s the key. It’s no different than enforcing bedtime. Children are very malleable. You can shape them, but not if you indulge their every whim.”

I politely thanked them for their (unsolicited) advice and my husband deftly changed the topic, but as I lay in bed later that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the the word “indulgent.”

My child at play.

My child at play.

My child at play.

Was it really indulgence to allow our child the freedom to express himself? It’s not as if he was shooting a BB gun at the neighbor’s pet cat, or throwing sand in another kid’s face.

Since that incident, I’ve had the word “indulgent” leveled at me many times by various detractors who disagree with the unconditional love and support my husband and I have offered our now-eight-year-old transgender daughter, as if that choice was the same as offering her an extra slice of chocolate cake even though we knew she already had seconds.

And here’s what I would say to those people: when it comes to parenting, indulgence and permission are two different things.

When we indulge a child, we let them get away with something — usually a behavior considered reprehensible by others. When we offer a child permission, we give them the reassurance that what they are doing is okay.

I like to think that the permission we gave Samuel to play as he saw fit in his early years paved the path for later emotional security.

On the eve of his sixth birthday, after a four-year battle with self-hatred and depression, he felt safe enough to transition from living as a boy to living as a girl. It was like witnessing a second birth.

And now we have a daughter who greets each day with excitement. Her name is Sadie, and she’s just as precious to us as her male counterpart was, only much, much happier.

What if we had punished Samuel instead of embracing Sadie?

I sometimes ask myself what would have happened if we had taken our dinner companion’s advice. What if we had shamed our son, or punished him? What if we had refused to let him out of his room unless he agreed to behave like a traditional boy?

In those early years of our child’s life, when my husband and I searched the Internet for information about children who claim to be the opposite gender than their anatomy indicates, we found these two statistics: Forty percent of transgender people attempt suicide each year, whereas a child who is accepted by his or her family is eight times less likely to attempt suicide later in life.

Better to be labeled as over-indulgent parents for letting our son play princess, we told ourselves, than to have a dead child.

If you worry that you, or someone you know, is indulging a young child by allowing him or her to cross-dress or do otherwise non-stereotypical activities, think again. Child development experts claim that children understand their gender identity as young as age 2.

But most children lack the vocabulary to articulate how they feel when they are so young. Their only recourse at gaining understanding may be to don a tutu as a boy, or to wear a Superman costume as a girl.

If your young child or student is a boy who likes traditional girl things, or a girl who likes traditional boy things, it doesn’t mean that he or she is transgender. It might mean nothing at all, or it might indicate that the child is what experts call “gender fluid.” It could be a phase, or it could be something more permanent.

No matter the reason, a child’s gender exploration isn’t something to punish.

Of course the nonconforming child’s behavior may be something you fear, and possibly for good reasons. You might live in a community that lacks understanding and compassion. You might be part of a religious group that doesn’t accept transgender identity as a possibility.

It doesn’t matter. Support that child anyway.

‘We’re living our lives, just like you’

Some may decry this decision, as if you are aiding and abetting a criminal. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are aiding and abetting the crucial work we all do in trying to figuring out who we are and why we’re here.

Like me, like my husband, like hundreds of other parents who have faced their young children’s gender dysphoria, you must push past fear and replace it with curiosity. And then you need to start learning, and connecting with other families who are going through similar experiences.

And if you don’t know any gender nonconforming children, or if you think the parents who support nonconforming children are mentally ill, child-abusing monsters — all things we have been called — I would wager a bet that if you came over to visit some afternoon, you might be surprised at how similar we are to you.

You might notice my teenage daughter’s school books and SAT prep manual scattered around. You might hear the sound of my younger daughter’s squeals as our dogs chase her around the house. You might notice we have the same favorite show playing on our TV, and if you look closely enough, you might see the imprint in the sofa where my husband naps as he pretends to watch.

What you wouldn’t notice is that one of my two daughters is transgender. You wouldn’t notice because there is nothing to notice.

We’re living our lives, just like you: struggling to keep things balanced, trying to look on the bright side, trying to get enough sleep, to drink enough water, to remember to brush our hair before we leave the house, to floss before bed, to say please and thank you, to apologize when wrong.

Those of us who are raising transgender children know it is time for us to be brave; to step forward; to introduce ourselves to you and welcome you into our lives; to prove that we haven’t indulged our children but merely chosen to love them.

Why is government searching phones?

These are some of the many American citizens re-entering the country who have been subjected to searches of their cellphones and questioning about their social media.

Such invasions of travelers’ private communications are extremely intrusive and have been conducted even when officials don’t apparently have reason to think the person has done something wrong. And the government has lately increased the practice dramatically — even though recent legal decisions raise serious questions about its constitutionality.

Because people keep ever more of their personal details on their phones and computers, it is particularly egregious that the government should claim some right to unfettered access to these devices simply because a person travels abroad.

On Monday, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — whose mission is to defend free speech in the digital age — filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the government to release information on the number of travelers whose devices have been searched, the policies related to searching cellphones containing sensitive and confidential information, and the findings of internal audits about the device search program.

Border searches of electronic devices by the Department of Homeland Security have risen exponentially in recent years, from about 5,000 device searches in 2015 to about 25,000 in 2016, according to press reports that cited DHS data. During the Trump administration, the intrusions appear to have become even more frequent; in February 2017 alone, border officials searched 5,000 devices.
And why is this happening? A US Customs and Border Protection policy since 2009 authorizes officers to seize and search a traveler’s electronic devices even if the person is not suspicious. The policy was always legally dubious, but it has become indefensible in light of the Supreme Court’s 2014 landmark decision in Riley v. California.

The court held that police generally can’t seize a person’s cellphone as part of an arrest without first obtaining a warrant that is backed by evidence that the cellphone contains evidence of a crime and is signed by a judge.

A cellphone contains “the sum of an individual’s private life,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The search of a smartphone is nothing like the search of a duffle bag. What people store on their cellphones — including Internet browsing history, medical records, family photos, GPS location data, financial information, and apps related to dating, addiction and hobbies — is vastly more sensitive than what people used to carry in their pockets, backpacks, or purses, or even keep in their homes.

Searches of electronic devices when there is no basis for suspicion to search them raise serious concerns relating to the freedoms of speech and association. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in another recent Supreme Court case, “[a]wareness that the government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms.” Americans will be justifiably concerned about speaking freely if, simply because they travel internationally, the government is given unlimited authority to read through their emails, texts, social media posts and the like.

The implications may be especially significant for a free press. Suspicionless searches of cellphones threaten the ability of journalists and their sources to report on important international issues, which deprives the public of its right to know about those issues.

Numerous reports show that journalists, lawyers and activists — particularly those who cover civil wars and terrorism or travel to conflict areas — have had their cellphones and devices searched at the US border, where officers have demanded their passwords and read their communications with sources.

Those sources will likely be leery of sharing information with journalists and activists if their identities and reports may be revealed to the US government at the border.

Anecdotal evidence about how the government is using its authority to conduct suspicionless electronic device searches is disturbing but incomplete. The public has a right to see a fuller picture, as many civil liberties groups have asked the government to provide.

Our freedom of information lawsuit request seeks a range of information, but one of the items we seek may be especially revealing: We’ve asked for the database of the Treasury Enforcement Communications System that houses information about every device-search at the border, including the reason for the search, the country of origin of the traveler, and the traveler’s race and ethnicity.
The government created this database in response to concerns voiced by the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights office several years ago about the possibility that searches might be conducted in a discriminatory or otherwise unlawful way.

Disclosure of the database — perhaps with narrow redactions to protect legitimate national security and privacy interests — would help the public understand the answer to basic questions about the government’s program: How often do border officers search travelers’ cellphones and other devices, and for what reasons?

Why did the incidence of cellphone searches sharply increase in the past 15 months? Does the department follow its own rules for taking special measures to protect searches of privileged and other sensitive content stored on cellphones, and what are those rules?

The courts should require the government to disclose this information and quickly, and the practice of delving into travelers’ private lives at the border without reason to suspect them of wrongdoing should ultimately end. Everything we know about the government’s searches of devices at the border suggests the government is dramatically expanding an unconstitutional program.

How Tetris can soothe after trauma

But a new study has shown that playing the computer game Tetris within hours of experiencing trauma can prevent those feelings from taking over your mind.

PTSD occurs when intrusive memories linked to fear from a traumatic event become consolidated in a person’s mind by them visualizing the event in a loop until it becomes locked in their brain.

Competing with the visualization, such as with a game like Tetris, can block that consolidation form happening.

“An intrusive memory is a visual memory of a traumatic event,” said Emily Holmes, Professor of Psychology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, whose team led the study. “Tetris also requires imagination and vision. Your brain can’t do two things at once, so this interrupts.”

Tetris is a simple, visual and addictive computer game in which the goal is to line up falling shapes to form rows that then disappear when aligned. As rows disappear, more shapes fall and the longer the game lasts, the higher the score.

The goal in Tetris is to line up falling shapes to form rows that disappear when aligned.

The goal in Tetris is to line up falling shapes to form rows that disappear when aligned.

The goal in Tetris is to line up falling shapes to form rows that disappear when aligned.

Holmes hopes that use of these simple and early strategies with patients could help prevent the onset of PTSD. The current standard treatment doesn’t begin until after people develop the condition.

PTSD is estimated to effect 3.5% of adults in the US, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The percentage is similar globally, at 4.6%, according to the World Health Organization.

Effective soon after an accident

Researchers tested the game on 71 patients in a UK emergency room who were seeking care after a motor accident. Half of them received standard care for their injuries, while the other half received a psychological intervention within six hours of their accident in which they were asked to recall their trauma, practice playing Tetris and then given the game to play on their own.

The patients were then monitored for one week, during which time they tracked how often they had memories, or flashbacks, relating to their accident. The people who has played Tetris reported 62% less memories on average over the week.

“After two days they had gone down to pretty much zero,” Holmes told CNN.

Researchers have long believed that intervening early — within hours or days of the event — could stop the fearful memories from developing in the brain. This is the first study using something as simple as a computer game.

Holmes has been researching the use of Tetris in this way for more than a decade in the lab and this proof-of-concept study is the first time she has experimented with patients.

The research remains in it’s early stages, she stresses. What we need to do is a larger study,” said Holmes who also hopes to monitor the effectiveness of her approach over a longer period of time, up to six months.

The need for more insight using a larger cohort of people was raised by consultant Mark Salter from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as the need to test options other than Tetris. “The study is small … and not everyone plays Tetris or is computer literate,” he told CNN. He added that there is also the challenge of “getting someone to participate when they’ve just seen something terrifying.”

See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter.

But he was intrigued by the findings and the ability of this prevention measure to be given soon after someone experiences a trauma. “What’s exciting about this is that it happens quickly,” he said. “It allows an immediacy to the intervention.”

Salter said the approach needs to include other options that are more universally acceptable since “it’s not just Tetris that does this.”

Holmes said that anything visual and engaging could have a similar effect. But, he added, other engrossing activities using other parts of the brain, such as number or word activities, may not work, or make things worse.

Why is government searching phones?

These are some of the many American citizens re-entering the country who have been subjected to searches of their cellphones and questioning about their social media.

Such invasions of travelers’ private communications are extremely intrusive and have been conducted even when officials don’t apparently have reason to think the person has done something wrong. And the government has lately increased the practice dramatically — even though recent legal decisions raise serious questions about its constitutionality.

Because people keep ever more of their personal details on their phones and computers, it is particularly egregious that the government should claim some right to unfettered access to these devices simply because a person travels abroad.

On Monday, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — whose mission is to defend free speech in the digital age — filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the government to release information on the number of travelers whose devices have been searched, the policies related to searching cellphones containing sensitive and confidential information, and the findings of internal audits about the device search program.

Border searches of electronic devices by the Department of Homeland Security have risen exponentially in recent years, from about 5,000 device searches in 2015 to about 25,000 in 2016, according to press reports that cited DHS data. During the Trump administration, the intrusions appear to have become even more frequent; in February 2017 alone, border officials searched 5,000 devices.
And why is this happening? A US Customs and Border Protection policy since 2009 authorizes officers to seize and search a traveler’s electronic devices even if the person is not suspicious. The policy was always legally dubious, but it has become indefensible in light of the Supreme Court’s 2014 landmark decision in Riley v. California.

The court held that police generally can’t seize a person’s cellphone as part of an arrest without first obtaining a warrant that is backed by evidence that the cellphone contains evidence of a crime and is signed by a judge.

A cellphone contains “the sum of an individual’s private life,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The search of a smartphone is nothing like the search of a duffle bag. What people store on their cellphones — including Internet browsing history, medical records, family photos, GPS location data, financial information, and apps related to dating, addiction and hobbies — is vastly more sensitive than what people used to carry in their pockets, backpacks, or purses, or even keep in their homes.

Searches of electronic devices when there is no basis for suspicion to search them raise serious concerns relating to the freedoms of speech and association. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in another recent Supreme Court case, “[a]wareness that the government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms.” Americans will be justifiably concerned about speaking freely if, simply because they travel internationally, the government is given unlimited authority to read through their emails, texts, social media posts and the like.

The implications may be especially significant for a free press. Suspicionless searches of cellphones threaten the ability of journalists and their sources to report on important international issues, which deprives the public of its right to know about those issues.

Numerous reports show that journalists, lawyers and activists — particularly those who cover civil wars and terrorism or travel to conflict areas — have had their cellphones and devices searched at the US border, where officers have demanded their passwords and read their communications with sources.

Those sources will likely be leery of sharing information with journalists and activists if their identities and reports may be revealed to the US government at the border.

Anecdotal evidence about how the government is using its authority to conduct suspicionless electronic device searches is disturbing but incomplete. The public has a right to see a fuller picture, as many civil liberties groups have asked the government to provide.

Our freedom of information lawsuit request seeks a range of information, but one of the items we seek may be especially revealing: We’ve asked for the database of the Treasury Enforcement Communications System that houses information about every device-search at the border, including the reason for the search, the country of origin of the traveler, and the traveler’s race and ethnicity.
The government created this database in response to concerns voiced by the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights office several years ago about the possibility that searches might be conducted in a discriminatory or otherwise unlawful way.

Disclosure of the database — perhaps with narrow redactions to protect legitimate national security and privacy interests — would help the public understand the answer to basic questions about the government’s program: How often do border officers search travelers’ cellphones and other devices, and for what reasons?

Why did the incidence of cellphone searches sharply increase in the past 15 months? Does the department follow its own rules for taking special measures to protect searches of privileged and other sensitive content stored on cellphones, and what are those rules?

The courts should require the government to disclose this information and quickly, and the practice of delving into travelers’ private lives at the border without reason to suspect them of wrongdoing should ultimately end. Everything we know about the government’s searches of devices at the border suggests the government is dramatically expanding an unconstitutional program.

How Tetris can soothe after trauma

But a new study has shown that playing the computer game Tetris within hours of experiencing trauma can prevent those feelings from taking over your mind.

PTSD occurs when intrusive memories linked to fear from a traumatic event become consolidated in a person’s mind by them visualizing the event in a loop until it becomes locked in their brain.

Competing with the visualization, such as with a game like Tetris, can block that consolidation form happening.

“An intrusive memory is a visual memory of a traumatic event,” said Emily Holmes, Professor of Psychology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, whose team led the study. “Tetris also requires imagination and vision. Your brain can’t do two things at once, so this interrupts.”

Tetris is a simple, visual and addictive computer game in which the goal is to line up falling shapes to form rows that then disappear when aligned. As rows disappear, more shapes fall and the longer the game lasts, the higher the score.

The goal in Tetris is to line up falling shapes to form rows that disappear when aligned.

Holmes hopes that use of these simple and early strategies with patients could help prevent the onset of PTSD. The current standard treatment doesn’t begin until after people develop the condition.

PTSD is estimated to effect 3.5% of adults in the US, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The percentage is similar globally, at 4.6%, according to the World Health Organization.

Effective soon after an accident

Researchers tested the game on 71 patients in a UK emergency room who were seeking care after a motor accident. Half of them received standard care for their injuries, while the other half received a psychological intervention within six hours of their accident in which they were asked to recall their trauma, practice playing Tetris and then given the game to play on their own.

The patients were then monitored for one week, during which time they tracked how often they had memories, or flashbacks, relating to their accident. The people who has played Tetris reported 62% less memories on average over the week.

“After two days they had gone down to pretty much zero,” Holmes told CNN.

Researchers have long believed that intervening early — within hours or days of the event — could stop the fearful memories from developing in the brain. This is the first study using something as simple as a computer game.

Holmes has been researching the use of Tetris in this way for more than a decade in the lab and this proof-of-concept study is the first time she has experimented with patients.

The research remains in it’s early stages, she stresses. What we need to do is a larger study,” said Holmes who also hopes to monitor the effectiveness of her approach over a longer period of time, up to six months.

The need for more insight using a larger cohort of people was raised by consultant Mark Salter from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, as well as the need to test options other than Tetris. “The study is small … and not everyone plays Tetris or is computer literate,” he told CNN. He added that there is also the challenge of “getting someone to participate when they’ve just seen something terrifying.”

See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter.

But he was intrigued by the findings and the ability of this prevention measure to be given soon after someone experiences a trauma. “What’s exciting about this is that it happens quickly,” he said. “It allows an immediacy to the intervention.”

Salter said the approach needs to include other options that are more universally acceptable since “it’s not just Tetris that does this.”

Holmes said that anything visual and engaging could have a similar effect. But, he added, other engrossing activities using other parts of the brain, such as number or word activities, may not work, or make things worse.

Transgender child’s mom: love your kids, period

I recognized the dress immediately. It had been his older sister’s — cast away, no doubt, in a donation bag that was never donated.

I didn’t race outside, tear the dress off and proffer admonishments. I watched, instead, as his makeshift wand of willow danced through the air — a little princess going from flower bed to flower bed casting enchantments over the marigolds.

I let our child continue playing undisturbed, but before I returned to my soup, I did what we all do when we see something adorable: I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo.

Later that night, my husband and I went to dinner with another couple we didn’t know well. As a fellow mom will do, the wife asked to see photos of our children, so I took out my phone and began swiping through recent family shots.

“Aren’t their children adorable?” she exclaimed, grabbing the phone out of my hands and showing photos to her husband.

Before I could get my phone back, they had discovered the photo from that afternoon.

I saw them exchange puzzled looks, then the wife said: “This is your son?”

‘Indulgence and permission are two different things’

Sensing their disapproval, I smiled and responded as calmly as I could, “Yes, he likes to play princess sometimes.”

“You really shouldn’t encourage that behavior,” the wife said with the grave compassion usually reserved for a potentially terminal illness. “When our son was little, he liked to play dress-up, too, but we didn’t indulge it. Not one bit. I even hired a male nanny! And now our son is completely normal! A strapping teenage boy — very popular with the girls — nothing odd about him at all!”

“You can’t indulge it,” the husband concurred. “That’s the key. It’s no different than enforcing bedtime. Children are very malleable. You can shape them, but not if you indulge their every whim.”

I politely thanked them for their (unsolicited) advice and my husband deftly changed the topic, but as I lay in bed later that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the the word “indulgent.”

My child at play.

Was it really indulgence to allow our child the freedom to express himself? It’s not as if he was shooting a BB gun at the neighbor’s pet cat, or throwing sand in another kid’s face.

Since that incident, I’ve had the word “indulgent” leveled at me many times by various detractors who disagree with the unconditional love and support my husband and I have offered our now-eight-year-old transgender daughter, as if that choice was the same as offering her an extra slice of chocolate cake even though we knew she already had seconds.

And here’s what I would say to those people: when it comes to parenting, indulgence and permission are two different things.

When we indulge a child, we let them get away with something — usually a behavior considered reprehensible by others. When we offer a child permission, we give them the reassurance that what they are doing is okay.

I like to think that the permission we gave Samuel to play as he saw fit in his early years paved the path for later emotional security.

On the eve of his sixth birthday, after a four-year battle with self-hatred and depression, he felt safe enough to transition from living as a boy to living as a girl. It was like witnessing a second birth.

And now we have a daughter who greets each day with excitement. Her name is Sadie, and she’s just as precious to us as her male counterpart was, only much, much happier.

What if we had punished Samuel instead of embracing Sadie?

I sometimes ask myself what would have happened if we had taken our dinner companion’s advice. What if we had shamed our son, or punished him? What if we had refused to let him out of his room unless he agreed to behave like a traditional boy?

In those early years of our child’s life, when my husband and I searched the Internet for information about children who claim to be the opposite gender than their anatomy indicates, we found these two statistics: Forty percent of transgender people attempt suicide each year, whereas a child who is accepted by his or her family is eight times less likely to attempt suicide later in life.

Better to be labeled as over-indulgent parents for letting our son play princess, we told ourselves, than to have a dead child.

If you worry that you, or someone you know, is indulging a young child by allowing him or her to cross-dress or do otherwise non-stereotypical activities, think again. Child development experts claim that children understand their gender identity as young as age 2.

But most children lack the vocabulary to articulate how they feel when they are so young. Their only recourse at gaining understanding may be to don a tutu as a boy, or to wear a Superman costume as a girl.

If your young child or student is a boy who likes traditional girl things, or a girl who likes traditional boy things, it doesn’t mean that he or she is transgender. It might mean nothing at all, or it might indicate that the child is what experts call “gender fluid.” It could be a phase, or it could be something more permanent.

No matter the reason, a child’s gender exploration isn’t something to punish.

Of course the nonconforming child’s behavior may be something you fear, and possibly for good reasons. You might live in a community that lacks understanding and compassion. You might be part of a religious group that doesn’t accept transgender identity as a possibility.

It doesn’t matter. Support that child anyway.

‘We’re living our lives, just like you’

Some may decry this decision, as if you are aiding and abetting a criminal. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are aiding and abetting the crucial work we all do in trying to figuring out who we are and why we’re here.

Like me, like my husband, like hundreds of other parents who have faced their young children’s gender dysphoria, you must push past fear and replace it with curiosity. And then you need to start learning, and connecting with other families who are going through similar experiences.

And if you don’t know any gender nonconforming children, or if you think the parents who support nonconforming children are mentally ill, child-abusing monsters — all things we have been called — I would wager a bet that if you came over to visit some afternoon, you might be surprised at how similar we are to you.

You might notice my teenage daughter’s school books and SAT prep manual scattered around. You might hear the sound of my younger daughter’s squeals as our dogs chase her around the house. You might notice we have the same favorite show playing on our TV, and if you look closely enough, you might see the imprint in the sofa where my husband naps as he pretends to watch.

What you wouldn’t notice is that one of my two daughters is transgender. You wouldn’t notice because there is nothing to notice.

We’re living our lives, just like you: struggling to keep things balanced, trying to look on the bright side, trying to get enough sleep, to drink enough water, to remember to brush our hair before we leave the house, to floss before bed, to say please and thank you, to apologize when wrong.

Those of us who are raising transgender children know it is time for us to be brave; to step forward; to introduce ourselves to you and welcome you into our lives; to prove that we haven’t indulged our children but merely chosen to love them.

Transgender child’s mom: love your kids, period

I recognized the dress immediately. It had been his older sister’s — cast away, no doubt, in a donation bag that was never donated.

I didn’t race outside, tear the dress off and proffer admonishments. I watched, instead, as his makeshift wand of willow danced through the air — a little princess going from flower bed to flower bed casting enchantments over the marigolds.

I let our child continue playing undisturbed, but before I returned to my soup, I did what we all do when we see something adorable: I grabbed my phone and snapped a photo.

Later that night, my husband and I went to dinner with another couple we didn’t know well. As a fellow mom will do, the wife asked to see photos of our children, so I took out my phone and began swiping through recent family shots.

“Aren’t their children adorable?” she exclaimed, grabbing the phone out of my hands and showing photos to her husband.

Before I could get my phone back, they had discovered the photo from that afternoon.

I saw them exchange puzzled looks, then the wife said: “This is your son?”

‘Indulgence and permission are two different things’

Sensing their disapproval, I smiled and responded as calmly as I could, “Yes, he likes to play princess sometimes.”

“You really shouldn’t encourage that behavior,” the wife said with the grave compassion usually reserved for a potentially terminal illness. “When our son was little, he liked to play dress-up, too, but we didn’t indulge it. Not one bit. I even hired a male nanny! And now our son is completely normal! A strapping teenage boy — very popular with the girls — nothing odd about him at all!”

“You can’t indulge it,” the husband concurred. “That’s the key. It’s no different than enforcing bedtime. Children are very malleable. You can shape them, but not if you indulge their every whim.”

I politely thanked them for their (unsolicited) advice and my husband deftly changed the topic, but as I lay in bed later that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the the word “indulgent.”

My child at play.

Was it really indulgence to allow our child the freedom to express himself? It’s not as if he was shooting a BB gun at the neighbor’s pet cat, or throwing sand in another kid’s face.

Since that incident, I’ve had the word “indulgent” leveled at me many times by various detractors who disagree with the unconditional love and support my husband and I have offered our now-eight-year-old transgender daughter, as if that choice was the same as offering her an extra slice of chocolate cake even though we knew she already had seconds.

And here’s what I would say to those people: when it comes to parenting, indulgence and permission are two different things.

When we indulge a child, we let them get away with something — usually a behavior considered reprehensible by others. When we offer a child permission, we give them the reassurance that what they are doing is okay.

I like to think that the permission we gave Samuel to play as he saw fit in his early years paved the path for later emotional security.

On the eve of his sixth birthday, after a four-year battle with self-hatred and depression, he felt safe enough to transition from living as a boy to living as a girl. It was like witnessing a second birth.

And now we have a daughter who greets each day with excitement. Her name is Sadie, and she’s just as precious to us as her male counterpart was, only much, much happier.

What if we had punished Samuel instead of embracing Sadie?

I sometimes ask myself what would have happened if we had taken our dinner companion’s advice. What if we had shamed our son, or punished him? What if we had refused to let him out of his room unless he agreed to behave like a traditional boy?

In those early years of our child’s life, when my husband and I searched the Internet for information about children who claim to be the opposite gender than their anatomy indicates, we found these two statistics: Forty percent of transgender people attempt suicide each year, whereas a child who is accepted by his or her family is eight times less likely to attempt suicide later in life.

Better to be labeled as over-indulgent parents for letting our son play princess, we told ourselves, than to have a dead child.

If you worry that you, or someone you know, is indulging a young child by allowing him or her to cross-dress or do otherwise non-stereotypical activities, think again. Child development experts claim that children understand their gender identity as young as age 2.

But most children lack the vocabulary to articulate how they feel when they are so young. Their only recourse at gaining understanding may be to don a tutu as a boy, or to wear a Superman costume as a girl.

If your young child or student is a boy who likes traditional girl things, or a girl who likes traditional boy things, it doesn’t mean that he or she is transgender. It might mean nothing at all, or it might indicate that the child is what experts call “gender fluid.” It could be a phase, or it could be something more permanent.

No matter the reason, a child’s gender exploration isn’t something to punish.

Of course the nonconforming child’s behavior may be something you fear, and possibly for good reasons. You might live in a community that lacks understanding and compassion. You might be part of a religious group that doesn’t accept transgender identity as a possibility.

It doesn’t matter. Support that child anyway.

‘We’re living our lives, just like you’

Some may decry this decision, as if you are aiding and abetting a criminal. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are aiding and abetting the crucial work we all do in trying to figuring out who we are and why we’re here.

Like me, like my husband, like hundreds of other parents who have faced their young children’s gender dysphoria, you must push past fear and replace it with curiosity. And then you need to start learning, and connecting with other families who are going through similar experiences.

And if you don’t know any gender nonconforming children, or if you think the parents who support nonconforming children are mentally ill, child-abusing monsters — all things we have been called — I would wager a bet that if you came over to visit some afternoon, you might be surprised at how similar we are to you.

You might notice my teenage daughter’s school books and SAT prep manual scattered around. You might hear the sound of my younger daughter’s squeals as our dogs chase her around the house. You might notice we have the same favorite show playing on our TV, and if you look closely enough, you might see the imprint in the sofa where my husband naps as he pretends to watch.

What you wouldn’t notice is that one of my two daughters is transgender. You wouldn’t notice because there is nothing to notice.

We’re living our lives, just like you: struggling to keep things balanced, trying to look on the bright side, trying to get enough sleep, to drink enough water, to remember to brush our hair before we leave the house, to floss before bed, to say please and thank you, to apologize when wrong.

Those of us who are raising transgender children know it is time for us to be brave; to step forward; to introduce ourselves to you and welcome you into our lives; to prove that we haven’t indulged our children but merely chosen to love them.

How much sex should you be having?

In what might be welcome news for everyone exhausted from work and frazzled from kids, research suggests you don’t have to get down every day to reap the rewards of sex, at least in terms of happiness and relationship closeness.

“I do think couples can end up feeling pressure to try to engage in sex as frequently as possible,” said Amy Muise, a postdoctoral researcher studying sexual relationships at Dalhousie University in Canada. Once a week “is maybe a more realistic goal to set than thinking you have to have sex everyday and that feels overwhelming and you avoid it,” said Muise, who is lead author of the study, which was published in November in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The study found that sex could boost happiness because it makes people feel more satisfied in their relationship, based on survey data from two separate cohorts, including 2,400 married couples in the U.S. National Survey of Families and Households.

“For people in relationships, their romantic relationship quality is one of the biggest predictors of their overall happiness,” Muise said. “Having sex more than once a week might not be enhancing that (relationship connection), although it is not bad.”

However, there are a couple of rubs with this research, Muise said. One is that it is not clear which came first, sex or happiness. It may be that people who have sex once a week or more were happier in their relationship and life to begin with, and not that the sex helped make them happy. Or both may be true: Sex enhances happiness and happiness enhances sex.

The other catch is that, although a weekly romp might be just what some people need, it might be too much or too little for others. “Certainly there are couples for whom having sex less frequently will be fine for their happiness, and there are couples who will get increases in happiness if they have sex more than once a week,” Muise said.

What’s the right number for you?

“One of the best effects of an article like this (by Muise and her colleagues) is that it opens up conversations with couples” about their sex life, said Vanessa Marin, a sex therapist based in Berlin. For some couples, the question of how often they should have sex might not have come up, which could be a sign they feel sufficiently close and satisfied — or that they are just too busy or disconnected to think about it.

“Most couples want to be having more sex and I think this is really a result of how busy and full most of our lives are,” Marin said.

Marin avoids prescribing an amount of sex that couples should have, because every couple is different, and instead recommends couples test it out for themselves. “I’m a big fan of having clients experiment, like, one month try to have sex twice a week and see how that goes, or once a week, try to play around with it,” Marin said.

As for those lucky couples that are content with how often they get busy under the sheets, one study suggests they may not want to change a thing. Researchers asked couples that were having sex about six times a month to double down on getting down. Couples that doubled their sexual frequency were in worse moods and enjoyed sex less at the end of three months than couples who had stuck to their usual level of bedroom activity.

“Being told you should do something always makes it less fun,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and lead author of the study. That is another reason Marin does not make recommendations to couples about sexual frequency — for fear they could worry they are not living up to expectations and lose their mojo.

However, there’s a far bigger relationship problem than couples worrying they aren’t having quite enough sex — “couples that have pretty much stopped having sex,” Loewenstein said. For these couples, “I think once a week is a good final goal. … It is almost like a natural constant to do it once a week,” he said.

Even if these abstinent couples want to be having more sex, they may lack the desire for their partner. These couples can try conventional strategies, such as scheduling more quality time together or trying a change in scenery. “What couple has not had the experience that you go to a hotel in a new location in a new environment and the person you’re with seems different, and different is good when it comes to sex,” Loewenstein said.

But if these tricks aren’t enough, couples may have to appeal to their rational rather than lustful side and tell themselves to just do it. “These couples might be surprised how enjoyable it would be if they restarted,” Loewenstein said.

Should you schedule your sex?

It might sound like the least romantic thing in the world to pencil in sexy time with your partner. But if you and your partner are game to try, there is no reason not to make a sex schedule.

“For some couples, scheduling sex works really well, it gives them something to look forward to, they like the anticipation, they like feeling prioritized,” Marin said. “Then other couples (say) scheduling sex feels horrible to them, like sex is transactional and just another item on their to-do list.”

Again, Marin recommends couples experiment with scheduling sex to see if it helps them, as long as neither is opposed to it.

A good idea for all couples, whether they like the idea of scheduling sex, is to plan for quality time together — just the two of them. Ideally, this would be about 20 minutes a day with the TV off and cell phones away, but for extra busy couples, it can help to reserve just five minutes a day for a tete-a-tete, Marin said. This time is also the “container for sex,” the time and privacy when sex can be initiated, but you don’t have to feel pressure about it, she added.

Although scheduling sex can help couples that want to be having sex but just can’t find the time, it can make things worse for some. “If there are relationship issues or psychological issues such as stress or anxiety, then scheduling sex might just add to the pressure,” said Acacia Parks, associate professor of psychology at Hiram College.

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As for when to schedule the sex, the best time is probably the time when you are least likely to be pulled away by life’s obligations. One of the perks of rise-and-shine sex is that testosterone levels are highest in the morning, and this hormone drives sexual desire. On the other hand, tuck-you-in sex could help lull you to sleep, as hormones released during orgasm could help you relax and feel tired.

According to Muise, the participants in her research typically reported having sex at night before going to sleep, which is not that surprising. But it has to work for both parties. “This is another point of negotiation between partners,” Muise said. “One of them is just too exhausted. That might be something to play around with, is there a time on the weekend that we could try instead.”

Why is government searching phones?

These are some of the many American citizens re-entering the country who have been subjected to searches of their cellphones and questioning about their social media.

Such invasions of travelers’ private communications are extremely intrusive and have been conducted even when officials don’t apparently have reason to think the person has done something wrong. And the government has lately increased the practice dramatically — even though recent legal decisions raise serious questions about its constitutionality.

Because people keep ever more of their personal details on their phones and computers, it is particularly egregious that the government should claim some right to unfettered access to these devices simply because a person travels abroad.

On Monday, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University — whose mission is to defend free speech in the digital age — filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the government to release information on the number of travelers whose devices have been searched, the policies related to searching cellphones containing sensitive and confidential information, and the findings of internal audits about the device search program.

Border searches of electronic devices by the Department of Homeland Security have risen exponentially in recent years, from about 5,000 device searches in 2015 to about 25,000 in 2016, according to press reports that cited DHS data. During the Trump administration, the intrusions appear to have become even more frequent; in February 2017 alone, border officials searched 5,000 devices.
And why is this happening? A US Customs and Border Protection policy since 2009 authorizes officers to seize and search a traveler’s electronic devices even if the person is not suspicious. The policy was always legally dubious, but it has become indefensible in light of the Supreme Court’s 2014 landmark decision in Riley v. California.

The court held that police generally can’t seize a person’s cellphone as part of an arrest without first obtaining a warrant that is backed by evidence that the cellphone contains evidence of a crime and is signed by a judge.

A cellphone contains “the sum of an individual’s private life,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The search of a smartphone is nothing like the search of a duffle bag. What people store on their cellphones — including Internet browsing history, medical records, family photos, GPS location data, financial information, and apps related to dating, addiction and hobbies — is vastly more sensitive than what people used to carry in their pockets, backpacks, or purses, or even keep in their homes.

Searches of electronic devices when there is no basis for suspicion to search them raise serious concerns relating to the freedoms of speech and association. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in another recent Supreme Court case, “[a]wareness that the government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms.” Americans will be justifiably concerned about speaking freely if, simply because they travel internationally, the government is given unlimited authority to read through their emails, texts, social media posts and the like.

The implications may be especially significant for a free press. Suspicionless searches of cellphones threaten the ability of journalists and their sources to report on important international issues, which deprives the public of its right to know about those issues.

Numerous reports show that journalists, lawyers and activists — particularly those who cover civil wars and terrorism or travel to conflict areas — have had their cellphones and devices searched at the US border, where officers have demanded their passwords and read their communications with sources.

Those sources will likely be leery of sharing information with journalists and activists if their identities and reports may be revealed to the US government at the border.

Anecdotal evidence about how the government is using its authority to conduct suspicionless electronic device searches is disturbing but incomplete. The public has a right to see a fuller picture, as many civil liberties groups have asked the government to provide.

Our freedom of information lawsuit request seeks a range of information, but one of the items we seek may be especially revealing: We’ve asked for the database of the Treasury Enforcement Communications System that houses information about every device-search at the border, including the reason for the search, the country of origin of the traveler, and the traveler’s race and ethnicity.
The government created this database in response to concerns voiced by the Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights office several years ago about the possibility that searches might be conducted in a discriminatory or otherwise unlawful way.

Disclosure of the database — perhaps with narrow redactions to protect legitimate national security and privacy interests — would help the public understand the answer to basic questions about the government’s program: How often do border officers search travelers’ cellphones and other devices, and for what reasons?

Why did the incidence of cellphone searches sharply increase in the past 15 months? Does the department follow its own rules for taking special measures to protect searches of privileged and other sensitive content stored on cellphones, and what are those rules?

The courts should require the government to disclose this information and quickly, and the practice of delving into travelers’ private lives at the border without reason to suspect them of wrongdoing should ultimately end. Everything we know about the government’s searches of devices at the border suggests the government is dramatically expanding an unconstitutional program.

Why the right is angry at Tomi Lahren

Lahren, a 24-year-old known for her video monologues delivered in a brash, self-aggrandizing tone, rose to quick prominence within right-wing media. She’s young, blond, opinionated and conservative, and unafraid to use sex appeal as a cudgel. “It seems feminists are all about freedom of expression so long as the females are overweight or transgender,” she says in one video.
Being a young, attractive, conservative woman also gave her cover to make the kind of startlingly cruel comments that would have sunk other careers — suggesting, for example, that Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives (and the lives of their children) were cowards who wouldn’t stay to defend their country. “Americans stand up and fight for faith, family and freedom,” reads the text overlaid on an image of herself, which she tweeted. “Syrians run away.”
But now, after a meteoric rise, Lahren has crashed to earth. She was suspended from the conservative website The Blaze, which features her videos. According to a report in the New York Post, she has been “banned permanently.” The reason: she came out on national television as pro-choice. “You know what? I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well,” Lahren said.

Lahren, apparently, didn’t get the memo that the American right is happy with sexy women as long as those women appear sexy to appeal to men; women who have the nerve to think they have the right to their own sexual and reproductive choices, well, they are not so welcome in the GOP.

Conservative men used Lahren as the perennial example of the sexually appealing right-wing woman, as a way to imply or outright say that liberal women are ugly. That jab, of course, rests on the idea that women are only as valuable as they are hot, a standard that clearly doesn’t apply for men — Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, or most of the other Republican men populating the White House. But Lahren was happy to play along.

Where she went wrong was in thinking it was only fair that she had some say over her sexuality. As an attractive young woman, Lahren was a useful tool for the old white men who run the right-wing media when she said all the right things — when she was a vicious ideologue, cute as a college cheerleader.

That she’s not following the playbook of “sexy young thing” looking to transition to “sacrificial pro-life mother” surely enrages the men who only want to hear women talk as long as they want to have sex with them — or as long as they’re making excuses for misogyny while putting a pretty face on brutal policies.

Let’s compare: Donald Trump was pro-choice before he was anti-abortion; it’s hard to imagine this level of outrage at a right-wing man who says he thinks freedom extends to women. But men on both sides of the aisle are given more freedom to be iconoclasts. Perhaps Lahren thought her status gave her a little more freedom to speak her mind and assert her basic rights. It’s clear now that she didn’t know her role, and the same men who helped usher her to fame are now keen to shut her up.

Lahren is a successful young woman who probably realizes that the right to decide for herself when to have children will shape the course of the rest of her life — her professional future, her economic prospects, her education, her romantic life, her health. So it is for every woman, which is why legal and accessible contraception and abortion are crucial, nonnegotiable pillars of women’s freedom. Lahren notes that her support of abortion rights comes from her commitment to freedom — “I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies,” she said.

It turns out that for all their talk about freedom and liberty, conservatives aren’t willing to fully extend those values to women. And for all their talk about free speech and all the complaints that liberal institutions shut down conservative views, they’ve been awfully quick to try and muzzle Lahren for the crime of saying she thinks a safe, legal medical procedure that has revolutionized women’s rights in America should remain legal.

Imagine the howling on the right if a liberal publication suspended a commentator for saying they morally opposed abortion — it would be used as further proof of leftist intolerance. It turns out that when it comes to free speech being used to support women’s rights, the right is pretty closed-minded.

That there’s room in the Republican Party and in conservative media for a man who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, another who was charged with domestic violence, and a whole room full of men who are happy to take away health care for pregnant women (and the list goes on), but not for a woman who says she gets to decide what happens inside her own uterus, tells you everything you need to know about conservatives and women. If only Lahren had figured out sooner that it’s not feminists who are the problem — it’s the whole conservative ideology she pushes.

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