Here’s the thing about little kids: they don’t know what it means to be a boy or a girl. That’s why you have to tell them. You have to guide them. You have to show them. They are ignorant of many things. They are helpless in many ways. That’s why they have parents. If your daughter truly is confused, if she’s really starting to think she’s a boy, then you are only going to enforce her delusions when you go out of your way to put her in elaborate outfits specifically designed to foster those confusions:

In fairness, I should mention that Ryland’s ‘true identity’ didn’t just reveal itself through her taste in toys and clothes. She came out and said she was a boy. She said it when she was two-years-old. She made fantastic and nonsensical claims about being something other than what she really is — much like, for instance, every single other toddler in the history of the world.

Walk into a room of toddlers and take a poll. You’ll soon discover that you are actually — according to the self-reported data from two and three-year-olds — surrounded by lions, dinosaurs, aliens, princesses, superheroes, and all manner of other mythical concoctions.

And, yes, you’ll find that many of the boys are girls and girls are boys. It’s extraordinarily common for kids that age to ‘self-identify’ as the opposite sex.

In most cases, you let them use their imagination and have their fun, but you make sure to offer them the proper guidance so that these games aren’t taken too far. If your kid thinks he’s a bird, let him pretend. But the moment he tries to jump out of a window or poop on your car windshield, it might be time to intervene.

Ryland’s parents took a silly thing that a toddler said and indulged it. They fed it. They snatched it out of fantasyland and made it real. Before long, poor Ryland was in the throes of a full-on identiy crisis.

They say that Ryland’s “boy phase” was more than a phase because she eventually started wearing boy suits and boy swimming trunks. “Started wearing.” Notice the way that’s phrased. You’d think she got a job, earned a paycheck, then drove to the store herself and bought her own outfits. In reality, however, one can assume that she only started wearing boy clothes because her parents started dressing her in boy clothes.

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