Reuters is telling he story of Penel Patterson.

Jodie Patterson's 3-year-old, Penelope, was brooding and angry until one day she asked her child what was wrong. Penelope, who was assigned female at birth, was upset "because everyone thinks I'm a girl," but he said he was really a boy.

I said, 'However you feel inside is fine.'" Patterson recalled from their home in Brooklyn, New York. "And then Penelope looked at me and said, 'No mama, I don't feel like a boy. I am a boy.'"

--Jodie Patterson

Almost immediately, Patterson embraced the reality that Penelope was a transgender boy, and by age 5 he was going to school as a boy. Today, at age 9, Penelope is happy and healthy as a boy who loves karate and super heroes and decided to keep his birth name.

Reuters has video, but danged if I know how to embed it. But here's Penel's story from Cosmopolitan and HRC:

Increasingly across the United States, doctors and parents of transgender children are embracing their identity as soon it starts becoming obvious, sometimes around age 3. Many say they are finding much greater chances of happiness and well-being when children are nurtured in their new gender identity at such a young age.

Conservative voices are much opposed to this, of course, claiming that nobody as young as three could know anything about their gender.

Researchers have long established that children acquire gender identity starting around 3 years old, and for the vast majority who are not transgender, such an identity is unremarkable.

But people who insist that being transgender is all about sexual orientation have an extremely difficult time accepting as fact that the gender identity of transgender people can develop independently of sexual thought or activity.

Some of the pioneering research on transgender issues has come from psychiatrists at VU University Medical Center in the Netherlands, sometimes called "the Dutch group."

Unfortunately some of the message out of this group can lead to harm of trans kids.

Advocating "watchful waiting," the Dutch group urges caution in leading pre-adolescent children into a social transition, in part because a significant though not precisely established percentage will revert back to the natal gender, or gender assigned at birth. Experts say further study is needed to determine how many children make such a reversion in their transgender identity.

The Dutch group sees potential harm in putting a teenager through a second gender transition. They also raise concerns that transition at a young age can distort a child's sense of reality, requiring later treatment.

But some Americans psychiatrists who work directly with transgender youth have argued that those who are consistent in their gender identity be allowed to transition because they are suffering in the natal gender.

I support a social transition for a kid who is in distress and needs to live in a different way. And I do so because I am very focused on what the child needs at that time.

--Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Children's Hospital Los Angeles

A social transition to the other gender helps children learn, make friends, and participate in family activities. Some will decide later they are not transgender, but Olson-Kennedy says the potential harm in such cases may be overstated.

Because prepubescent transgender children require no more physical change than a new hairstyle and clothes, the initial transition is completely reversible, Olson-Kennedy said.

Of some 1,000 patients she has dealt with, only one switched back to the natal gender, and without any harm, she said.

They tell us who they are. We don't force anything on them. By affirming who they are, there's definitely better evidence that they do well mentally and physically. So, how could that be wrong?

--David Breland, Seattle Children's Hospital Gender Clinic

One long-term study under way by the University of Washington's TransYouth Project is attempting to establish the stability rates of transgender identity among youth and the correlation between family acceptance and well-being.

Led by psychology professor Kristina Olson, the study aims to follow 350 transgender kids for 20 years, starting from the ages of 3 to 12.

So far, her team's research has found that transgender children who transition at a young age do remarkably well as long as the family is supportive. Transgender children aged 3 to 12 who live as the other gender have shown levels of depression equal to a control group of cisgender children, and the transgender group had only minimally more anxiety.

Moreover, observation of a group of 5- to 12-year-olds who were allowed to transition found that they tended to be clear about their gender identity and maintained it as deeply held. A third look at 9- to 14-year-olds concluded that "We found remarkably good mental health outcomes in socially transitioned children." The long-term study continues, but Olson's team has published these initial findings in research papers.

DeShanna Neal, a mother of four from Delaware, can attest to the benefits of embracing her young child's transgender identity.

Her child Trinity, now 13, was determined to be a boy at birth but began identifying as female by age 3. By 4, Trinity was living as a girl at home, but when she started school she went dressed as a boy.

Still, she identified as a girl at school, troubling her teachers and leading to stress for Trinity. A school psychologist determined she suffered from depression.

Neal found a therapist who told her and her husband to fully embrace Trinity's female identity. She said that the therapist also gave strikingly blunt advice.

She said, 'Your daughter already knows who she is. Now you have to decide. Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?'

--Neal

Those conservative voices have counseled parents of transgender kids to refuse to accept who their child is, claiming that it is sinful to do so. Such parents have gone so far as to evict their child from their homes or to try to beat the trans out of their child...in some known cases resulting in death of the child. But the most dangerous facet of this sect has been their insistence that public schools refuse to accept that children might be transgender and accept them for who they are.

I was watching the PBS show celebrating the anniversary of the Bard's death this past week and a thought came to mind about a big thing to do:

I share it here...with some trepidation. A gift for Boxing Day.

To be who you are inside your own head, or not to be so
That is an intriguing question
Whether it is better to be silently the target of the slings and arrows of so-called normal people
Or to speak our everlasting truths against the sea of troubles directed our way
And by raising our voices to end those troubles.
To die, to end the heartache and the pain of living among those who want to drive us away
The end of that heartache and pain is devoutly to be wished
To sleep, perchance to dream, of a better life,
Perhaps a chance, in those dreams, to be who we know ourselves to be.
Ay, there's the rub,
For in the sleep of death, there are no dreams,
No better day, when we have shed this mortal coil
To respect life, when it brings so much pain?
Who would bear the whips and scorns of a society
Bent on oppression, obsessed with denying us love
Or equal treatment before the law, or a voice in human affairs
That deems us to be unworthy of the class human
Unfit to work, to sweat in our labor to provide for ourselves,
Condemned to dread the end of our lives,
Of coming to that undiscovered country, from which nobody who visits can return
Only to find that we are never to be allowed to enter even there
No matter how many good deeds we have performed during our years
Or how sound our good will or how placid our hearts
Conscience does make cowards of us all
Until and unless we discover who we truly are
We are condemned to travel the current of lives not our own
And perform meaningless actions, never for the benefit of ourselves or our kind
But only for the benefit of those who would hate us for whom we may become
Still it is our obligation to push forward, beat a pathway into the future that may be followed
For the youth who shall come after us
Erecting for them the chance at a future we can only dream of,
Full of aspirations achieved and inspirations still to be conceived.