Right-wing Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro spoke to Orthodox students at Yeshiva Monday.

Transgender people are unfortunately suffering from a significant mental illness that is deeply harmful and it’s not a solution to pretend that transgender people are the sex that they think they are in their head. Biology is biology; men can’t magically become women and women can’t magically become men.

Vanessa LoBue, assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers-Newark, has contributed an article at The Conversation that was forwarded to me. When do children develop their gender identity?

It turns out that for young children, initial concepts about gender are quite flexible. In my own research, I’ve found that children don’t begin to notice and adopt gender-stereotyped behaviors (e.g., preferring colors like pink or blue) until the age of two or three. A few years later, their concept of gender becomes quite rigid, and although it becomes more relaxed by middle childhood, even adults have trouble going back to thinking about gender as something that’s flexible.

--LoBue