When I saw the title "My Child Will Not Be Allowed To Be Transgender" on my Facebook newsfeed you could see my facial expression change from happy to plain disgust. I literally had just shared a video of a transgender girl telling a story about how she was getting bullied.

Before I clicked on the article my mind was all over the place. How are you going to have children if you can't even support them? Or why don't you support transgender people for being who they are? Then I clicked on the article and I realized that this is why I don't read controversial articles that have a different view from mine, because I get so heated.

The first thing I want to say is, you don't allow people to be who they are, it's their own identity. A boy isn't going to just come home one day and be like "I want to be a girl because it's a trend". Trans girls/boys don't choose to be who they are. They feel like they're trapped in a body that doesn't belong to them and nothing's wrong with that. Saying you're not going to allow your child to be transgender is like your parents telling you that you're not allowed to be in the military because you might die.

The fact that someone can write an article about not letting their child be transgender and say at the beginning of their article that "this article is in NO way saying that I hate transgender/homosexual people. I love and respect them as humans (and friends!), I just simply don't support their decision." Is a little unsettling to me because saying that you don't hate transgender people but you don't support their "decision" is going against you not hating them. You must have a little hatred, I'm not saying you have a whole lot but you can't respect people if you don't respect who they are as a person, and being transgender is who they are; they didn't decide to be transgender.

You might not encourage your boy to wear pink or your girl from using the boy's bathroom until they're out of your "authority", but what is going to happen when they do get out your authority? That's if they make it out of your authority. You can't wait to have kids of your own but if your child doesn't feel like they can be who they are around the person that is supposed to support them the most, what will happen then? They will most likely be depressed and suicidal, because they have to hide who they are. But when your child does get out of your house and out of your authority, what is going to happen? Are you still not going to encourage them to be who they truly are or are you going to be there supporter?

Being who you are is not a mental illness. BEING TRANSGENDER IS NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS! According to the World Health Organization, a mental illness is "distress and dysfunction" and while transgender people do have distress, being transgender is not a factor of being distressed. The distress that transgenders have is from the social rejection they experience. It is not a scientific fact that being transgender is a mental illness, but it is a fact that being transgender is not a mental illness. Therefore, there is no need to look for “symptoms” and to look for therapists, counselors, and physicians because they can not help you; you will be spending thousands of dollars on something that does not need to and cannot be”fixed.”

There is nothing wrong with being gay or transgender, and I hope that before anyone that has the same perspective as you has children, that you find a way to encourage your children to be whoever they want to be, including being transgender.