5-year-old AFAB niece might be trans- how can I help?

Post date: 2021-11-29 08:07:44

(Using 'her' pronoun for simplicity.) My young niece has called herself a boy a few times over the last couple years, likes boy stuff (so to speak) mostly, idolizes her father and uncle (me) and not much her mother, my sister. Recently she requested (and received) a 'cool guy' haircut and asked her mother if she's a boy now. Looking for advice to pass on to my sister.

She is an anxious child possibly/probably lightly neuroatypical- frequent stimming behavior, a formidable partiality for planning and order, unhappiness with even small surprises, strict food preferences, other fixations. This is all fine (and the possibility of her being trans is also fine) but it means she is more of a puzzle to her parents. They wonder, quite understandably, if her claim that she's a boy is another fixation rather than a deeper truth.

And she's so young, she doesn't understand gender or sex. It's not at all clear she knows what it means when she says she's a boy. She definitely does not understand the import. As far as I know her mother has only been supportive, not dismissive, and hopefully this is true for her father also, though he has a conservative background and I believe he is dearly hoping this is a phase.

What advice can I give my sister and what resources can I refer her to? What kind of expert should they speak to? At this time I think the central difficulty is determining how much to cater to my niece's claims about herself in her day-to-day. E.g. should her parents start calling her a boy (when to do otherwise would upset her)? If so, what about at school? And so on.

- The family lives in Sweden
- My niece has a little brother, no sisters

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