Monday, November 14, 2011

Childhood Gender Dysphoria

You would think that for a person who styles herself a writer, there would be more than one blog post a month, wouldn't you? I still have the goal of updating here at least weekly, but I tend to find myself too often distracted by discussions on web sites with a lot of traffic as opposed to this quiet little almost deserted corner of the net. It seems somewhat self important to be pontificating here for my own satisfaction  but that's an element of self doubt that probably works against me. Be that as it may, enough with the introverted prelude and on to the subject.

One of the topics that I've been most involved in over the last month is the several different recent stories all related to childhood gender dysphoria. In just the last couple of months there have been at least three prominent stories involving youngsters ranging in age from 7 to 11 whose life has brought them media attention. Not surprisingly, the reaction of the uninitiated has been passionate, but not always productive.

We transsexuals already deal with a situation in which those around us are not short on strongly held opinions, but are short on well informed positions. With many of the people I encounter, virtually every thing they think they know about transsexualism is at least in part incorrect. While many take a praise-worthy "live and let live" philosophy, that comes in many cases more from being a compassionate person more so than being a well-informed person.

This phenomena is compounded when the factor of childhood comes into play, simply because it never occurs to many people that children feel this way. The stereotype is that this is a decision considered and made as an adult - and historically it's true that the vast majority of us dealt with our condition as adults. But the fact that circumstances compelled us to wait creates an illusion which is inaccurate. The vast majority of transpeople testify that they understood the nature of their condition (even if they were unsure what to call it) at a very early age. People who've heard my story know that I report having been certain I was a girl no later than my 8th birthday. My experience is the rule, not the exception.

While those of us born in the 70's, 60's and before knew full well to keep our mouths shut in most cases because our culture simply had no precedent for the child who wished to transition to the other gender (except those with intersex conditions) this is no longer the case. When I was a child, I would have thought I was the only person with my particular sort of "crazy" in the world, I certainly had no idea what to call it, not for 3 or 4 years after I realized it. What I DID know was that coming out and telling my family that I knew in my heart that I was supposed to have been born female would have ended very badly for me. Certainly, as an 8,9,10 year old child I might have had even more fear than was justified. I had four of the best grandparents in the world and I certainly did not want to be disowned by them. Looking back now, I suspect it is not a given they would have, but in the mind of a child? All I could see was the strong possibility of losing everyone who claimed to love me.

I think it's reasonable to assume almost any child in those days would have. The record is littered with those who, usually as teenagers, had the boldness to tell their parents only to find themselves met with fierce resistance including "camps" designed to "fix" them, beatings designed to take a more direct approach, or even being thrown out of the house and disowned entirely. Any one who came of age throughout the 60's and 70's had real reason to expect such an outcome. Of course, that now creates the impression that none of us (or very few) knew about it then, because we hid it. I don't think cis-people fully appreciate the massive mental pressure to conform, to put the mask on and hide and try to be "ultra men" (or women) rather than risk being shunned and shamed for being a "freak." that we learn to hide it well is always eventually used against us as evidence that we can control this if we want to, and there's no reason for us to ever act on these feelings.

Thankfully, society has grown to the point that more and more young people sense that they can, in fact, open up to their parents. Not that the cultural resistance isn't there, and often fierce. but parents, despite almost always feeling strong initial resistance, now turn to professional help and the medical and psychiatric professionals have learned from years of mal-treatment that rejection and resistance are exactly the wrong things to do.

The uninformed cavalierly discuss these cases in terms which have no relationship to the established facts of this condition. Space prevents me from listing examples, but the gist of the argument seems to be that if you MAKE a boy do boyish things, you can train him to be happy as a boy. History demonstrates this is futile. Everything up to and including electroshock therapy has been tried to "cure" GD and nothing has ever worked. Even when one submits to religious pressure to repress one's condition, as I did, you are not "cured" but simply putting on the mask in order to please those whose judgement you fear.

Professional care-givers now know that such draconian reactions cause great psychological and emotional harm to the child. Some critics make the observation that "many children go through a period of gender confusion and grow out of it" and while there is a general truth to that, in the specific it is essentially false. "Gender confusion" is not what the transsexual child feels. We KNOW we are the wrong sex. Ask a "male" child with GD what sex he is and he will adamently say "I am a girl!" and he will not be talked out of it or back down from it or let it go. If you try to make him act male he will be at a minimum deeply depressed and possibly manifest other behavioral and mental problems. A boy who is typically though of as having "gender confusion" is almost always simply one who's not conforming to typical gender specific behavior (for instance, he might prefer dance to sports) and these children seldom declare they are the opposite gender and refuse to conform to any other truth. The latter group almost always "grows out of it" but these are not trans in the first place.

That's not to say a parent should run headlong into assuming a child is trans. Counseling is a must and flexibility is crucial. But the worst possible reaction is to try to crush the idea and drive it from your child.

In one of the notorious cases, a boy of 11 is taking hormone blocking drugs which will delay puberty for three years while the family considers the options and the child has time to be sure his GD will persist.  Critics cry "child abuse!" despite the fact that it's well understood that there's no real negative impact to delaying the onset of puberty. Some children have late onset puberty naturally - and early onset puberty, want to guess what the standard treatment for THAT is? It's interesting that critics who counsel "wait and see if they grow out of it" criticize the very treatment which allows just that option. These critics fail to appreciate that for the genuine TS child, puberty is a devastating experience. For a male-bodied child to be forced to endure the lowering of voice, the hair growth, the mascilinzation of features which comes with that event is torturous. And likewise the female-bodied child who has to watch breast and hip growth destroy what little male illusion she might otherwise have seen in the mirror is tremendously painful. And that's to say nothing of the pain and expense they will have to endure once they reach adulthood to reverse these developments (those which CAN be reversed).

In another case, a male-bodied child living as a girl wished to join the girl scouts. When the state chapter approved the request critics, mainly religious critics, were enraged again. It was not uncommon for this SEVEN year old child to be called a pervert and a lecher. such critics completely fail to understand transsexualism on even the most basic level. A M2F transsexual is pretty much the LAST person you should worry about assuming the aggressive male position in a romantic or sexualized situation. As if we are to assume 7 and 8 year old girls are sexually active anyway. In most such cases, other than those prone to bullying on any grounds, most of the child's peers will readily accept and adapt. Children at that age have not been indoctrinated with societies prejudices in many case, and often the child is readily accepted into the peer group. It's the PARENTS, with their uninformed biases who panic and demand action.

In the various discussions I've had on several sites - mostly Christian media sites - I've made an effort to be respectful but informative. It's my desire to see people of good will given the opportunity to learn and grow in their opinions on this subject. But sometimes the hostility is shocking. I can only hope that our culture continues to grow so that more and more children can avoid the destructive effects of dealing with a completely hostile culture.

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