by hilzoy
Yesterday, NPR had a fascinating story about two six year olds who are transgender. You can either read or listen to it here; if you have twenty three minutes, I recommend listening to it. One thing that becomes very clear when you listen to it is that these are not kids (biologically, boys) whose parents put the idea of being girls into their heads. They came up with it on their own. They played with dolls, not trucks; they identified with female characters, not male ones; one decided to go trick or treating as Dorothy when he was two and a half (and that’s not the half of it; read or listen to the story.) As for the other:
“Around the age of 3, Jonah started taking his mother Pam’s clothing. He would borrow a long T-shirt and belt, and fashion it into a dress. This went on for months — with Jonah constantly adjusting his costume to make it better — until one day, Pam discovered her son crying inconsolably. He explained to his mother that he simply could not get the T-shirt to look right, she says.
Pam remembers watching her child mournfully finger his outfit. She says she knew what he wanted. “At that point I just said, you know, ‘You really want a dress to wear, don’t you?’ And [Jonah’s] face lit up, and [she] was like, ‘Yes!'”
That afternoon, Pam, her sister and Jonah piled into the family car.
“I thought [she]* was gonna hyperventilate and faint because [she] was so incredibly happy. … Before then, or since then, I don’t think I have seen [her] so out of [her] mind happy as that drive to Target that day to pick out [her] dress,” Pam says.
Pam allowed Jonah to get two dresses, but felt incredibly conflicted about it. Even though Jonah asked, she wouldn’t allow him to buy any more dresses for a year afterward, so Jonah wore those two dresses every day, nothing else, until Pam got sick of looking at them.”
Eventually, both sets of parents sought counseling, and got two counselors with very different approaches. One believes in trying to get children like this to stop trying to be the opposite gender. The other does not.
I can see both sides of this question. I ask myself: suppose I had a transgender kid, and there was some completely benign thing I could do — providing a diet with more of some vitamin, for instance — that would make my child completely comfortable with his or her biological gender. (Note: to count as benign, it would have to be something like dietary modification, as opposed to telling my kid to act more like a boy or girl.) Would I do it? I think so. Being transgender is not just no fun at all; it involves pretty serious surgery and a lifetime on hormones, and if something like a dietary modification, undertaken early enough, could spare my kid this, I think I’d go for it.
[UPDATE: Hob, in comments, notes that being transgender doesn’t necessarily mean surgery. True enough, and I was too quick to say that it did. Hob also says that I make it sound unduly grim: “many of my friends were having no fun at all for some part of their lives, but they are now.” To be clear: I didn’t mean that it’s never fun (and should have been clearer on that; of course it can be.) I should probably have said: it can be tough, which is more like what I meant. Also, I meant to include the parts when people don’t have fun: the part before you figure out what’s going on and what to do about it, for instance. Though, on reflection, I should probably have hedged that too: maybe for some people it’s never confusing at all, and people are never bigoted and vile, and there is no employment discrimination, and so forth. END UPDATE.]
But that hypothetical assumes something crucial, namely: that gender identification can be modified. Maybe in some cases it can: human nature being endlessly various, I’m sure there are boys out there who decide to be girls, or vice versa, but for whom this is malleable. (Thus the word ‘decide’, which would otherwise be completely question-begging.) I’m also sure that there are a lot of transmen and transwomen whose gender identification is not modifiable in any way we know of: people who try as hard as they can not to want to be a different gender, without success. And before I decided what to do in response to the fact that my hypothetical child did not identify with the body s/he was born with, I would want to have some idea which s/he seemed likely to be.
Here’s what happened to the two kids.