So this is important, It's occurring, and it's effecting many more kids than you'd think it is.
Recently, I sat down to watch my favorite TV show “Law and Order: SVU” much like I usually do. The episode was called ‘Transitions’ and I was extremely surprised at the subject matter of the show; transgender children and what is called ‘Gender Identity Disorder’. I had heard of this before of course, transgender men and women that work to become what they believe they truly are, but I had heard very little about how much this has been affecting some children. The episode addressed a problem with a mother and father fighting for custody of their transgender son Henry, who was fighting to become the girl he was on the inside. The mother, although it was difficult on her, supported her ‘daughter’s’ decision, while the father was in complete denial of it all, forcing his child to become suicidal. The father refused to allow hormone blockers to be taken to stop puberty and start transitioning into a female, which caused massive issues amongst the family. This brought me to my question, “Should parents really have a say in whether or not their transgender child can begin their transition?”
To be transgender, it means that you feel that you were born into the wrong body; your brain is telling you your female, but your body is make, or vice versa. It is something that many people go through and it’s becoming much more common today for those people to do something about it. Recently, there was a report about the transgender man who gave birth to a baby, because he hadn’t fully transitioned into the male form surgically. But now, people are starting to discover this at younger and younger ages. In many ways, this is easier on them, but it causes much emotional difficulty on others, particularly the parents.
In 2007, an article was printed about a transgender six-year-old girl whose parents supported her transition into the female identity. Born a boy, Jazz Jennings had insisted since the moment she could talk that she was a girl. Jazz is one of the “youngest known cases of an early transition from male to female” (Goldberg/Adriano 1). Jazz’s parents have also discussed Hormone Therapy. This will stop her from growing body hair and everything else that’s masculine. Once she starts taking estrogen, this will help her body start taking a turn for female. Her fat will start to go to her hips and she will develop breasts.
Eventually, all transgender people come across a difficult decision; do they want to take the step towards Gender Reassignment Surgery? Most people in this situation are older when they make the decision, but often, for children, the surgery is all they want. For children like Jazz, it isn’t something that has been thought about as much as wearing dresses and decorating her room with mermaids. At the tender age of six, she’s taking the steps toward becoming a little girl and not needing to worry about becoming a woman. For kids like Riley Grant, a transgender ten-year-old girl, it’s all they can think about.
Riley Grant was born a boy, but always knew he was a girl. As a child, he was quiet, passive, and quite clingy. “His mother knew that he wouldn't become a macho little boy,” Says Alan Goldberg of ABC News. Her mother, is very supportive of Riley’s decision, and is quite understanding of her situation. “She has a birth defect, and we call it that. I can't think of a worse birth defect, as a woman to have, than to have a penis," Riley's mother, Stephanie, told Barbara Walters. "She talks about the day she'll have a baby. That's not in her future. But she sees herself as growing up to be a woman" (Goldberg 1). Riley has always been quite emotional and passionate about insisting that she was a girl. This all become quite clear one day when his mother was giving she and her sister a bath. Riley, out of the tub, held a pair of nail clippers against his penis and said that it wasn’t supposed to be there, that “God made a mistake”, breaking his mother’s heart. His mother began to buy him feminine things in secret, making sure that her father wouldn’t find out. This went on for a few months, then her father found out. He was extremely upset; it wasn’t something he at all believed in. Seeing his son wear a dress was almost too much for him to bear. This caused so much tension in the Grant’s marriage, and they almost ended up separating over it.
This has to make you wonder, if you were in this situation to, as a parent, could you really say that you’d rather have a dead son than a happy, loving daughter? This could be misconstrued as an unfair question, and an unfair one it is, but it’s definitely one to think about. When doctors perform the Gender Reassignment Surgery, they always make sure that they are at the age of consent, eighteen. But is this really right? Is it really worth it to make these children suffer and live in such depression, knowing that they’re in the wrong body, that they were born physically into this world the exact opposite of how they’re brain is developing? In the womb, at the beginning, all fetus brains start out as female until the testosterone began to effect the brain and body development. But what if during this time, something went wrong? This is the theory many scientists have made; that as a fetus, the brain was affected and the body was not, or vice versa, causing the brain to develop feminine and the body to develop masculine, or the brain to develop masculine and the body to develop feminine. Should this really be the choice of the parents for their child when in all honesty, they have no idea what their child is going through? Also, should the parents have any say in whether or not their children should be able to stop taking the hormone blockers? Just because a father wants his son to remain his son, simply because his little boy playing with dolls makes him uncomfortable, is it really worth risking the depression or even the suicide of his child? Many people are fighting for this today, to put the decision ultimately in the hands of those who are transgender, at any age over ten.
To some, this seems outrageous and far too young an age, but too others, they know that a child can tell immediately if something isn’t right, and want it fixed. Children are much more perceptive than we think they are, much more aware of what’s going on with their bodies than we’d like to think. It’s actually been proven in a study done by Barbara Walters, that children who start their transition early see massive improvement in their personality and even their grades in school. One transgender boy, after taking testosterone and hormone blockers in order to start his transition from female to male, went from D and C grades to A and B grades once he felt he was in the ‘right body’, and is happy now, very happy.
What I hope to learn from this project his this; I want to better understand the reason this happens to so many children. Also, I would like to know why it seems that younger and younger children are making this discovery known and taking action. This is something that many people don’t think about in everyday life, but the fact of the matter is that it is a real issue and it’s affecting younger and younger people everyday. These children, who only want to feel like they were born in the right body, are being made miserable because people are so closed-minded and don’t want to hear about anything out of the norm. Parents of these children are putting more and more stress on these children because they want to avoid embarrassment and heartache. This is of course understandable, but also, people need to realize sometimes that what’s best for their children isn’t always what you as a parent want, no matter how outlandish and hard it may seem. I also hope to explore more of these types of cases and what there outcomes are; whether or not these people ever got what they truly wanted.
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