The November 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine contains an article called “A Boy’s Life.” It’s a comprehensive exploration of the topic of transgender children: where it comes from, the struggles that parents and children experience as they strive to find ways to deal with it, and the difficult choices they must make in that process.
I’m not sure how I feel about this article. Much of it is troubling, since I wish the whole topic of the origins of being transgender and how best to treat it to be neat and simple, but it just isn’t. In the end, I believe that children should be allowed to make their own decisions to the extent that’s feasible. (Obviously, that’s a huge loophole, but, for the moment, I have neither the time nor the inclination to try to define my position any further.) If a child typed as a boy at birth wants to live as a girl, she should be allowed to do that with her parents’ support. At the same time, her parents need to make clear that either choice is OK. If she later decides that she wants to live as a boy, that too should be allowed. Will it be more difficult then? Yes, of course. Every choice we make has consequences and, as much as we might like to, we cannot insulate our children from the consequences of their choices any more than we can avoid the consequences of our own. But I believe that the challenges of returning to life as a boy, after living as a girl for weeks or months or years, will be less traumatic than growing up never having had the chance to have that experience and to make a more informed decision about her future.
Eventually, she will be faced with decisions that will have permanent, physical consequences — whether to begin cross-sex hormones, whether to have SRS. That is where the use of hormone blockers has the greatest benefit, since they delay the onset of changes that will make living in her affirmed gender infinitely harder until she has the maturity and the information she needs to make that momentous decision, while retaining the option of allowing her puberty to proceed as it would without intervention. In the end, however, it must be her decision, not her parents’, not her doctor’s. None of can know what is truly best for another person, even our children. All we can do is ask Spirit to guide our choices and the choices of our children and then trust that She will respond to our calls.
(Crossposted from my personal blog.)
Filed under: Education, Life Experiences, News, Transgender | Tagged: Dr. Norman Spack, hormone blockers, The Atlantic magazine, transexual, Transgender, transgender children, transsexual | 3 Comments »
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