Not Waiting Until 18

Not Waiting Until 18

I was told by a reader that for all the fuss in Britain recently when a boy came back to school as a girl, that this only hormone therapy and dressing up as a girl; that surgery waits until they are 18. Apparently not in Germany. From the September 21, 2009 Independent (one of the left-wing newspapers in Britain that doesn't impress me with the quality of its reporting on other matters):

Petras started hormone therapy at 13 and in 2006 appeared in a German TV documentary which drew attention to the plight of transsexuals and German laws which prohibit sex change operations on people under 18.

Her campaign led to her being given legal permission to undergo the reassignment operation in November last year, when she was 16. "I went to a lot of psychologists and many of them agreed that it would be really important for me to have the surgery as soon as possible and not wait until I was 18," Petras said in a recent interview with the German media. "Because I had so many psychologists on my side, I got the legal permission I needed."

She says she has no regrets about her surgery and insists that the operation did not really change her, although she admits to feeling a soaring sense of deep satisfaction when the doctors had finished their work. "When I first saw my body I was just so happy," she said. "I finally knew that I was complete."

She enjoyed singing and – thanks to the early age at which she started hormone therapy – her voice never broke. She started making videos of herself singing Alicia Keys songs in 2007. But nowadays she writes, performs and co-produces all of her own music, using her past as an inspiration for her lyrics. She has just signed a deal with the top German record producer Fabian Gorg.

I do find myself wondering how much of this, "I was born a girl" might be tied to this:

Kim Petras is quietly moving on from the issue which defined her adolescent years. For Kim began life as Tim, a little boy growing up with two older sisters in the German city of Bonn.

Lots of boys grow up as the only boy in a family of girls, of course, and don't become convinced that they are really females born in the wrong body. But I find myself believing that makes more sense than the notion that somehow Tim Petras was born female, trapped in a male body.

There's another case now in Britain, involving a nine year old boy who just returned to school as a girl. From the September 19, 2009 Daily Mail:

A boy of nine has returned to school as a girl in what is believed to be Britain's youngest gender swap.

Children at the school in southern England were told the child had left and been replaced by a female pupil.

The child came dressed in girls' uniform with long hair tied in a pink ribbon.

The case comes after it was revealed yesterday that a 12-year-old boy had started his first term at secondary school in southern England as a girl.

Some parents at the school have criticised staff for not informing them before telling children about the gender change at a special assembly.

Now, the nine year old is too young to start on hormone therapy, but I find myself wondering what is being put in the water to make parents go along with this idiocy. Part of why I am so skeptical of the whole transgender craziness--aside from the some of the articles and studies that I have previously linked to--is that young kids are highly impressionable. As I explained several years ago:

About twenty years ago, my wife and I attended a class about child sexual abuse. My wife and I had run into an astonishing and depressing number of adult survivors (this was California, remember), and we decided that we wanted to know more about abusers and the problems of the victims. Most of the other students were in the health professions, and I was almost the only guy in the class.

Anyway, over lunch we got to talking to a woman in the class whose husband today would doubtless be considered "transgendered." He wanted a sex change, because he didn't feel like he really belonged in a male body. His wife was distraught about this; she explained that her husband had grown up in a home with a macho Marine father, and a mother who had desperately wanted a little girl, not a little boy. As a result, Mom had made him wear dresses (at least at home), had painted his nails, etc. until he was old enough to refuse. Gee, why do you think he was conflicted about his sexual identity?