Transgendered kids, part 2

So I finally got around to listening to part 2 of NPR's series on transgendered kids today. And this one definitely made me cry.

See, Violet was born Armand.

Armand found a Minnie Mouse costume one day and fell in love with it. It had belonged to his older sister, Melina, but Armand wouldn't take it off.

Armand's parents didn't want to accept it. They tried to make him live as a boy. Their house was full of explosive, uncontrolled fights. Psychiatrists threw out alphabet-soup diagnoses. Then Armand threatened suicide, pointed a knife at himself, scared the hell out of his older sister.

It wasn't ADD or OCD or anything else that shrinks have easy drugs to fix. Depression meds didn't cure it. (And I don't want anyone to think I'm deriding them for taking those drugs, but I am damn sure that shrinks who met a transgendered kid and started throwing psych meds at her should be slapped.)

When Armand's parents finally found a psychiatrist who diagnosed their child with Gender Identity Disorder (a term I dislike, but one that helped them deal with it, at least), they described it as a feeling of relief, that someone finally understood. They immediately stopped trying to force Armand to live as a boy.

Her mother said, "We could see the desperation in her face...it was like she was screaming out 'Listen to me, this is who I am!'"

"When we found out she was transgender, it was like 'What do you need?'" As soon as they let her, age 10, be who she felt she was, she was the happiest kid in the world. It was like a different child. "She looked freer," her parents said.

Then the family found out about a treatment that postpones puberty. Hormone blockers are given once a month, and they stop the development of sex hormones. This prevents physical differences between genders from developing--no facial hair, no Adam's apple, no voice deepening. It makes later-life transgenderism easier, since the distinguishing characteristics are not there. The child can take hormones of the sex they feel that they are and be virtually indistinguishable from others.

The downside to this therapy is that if a child later takes hormones, they can become sterile. And of course there are those who say, as we discussed in the last post, that a child that young can't know whether he or she is actually transgender. But Armand's wonderful, loving, accepting father says he tells people, "What people fail to realize is that they made that decision long before [age 10]." He asks them how old they were when they knew they were a boy, or a girl.

And the therapy is designed to delay puberty, not to prevent it. It is designed to prevent the horrifying experience that Melina, Armand's sister, voiced so well:

Melina, who is 14, says she sometimes thinks about what it would be like if she woke up every day to a body that was slowing turning male. If she were growing in ways that felt alien and frightening.

"To go through the process of the gender that you're really not ... that must be the most scariest most disgusting thing ... I can't even imagine what that's like," she says.

Imagine, indeed.

NPR also spoke to Polly Carmichael, a British psychologist who works at the Portman Clinic in London and practices techniques apparently similar to Zucker's in that they require children to live as the gender they were born as. They claim that 80% of the children they work with grow up and remain their biological gender.

However, the Amsterdam clinic where the hormone blocker therapy was instituted says that 100% of their patients grow up and live as transgender.

I understand being leery of hormone therapies. I could tell you all about how Depo-Provera screwed my life right up for a couple of years. I don't know how I'd feel about my child undergoing hormone therapy. But I do know that I can vividly picture the feeling of my body turning into something alien, different, and that it would feel monstrous. (Oh, the monsters-post I'm going to write soon...)

The fears of all those people who say that a child's gender identity is fluid (which should be more proof that gender is not biologically predetermined, shouldn't it?) and thus the child might want to "change back" would have more weight if these parents were actually putting their kids through sex reassignment surgery, which is not the same thing as being transgender or taking hormones. But otherwise, why not? Who cares if Armand only wants to be Violet for a few years and then decides that Armand was a better fit, after all?

Robert, Violet's father, said that telling his family was the hardest part. After all, Violet was ten. He told the story of a family gathering where all of his aunts were sitting together, and one of them, the matriarch of the family, asked him "Robert, didn't you have a boy?"

And he steeled himself, and he explained that Armand was now Violet, that she was transgender, and he brought her over to say hello to her great-aunts.

And when she happily skipped away, he waited for the aunts' response.

"I'm proud of you," his aunt said. "It must have been hard."

(Rewriting this again made me well up with tears again.)

(Cross-posted at Season of the Bitch)