[OneMoreTime]

a personal note.....

This is a topic very close to my heart. My younger daughter, from the time she was very young preschooler, little more than a toddler, wanted desperately, with all her heart , to be a boy. I will never get over the pain I felt the day she came to me, still that tiny little child, and begged me to make it possible for her to become a boy. Never, in her entire life, has she ever asked me for something like she did that day -- the yearning, pleading in her eyes.... then mirroring the heartbreak in mine...

She would introduce herself to new male companions with a male name, she would use the boys restroom at preschool. She played with gender neutral or boy toys - never dolls or tea party sets or doll houses..... and was always climbing trees, scaling 6 foot fences, and could often be heard walking across the roof.

So I let her have boy haircuts as long as she wanted ... and let her grow up dressing in jeans and polo shirts - dresses only if we went to church - during her teen years as her slim willowly body did it's thing, she passed as male to most of the world with her every stance, step, gesture and expression, all male, completely male, matching her buds, step for step down the street - indistinguishable from them. And hid all else beneath heavy boots, loose low-riding pants, huge flannel shirts, wore backward gimmee caps over her half-shaven head, longer hair hidden under the cap.

Later, she had a gay boyfriend who taught her how to talk and walk and move as a woman ... encouraged her to learn to use makeup, and to dress so as to show off her small breasts, the gentle curve of her hips ... and she can dress up to be a complete stunner, someone who catches every eye in the room .... but then, so do drag queens.

Now she is 28 in two weeks. And she tells me that she is a man trapped in a woman's body. That she is a gay male, even tho she had a male-female relationship for a short time in her teens -- what to the outside world looked like a lesbian relationship.

And she is a beautiful young woman.... but she still yearns to be a man, so she can be the lover to another man in the way she wants to be. She understands her lovers so well -- how they are more gay than anything... yet how they are still trying to come to grips with that identity - and sometimes never will. Yet they find themselves incredibly attracted to her... Even older "out" gays have told her they would love to marry her --- because they fall in love with the man inside her...

She once worked, in her teens, at a men's dance club -- but she was pals with the guys, not seductive ... and protected the other women from unseemly advances and crude behavior -- she acted more like a bouncer than a come-hither sex object. The job didn't work out. But then she had been protecting "other girls" from sexual harrasment at sschools for years, hoisting the boy off his feet, up against the wall, by the front of his shirt.

Would she have sexual reassignment surgery if she could? I don't know. Not all transgendered persons opt for that. Would she want hormone therapy? Again, I do not know. I think she is too afraid of life and of her rootlessness and aloneness to currently shake things up -- she fights her battles rather than go looking for instant magical cures....

I can't go back in time and give my daughter her wish.... Tho I still feel deeply guilty and very sad for her that I didn't just recognize her condition, but that I did something about it.... And so I pass on this article about children like my Katherine.
- Teri


Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear
A boy, 5, left, who identifies as a girl, plays with a friend in Northern California. He began emulating girls shortly after turning 3.



By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: December 2, 2006

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 — Until recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.

Related
Glossary


But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.

Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun to advise families to let these children be “who they are” to foster a sense of security and self-esteem.

They are motivated, in part, by the high incidence of depression, suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools are now required to respect parents’ decisions.

“First we became sensitive to two mommies and two daddies,” said Reynaldo Almeida, the director of the Aurora School, a progressive private school in Oakland. “Now it’s kids who come to school who aren’t gender typical.”

The supportive attitudes are far easier to find in traditionally tolerant areas of the country like San Francisco than in other parts, but even in those places there is fierce debate over how best to handle the children.

Cassandra Reese, a first-grade teacher outside Boston, recalled that fellow teachers were unnerved when a young boy showed up in a skirt. “They said, ‘This is not normal,’ and, ‘It’s the parents’ fault,’ ” Ms. Reese said. “They didn’t see children as sophisticated enough to verbalize their feelings.”

As their children head into adolescence, some parents are choosing to block puberty medically to buy time for them to figure out who they are — raising a host of ethical questions.

While these children are still relatively rare, doctors say the number of referrals is rising across the nation. Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have laws protecting the rights of transgender students, and some schools are engaged in a steep learning curve to dismantle gender stereotypes.

At the Park Day School in Oakland, teachers are taught a gender-neutral vocabulary and are urged to line up students by sneaker color rather than by gender. “We are careful not to create a situation where students are being boxed in,” said Tom Little, the school’s director. “We allow them to move back and forth until something feels right.”

For families, it can be a long, emotional adjustment. Shortly after her son’s third birthday, Pam B. and her husband, Joel, began a parental journey for which there was no map. It started when their son, J., began wearing oversized T-shirts and wrapping a towel around his head to emulate long, flowing hair. Then came his mother’s silky undershirts. Half a year into preschool, J. started becoming agitated when asked to wear boys’ clothing.

En route to a mall with her son, Ms. B. had an epiphany: “It just clicked in me. I said, ‘You really want to wear a dress, don’t you?’ ”

Thus began what the B.’s, who asked their full names not be used to protect their son’s privacy, call “the reluctant path,” a behind-closed-doors struggle to come to terms with a gender-variant child — a spirited 5-year-old boy who, at least for now, strongly identifies as a girl, requests to be called “she” and asks to wear pigtails and pink jumpers to school.

Ms. B., 41, a lawyer, accepted the way her son defined himself after she and her husband consulted with a psychologist and observed his newfound comfort with his choice. But she feels the precarious nature of the day-to-day reality. “It’s hard to convey the relentlessness of it, she said, “every social encounter, every time you go out to eat, every day feeling like a balance between your kid’s self-esteem and protecting him from the hostile outside world.”

The prospect of cross-dressing kindergartners has sparked a deep philosophical divide among professionals over how best to counsel families. Is it healthier for families to follow the child’s lead, or to spare children potential humiliation and isolation by steering them toward accepting their biological gender until they are older?

Both sides in the debate underscore their concern for the profound vulnerability of such youngsters, symbolized by occurrences like the murder in 2002 of Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager born as Eddie, southeast of Oakland.

“Parents now are looking for advice on how to make life reasonable for their kids — whether to allow cross-dressing in public, and how to protect them from the savagery of other children,” said Dr. Herbert Schreier, a psychiatrist with Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland.

Dr. Schreier is one of a growing number of professionals who have begun to think of gender variance as a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a disorder. “These kids are becoming more aware of how it is to be themselves,” he said.

In past generations, so-called sissy boys and tomboy girls were made to conform, based on the belief that their behaviors were largely products of dysfunctional homes.

Among the revisionists is Dr. Edgardo Menvielle, a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington who started a national outreach group for parents of gender-variant children in 1998 that now has more than 200 participants. “We know that sexually marginalized children have a higher rate of depression and suicide attempts,” Dr. Menvielle said. “The goal is for the child to be well adjusted, healthy and have good self-esteem. What’s not important is molding their gender.”

The literature on adults who are transgender was hardly consoling to one parent, a 42-year-old software consultant in Massachusetts and the father of a gender-variant third grader. “You’re trudging through this tragic, horrible stuff and realizing not a single person was accepted and understood as a child,” he said. “You read it and think, O.K., best to avoid that. But as a parent you’re in this complete terra incognita.”

The biological underpinnings of gender identity, much like sexual orientation, remain something of a mystery, though many researchers suspect it is linked with hormone exposure in the developing fetus.

Studies suggest that most boys with gender variance early in childhood grow up to be gay, and about a quarter heterosexual, Dr. Menvielle said. Only a small fraction grow up to identify as transgender.

Girls with gender-variant behavior, who have been studied less, voice extreme unhappiness about being a girl and talk about wanting to have male anatomy. But research has thus far suggested that most wind up as heterosexual women.

Although many children role-play involving gender, Dr. Menvielle said, “the key question is how intense and persistent the behavior is,” especially if they show extreme distress.

Dr. Robin Dea, the director of regional mental health for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, said: “Our gender identity is something we feel in our soul. But it is also a continuum, and it evolves.”

Dr. Dea works with four or five children under the age of 15 who are essentially living as the opposite sex. “They are much happier, and their grades are up,” she said. “I’m waiting for the study that says supporting these children is negative.”

But Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and head of the gender-identity service at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, disagrees with the “free to be” approach with young children and cross-dressing in public. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Zucker has treated about 500 preadolescent gender-variant children. In his studies, 80 percent grow out of the behavior, but 15 percent to 20 percent continue to be distressed about their gender and may ultimately change their sex.

Dr. Zucker tries to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender” until they are older and can determine their sexual identity — accomplished, he said, by encouraging same-sex friendships and activities like board games that move beyond strict gender roles.

Though she has not encountered such a situation, Jennifer Schwartz, assistant principal of Chatham Elementary School outside Springfield, Ill., said that allowing a child to express gender differences “would be very difficult to pull off” there.

Ms. Schwartz added: “I’m not sure it’s worth the damage it could cause the child, with all the prejudices and parents possibly protesting. I’m not sure a child that age is ready to make that kind of decision.”

The B.’s thought long and hard about what they had observed in their son. They have carefully choreographed his life, monitoring new playmates, selecting a compatible school, finding sympathetic parents in a babysitting co-op. Nevertheless, Ms. B. said, “there is still the stomach-clenching fear for your kid.”

It is indeed heartbreaking to hear a child say, as J. did recently, “It feels like a nightmare I’m a boy.”

The adjustment has been gradual for Mr. B., a 43-year-old public school administrator who is trying to stop calling J. “our little man.” He thinks of his son as a positive, resilient person, and his love and admiration show. “The truth is, is any parent going to choose this for their kid?” he said. “It’s who your kid is.”

Families are caught in the undertow of conflicting approaches. One suburban Chicago mother, who did not want to be identified, said in a telephone interview that she was drawing the line on dress and trying to provide “boy opportunities” for her 6-year-old son. “But we can’t make everything a power struggle,” she said. “It gets exhausting.”

She worries about him becoming a social outcast. “Why does your brother like girl things?” friends of her 10-year-old ask. The answer is always, “I don’t know.”

Nila Marrone, a retired linguistics professor at the University of Connecticut who consults with parents and schools, recalled an incident last year at a Bronx elementary school in which an 8-year-old boy perceived as effeminate was thrown into a large trash bin by a group of boys. The principal, she said, “suggested to the mother that she was to blame, for not having taught her son how to be tough enough.”

But the tide is turning.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, requires that students be addressed with “a name and pronoun that corresponds to the gender identity.” It also asks schools to provide a locker room or changing area that corresponds to a student’s chosen gender.

One of the most controversial issues concerns the use of “blockers,” hormone used to delay the onset of puberty in cases where it could be psychologically devastating (for instance, a girl who identifies as a boy might slice her wrists when she gets her period).
Some doctors disapprove of blockers, arguing that only at puberty does an individual fully appreciate their gender identity.

Catherine Tuerk, a nurse-psychotherapist at the children’s hospital in Washington and the mother of a gender-variant child in the 1970s, says parents are still left to find their own way. She recalls how therapists urged her to steer her son into psychoanalysis and “hypermasculine activities” like karate. She said she and her husband became “gender cops.”

“It was always, ‘You’re not kicking the ball hard enough,’ ” she said.

Ms. Tuerk’s son, now 30, is gay and a father, and her own thinking has evolved since she was a young parent. “People are beginning to understand this seems to be something that happens,” she said. “But there was a whole lifetime of feeling we could never leave him alone.”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/us/02child.html

[firemonkey]

http://www.antijen.org/index2.html
http://www.tsroadmap.com/early/earlyindex.html
http://www.tsroadmap.com/early/from-within/index.htm
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conw...yn/Evelyn.html
http://www.susans.org/reference/index.html
http://www.lauras-playground.com/mtf.htm
http://www.geocities.com/transboi80/resources.html
http://www.gender.org.uk/
http://transsexual.org/
http://www.contemporarypediatrics.co....jsp?id=147767
http://www.gendertalk.com/
http://www.gpac.org/
http://www.tgcrossroads.org/resource...cat=FTM&state=
http://www.tgcrossroads.org/

To be avoided alt.support.srs where discussion on GID takes second place to arguments between
those pushing an autogynephilia agenda and those arguing against them.

[OneMoreTime]

Ah, Tim .... You were so sweet to go find all these wonderful online resources. Just think of how many people they will help thru the years. You show your kindness thru your actions..

Teri

[firemonkey]

Teri,It was a pleasure to help .I have had gender issues myself but not to the depth and intensity that i can not live alibi reluctantly as a male.

[OneMoreTime]

Dear Tim .... Thank you for sharing with me. With us.

As society becomes more open, accepting and understanding of diversity, we learn, more and more, how most people have varying desires, fantasies and yearnings.

My brother was gay - but shared with me that he really wished he were a woman. He wanted to be a stay at home wife, decorating and cooking.

My ex husband had much more and much prettier underwear than I did. I had three small drawers - one for bras, one for panties, one for stockings. My husband had an entire tall large chest of drawers - one shallow drawer on the top for socks, a deep one at the bottom for hunting season wear -- and all the rest for his delicates. All colors, styles, designs. He craved to be a woman and said he would marry rich and spend his life at the mall shopping.

I never craved to be a man, but I wanted to be able to pass as a boy to be able to be "a French Resistance fighter", a guerrilla fighter... I was a sharpshooter. And I wanted to operate big yellow Catepillar road building equipment, I wanted to gouge flat highways thru the middle of hills and mountains. I wanted to use forklifts and lift tons of cargo. I wanted to be a livestock vet, dealing with large dangerous cattle. I wanted to ride big Harleys - but only behind a slim tough guy in a black leather jacket, heavy boots and dark shades.

Let go of all my dreams, tho...

Ah, such are our dreams.... and who knows what genetic and neurological features lie behind, what childhood experiences lie beneath, what rewarding adult exeriences and traumatic cruelties spur them on, shaping us, making us who we are....

But --- Our brains are plastic - changeable, ever in flux .. by the time we are adults, we pretty much have our "personality" - but more and more, we are learning that even in our mature years, with the right experiences, the right understandings and input and reinforcements, the correction of massive amounts of "stinking thinking", nearly all of us can change our lives quite a bit ---- how we think, how we function, how we relate to others. Personally, I think it's worth fighting for and going places in my mind that are not comfortable or happy with the intrusions.

Teri

[firemonkey]

http://trouble.philadelphiaweekly.co...ender_dis.html

[hsiw]

sorry, i tried to post- but ended up changing my mind.