To the Editor:
In March, you reported on 6-year-old Coy Mathis, born a boy and now identifying as a girl. Although her school in Colorado first allowed her to use the girls’ bathroom, one day she could no longer do so. The state’s civil rights division has now ruled against the school, rejecting its argument that “as Coy grows older and his male genitals develop along with the rest of his body, at least some parents and students are likely to become uncomfortable” (my italics).
Actually, no one knows whether Coy will continue to feel that she is a girl when her body develops further, since most children like her grow up to be gay, not transgender.
Gender identity is one’s sense of being a boy or girl, man or woman. Theories abound, but no one knows how it develops in transgender or non-transgender people. Some children strongly disagree with their gender assignment as young as age 2. Clinicians call this gender dysphoria. It is rare, and most gay people were not gender dysphoric as kids.
Currently experts can’t tell apart kids who outgrow gender dysphoria (desisters) from those who don’t (persisters), and how to treat them is controversial.
Some clinicians encourage early social transition, without surgery or medication, to the other gender. This approach implicitly assumes a trans-adult outcome or a benign transition back to the original gender. But little research has been done on these outcomes.
Other clinicians discourage any cross-gender behavior. They believe, also without much empirical proof, that early social transition encourages gender dysphoria persisting into adulthood and a lifetime of medical treatment for gender reassignment.
A third, “wait and see” approach permits cross-gender behavior but sets no goal for the child’s final gender identity.
I would advise parents to learn all they can about the different approaches so they can understand the limitations and how they are sometimes guided by personal beliefs about gender rather than by good research data.
JACK DRESCHER
New York, June 25, 2013
The writer, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, served on the D.S.M.-5 Work Group on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders. He is co-editor of “Treating Transgender Children and Adolescents.”
Readers React
I empathize with children’s need to be true to themselves. But when I hear 3-year-olds, who are famous for their fluid sense of fact, fantasy and fiction, being dubbed transgender, I worry that parents and doctors may be imposing the trans label on children to allay their own anxieties about gender expression (boys in tutus and so on). They feel compelled to locate children who are exploring possibilities of gender firmly on one side or the other of the gender binary.
If a 3-year-old says she’s a chicken, that doesn’t mean you should start feeding her kernels of corn — or that you should diagnose “chicken identity disorder.”
Gender-nonconforming children need time to freely, safely discover who they are. Many grow up into happily gender-conforming adults. Some grow up to be transgender adults, but most transgender adults aren’t transsexuals whose lives depend on gender reassignment: many are cross-dressers, gender fluid or gender queer. It takes years to sort out identities that don’t fit easily into socially recognized categories, and even children who are transgender may be harmed by the imposition of transsexual identities and therapies.
But because we live in a world still organized in terms of the gender binary, it’s hard to create spaces in which our children can safely explore nonconforming gender identities. Parents who support their freedom of gender expression may face censure by families, shunning by neighbors and even state investigation of their fitness to be parents.
Despite these harsh realities, our job is to help our children discover and become their wholest, truest selves. Whether or not we support medical treatment for gender-nonconforming children, the usual rules apply: children need to know that they are seen, held and loved for who they are. They need a rich array of possibilities to play with and explore, and we need to be patient and loving as they do so.
JOY LADIN
Hadley, Mass., June 26, 2013
The writer, a male-to-female transsexual, is the author of “Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders.”
So, a 6-year-old has the entire state of Colorado’s school system in upheaval? Either Coy is one incredibly powerful first grader, or the educational system of Colorado is in serious need of repair.
As someone who uses public facilities with great frequency, I can tell you that it’s always been my practice to enter the bathroom, do what needed to be done with as much privacy as the setup allowed, and exit said washroom to carry on with my life. Whether those around me were girls, boys or folks who had yet to make up their minds had very little effect on my actions. And so, the question in my mind is: Why are we still enslaved by our shame of the human body?
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-our-notions-of-gender.html?pagewanted=all
