Every year, there’s the story of the ‘youngest child’ who is socially transitioning at school. From London’s Daily Mail, we have a 9 year-old who is ‘the youngest child to transition,’ which follows the now standard journalistic template. It’s honest, accurate, gives bit of background on GID (gender identity disorder)…and skips any discussion of non-conforming gender expression which doesn’t lead to transexualism.
My kid, at least at the moment, is in that excluded middle.
Confronted with gender non-conforming behaviors, some parents first attempt supression, suffer with their children through the consequences, and then, they flip; their kid has a birth defect. It’s a medical problem. It is gender identity. And it has nothing to do with sexuality. This is the dramatic, unambiguous, civil-rights story that the journalists all tell. In every story—the kid was born in the wrong body; it’s biological. There are boy brains and girl brains; boy bodies and girl bodies. The parents are earnest, unwilling converts, normal people facing this extraordinary challenge.
This story is frequently true.
We won’t know for sure what all this means for another decade or two; gender non-conforming behaviors were universally supressed until very recently, and there is little data on how these young nonconforming children really turn out.
We do know that in the Netherlands, for older teens with well-documented histories of GID, that hormone blockers prior to puberty, and hormone therapies later on, have been successful. From Edge New England.
…in a clinical trial at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, in which about six dozen children (most 12 and older) were treated with puberty-delaying hormone therapy, the results have reportedly been overwhelmingly successful: the article quoted Henriette Delemarre-van de Waal, who said that, so far, “we don’t have any patient who has regretted their decision on the treatment.”
(What we don’t understand is exactly how the screening process within Netherlands maps onto what is currently happening in the United states, with our wildly disparate patchwork of inadequate under-funded health care and varying social mores…)
Other evidence from across the therapeutic spectrum tells us that some of these kids will identify as trans; some will identify as gay, and some will end up somewhere in the middle. There are arguments about the percentages for each outcome, but on this, pretty much everyone in the fact-based community agrees.
But what about those that don’t ever wind up at point A or point B…
Google ‘third gender,’ and see where it leads. The native american Berdache; the Indonesian waria; the Abanian Sworn Virgins; early Islam’s mukhannath, the Old and New Testament Eunuch, the India Hijra; the list goes on and on. Traditional cultures have usually carved out tiny niches for their third genders; harem guards, shamans, prostitutes; asexual male stand-ins. Not what we in the west want for our kids, but at least these cultures have words for this. We are having to make this language up as we go along.
You’ll never hear about a third gender in the ‘youngest kid ever to transition’ story, of course. Why? Because they’re confusing! They don’t fit in the soundbite!
The third gender—my kid— muddies the waters. Does a child who doesn’t feel they were born in the wrong body deserve to wear a skirt to school? Just because he wants to? Just because he feels more comfortable this way? Just because he might have identified as transgender at one time—but never did?
Which gender behaviors should be suppressed? How far is too far? Can girls have crew cuts? Can boys wear skirts? Can girls play sports? Can boys cook? Can girls wear pants? Can boys wear earrings? Can women vote? Can men take care of children?
As we progress as a species, the trend seems clear enough. Our children want to be free; freer than we were. Free from confining stereotypes. Free from shame and guilt about their bodies, the sexuality, their gender identity. To quote Jame’s Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, completely out of context:
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
The supportive community grants their children (and by extension, your children, and by extension you) these new freedoms. These freedoms will resonate throughout the culture. Every spectrum includes a middle.
Perhaps one day a mainstream journalist will give the fact more than a moment’s attention, when talking about the newest-youngest-ever-trans kid.
Until then, well, there’s me and Sarah Hoffman.
POSTSCRIPT: I want to be clear, journalists manufacture this excluded middle; not trans advocates; Kim Pearson and TYFA, and Stephanie Brill in her book, The Transgender Child, acknowledge and support gender non–conforming kids who are not on the road to hormonal and surgical intervention. In many caseses which I am aware of, having been consulted for the last several print media stories about trans kids, it isn’t even the writer’s who exclude the middle—it’s the editors.
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Your blog is beautiful, thank you for writing it.
To add to your list of other cultures with a recognized and celebrated third gender is Samoa. Many South Pacific countries that are Polynesian (including Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau) celebrate and respect ‘Fa’afafine’ (which in Samoan means ‘like a woman’.) Check out this website: http://www.samoafaafafine.org/sfa/welcome.html. I spent several years in Samoa as a Peace Corps Volunteer and found the Samoan’s general acceptance and appreciation of Fa’afafine’s role in Samoan every day life refreshing and amazing.
Thanks for the link. My knowledge of these subjects is sort of cursory; periodically professionals and people more knowledgeable have long conversations with me until I get it something. I try to pass it on. I need to know more; I feel like these other cultures can help us transcend our own culture’s limits. Perhaps all these arbitrary norms burned into us by a zillion hours of popular culture, of (blessed) suburban normalcy, can be unlearned by realizing that the in other places, people have thought differently—do think differently. Thanks again.
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