There is a really neat series on NPR yesterday and supposedly today about gender identity. Yesterday, the story was about how two families are dealing with their sons who actually feel as though they are girls. One family is trying to cure him, the other is accepting and helping of him.
A lot of these things really hit close to home in this story. Especially the identifying with females, having female playmates as a kid and the like. But the approaches really begin to show that it is really something that can't be cured. Towards the end of the story, you find out that "Bradley" is still not 'cured' of his liking girl things, even after the parents took away everything feminine in his life. Your gender identity is more than toys, clothing, and color preferences. The parents, and the doctor who is trying to cure him, are going to be creating many more problems down the road as the child is simply going to be more frustrated.
You can delay something indefinitely, but what about when the child is on their own and can make their own choices in life? One of the main reasons the parents in the show said they are trying to cure their child is that socially, they feel that someone who is transgender would end up socially isolated for the rest of their life, but mostly through childhood as male classmates couldn't identify with them and that female classmates wouldn't either. I think this is pretty much a crutch for the parents' fears and not consistent with reality. If worked out correctly, you wouldn't even be able to tell the child apart from other females especially if hormone treatments are worked out during their teen years.
In the end, I thought the show did a great job of showing the differences in opinion fairly. Also, today there is an episode dealing with transgendered teens. I'm looking forward to checking that out too.
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That sounds like a really interesting series, Colleeny!
The sad thing is the parents who wish to "cure" their child are most likely doing far more than they can even realize right now. Sure, they can medicate the bejeezus out of the poor kid, but it's not going to fix the underlying issue.
The public perception of gender is that it's all superficial- it's pink, it's Barbie dolls, it's dresses and long hair. The truth is that gender identity is so deep, perhaps the deepest part of who we are, going right down to the soul. You can't go in and carve out parts of a person's soul to make them fit.
And that's what the public at large just doesn't get about being transsexual. Surgery isn't a luxury, it isn't fun, it isn't something most anyone really WANTS. Rather it's only necessary, because it's a far easier thing to modify the transient flesh than it is to rend the eternal soul and mold it into a single, "approved" identity.
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