gargouille
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- Sep 16, 2006
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the NYT said:Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn't Clear
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: December 2, 2006
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/us...&ei=5070&en=69
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.
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,"
hormones 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-psychotherapi st 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."
Any thoughts or feelings about this?