Replies

It doesn’t look to me like the document is limiting its discussion to psych-only cases. It is defining “trans” people as those who identify with the opposite gender than what they were assigned at birth, but does not limit the reasons for the assignment. And the LifeSite article is referring only to the recommendation re children approaching puberty, not the whole document, which covers treatment for all “trans” people, including those who first claimed this status in adulthood.

Most babies who are born with visible anatomical abnormalities are “assigned” to either male or female on their birth certificate. And many cases of chromosomal abnormalities or chromosomal/anatomical mismatch are not detected at birth. The most common is babies who look like girls but are chromosomally male (or in some cases chromosomally mosaic, with some cells having XX and others XY) — female anatomy is the “default setting”, and hormonal abnormalities in either the baby or the mother can result in an XY fetus simply staying on the default setting.

I tend to think that the great majority of gender identity issues in children have roots in anatomical/chromosomal/hormonal abnormalities of some sort. Some of these can be very difficult to detect or confirm, especially hormonal abnormalities that were temporary, but affected brain development during some critical phase. It has become fashionable in some circles for teenagers and adults to declare themselves to be “trans” or just declare themselves to be the opposite gender to what they appear to be, and I think that in most cases this is just a manifestation of other psychological problems. But I don’t know of any circles in which this has become fashionable among prepubescent children, and certainly not to the degree that a child would stick to the act even after being hauled off to doctors and having things like surgery discussed. There are probably some cases where parental behavior is at the root of such thinking in young children, but that doesn’t make the child’s psychological problem any less real, and probably strengthens the argument for delaying puberty until the child is older and beginning to be more independent of his/her parents. Where parental behavior is at the root of the problem, children are very likely to simply outgrow it, and more likely to do so peacefully if puberty is delayed.

My only personal experience with a person who had “gender issues” in childhood was a passing acquaintance with a then-woman who attended the college I graduated from, some years after I had graduated. She’d been born with some clear anatomical abnormality, and her fundamentalist Christian father didn’t believe in any “intersex” stuff, wanted a son, and simply insisted that she be a boy. She always thought of herself of girl, but was met with violence at home if she expressed that there. By junior high, she was leaving the house dressed as a boy every morning, and being met on route by a sympathetic teacher or counselor who gave her the opportunity to change clothes and arrive at school dressed as a girl. Needless to say, she ended up with some serious problems, and eventually ended up living with an unrelated family who were a different sort of Christians, and helped her get her life on track. By the time I met her, she was in her early forties and just starting college. She graduated and went to law school and I don’t know what became of her after that. But she was definitely not an attention-seeking nut whose problems had all been psychological. She was as low-key as she could be, but since she’d been forced to develop as a male (I don’t know if she was just left to develop naturally, or if she was given some hormones), she had the tell-tale pitted skin of someone who has had a great deal of facial hair removed by a electrolysis, and a slightly receded hairline. She was never going to look like a normal woman (and probably never looked like a normal man either), but if she’d received hormones to postpone puberty until she was 18 and legally free of her father’s interference, it would have been been a huge blessing for her. Her case is one where I can see that letting someone under 18 choose this treatment, even over parental objections, would make a lot of sense.