Now he’s ditched pink hairbands and plays with Power Rangers

HAILING from an ordinary suburb of a northern city, the child, known only as J, was forced to live to as a girl from infancy. Raised by an ostensibly loving but sometimes ‘abusive and bombastic’ mother, the child regularly appeared at school in a pretty dress, with a pink hairband and painted nails.

Yesterday the judge said J was now interested in more traditional boys’ things. ‘I have noted from reports that [the boy] has become interested in Power Rangers, SpongeBob, superheroes and is constantly finding new interests,’ he said.

‘It is striking that most of [the boy’s] interests are male-oriented. I am entirely satisfied, both on the basis of the reports and [the father’s] evidence, that he has brought no pressure on [the boy] to pursue masculine interests. [The boy’s] interests and energy are entirely self-motivated.’

The judge heard that when quizzed by concerned teachers, his mother told them her son was ‘happy’ to look like a girl. Yet the teachers noticed he didn’t ‘display any differences to the other boys’ in class.

Out of school, J happily played with children on his street, but such experiences were marred by his mother’s fear of transphobic bullying. On several occasions she rang the police to report other children for hate crimes – including an instance when youngsters tried to pull down his trousers to check his sex.

The incident was recorded as a transphobic hate crime by police, although no further action was taken.

Social workers noted after the incident: ‘[The mother] intervened and took [her son] inside, informing the children they are no longer allowed to play with [him]’.

But behind closed doors, every aspect of his life was being governed by the close relationship with his mother.

‘In enmeshed families the individual gets lost in the system,’ a clinical psychologist observed. ‘[The mother’s] wish for emotional exclusivity means that [she] had removed [him] from a range of ordinary socialising experiences though she refutes this and believes that she has acted to protect [him] from bullying.’

In late 014, the mother took her son out of school due to her obsession that he was being bullied. Social workers accepted her claims that J had been diagnosed as gender dysphoric (a gender identity disorder) and, despite his increasingly dirty appearance, still refused to intervene.

By the end of the following year, he was living entirely as a girl. He was registered at a new GP as a girl and was permanently in female clothes. By the time his mother was taken to court, she spoke of his gender in ‘the opaque and convoluted argot of social work and psychology’.

‘She offered an impressive, intense and highly articulate evaluation of the problems faced by children with gender dysphoria but she conveyed no sense of J’s personality, temperament or enthusiasms,’ the judge said.

Since being placed with the father and his partner, the boy is happier, but remains affected by his confused early life.

He ‘constantly rearranges his private parts and seems uncomfortable’ and had been known to ‘wear several pairs of knickers’. His father was left shocked when his son said he did ‘not like his floppy bits flopping around’ and explained his rudimentary knowledge of sex change procedures.

When a visiting teacher confused him for a girl, he asserted in front of the entire class: ‘No, I am a boy.’ He continues to express alarm and discomfort when other boys take off their tops when they play in the park. Experts have linked this behaviour to the disturbing idea of his mother affording him ‘considerable knowledge or discussion of genital anatomy’. But free of her manipulation, J now ‘very clearly identifies himself as a boy’, the judge found.

However his mother – with whom he is permitted limited contact – seems still trapped by her beliefs.

At a meeting in July, she asked her son: ‘Are you allowed to do girlie stuff?’ ‘I can if I want,’ he replied. ‘Do you want be a girl?’ she insisted. When her son didn’t answer, she said: ‘I know you are a girl and you feel like a girl and want to be a girl. I know you do – grown ups don’t understand – you need to tell them.’