TIME TO CHANGE THE CONVERSATION
WHEN author and psychotherapist Stella O’Malley was a child she wanted to be a boy. She behaved like a boy, dressed like a boy and insisted that everyone treat her as a boy.
Puberty hit her “like a train wreck”, she recalls, but she feels that nature was too big a force to change her.
Now married with two children, she’s happy to be a woman. But she wonders, had the option to transition been an option to her in the 1980s, would she have gone through it, and would it have been the right decision?
At a time when there is a staggering rise in the numbers of young people embarking on gender transitioning, this is a thought-provoking film.
Stella meets some of these young people, as well as academics and parents trying to support their children.
Stella says: “I think without a doubt that I would have been that kid who got hormone treatment and transitioned.”
But she’s uncomfortable with the idea of kids taking drugs that cause a permanent change to their bodies.
She meets Cole, 24, who has been taking testosterone for two years, who admits these are untested waters for the “trans generation”.
In one shocking interview, Stella talks to Cale, 24, a woman who transitioned to be a boy when she was 15, with doses of testosterone and even undergoing a double mastectomy. Cale says: “I really hated myself for a very long time. I think I wanted to become someone else.”
But she later realised she’d been changing her gender for the wrong reasons and de-transitioned.