I told my class to call me Richard. Did that make me a trans kid?
IDIDN’T want to be a girl! I wanted to be a boy, like my three brothers. Until the age of about ten, that is, which means whenever I see or read anything about children and ‘trans’ I can’t help thinking: there but for the grace of God. I was the least girlie little girl on the block. If given dolls, I’d chuck them out of a high window. When I watched Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best? on BBC2 last week, it made me glad I was a child of the 1970s rather than today, as I’m pretty sure I’d have been given a label such as ‘gender dysphoric’, and encouraged to explore my gender ‘issues’ further – in fact, maybe too far.
Aged about eight, I went to a new school in Camden, and decided it was time to walk the walk. I wore my older brother’s castoff bell-bottom brown cords and told my classmates at Primrose Hill Primary that my name was Richard.
At home, the only real fights I ever had with my mother were when she made me wear dresses for special occasions or family photos – a trigger for a total, Exorcist-style tantie on my part. I didn’t want to wear any item of clothing that told the outside world I was female. My mother would have to subdue me to force my rigid limbs into a loathed tight-sleeved Laura Ashley lawn smock (rather pretty – I wish I’d kept it) while I levitated with rage.
Now, of course, my mother would be called out for failing to take a ‘gender affirmative’ position, while I would have been online for hours a day, discovering about puberty blockers and becoming the boy I then thought I wanted to be.
I watched Transgender Kids with some sympathy, but also with concern. As the show revealed, there’s a surge of children seeking gender reassignment surgery, and Western society is bending over backwards to accommodate them. In the US, there are 20 summer camps for children who feel they were born in the wrong body, and 40 clinics to help them change, chemically and surgically. In the UK, there has been a huge spike in children seeking such referrals, too.
I’m all in favour of having a less pink/blue world, where girls must play with Barbie dolls, and boys with trucks and guns. This would help close the gender gap gently, and, somewhere over the rainbow, we might all live in perfect harmony like that old Coke ad.
But I’m very clear on one thing when it comes to trans kids. Having sex is not legal until the age of 16. But children as young as nine can start the process of changing sex, enabled by their parents and the medical profession, and this way madness lies.
In one scene in the programme, a little Canadian ‘girl’ said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have the surgery to complete her transition to female but got muddled as to whether she wanted to become a boy/man, or a girl/woman.
This was enormously revealing. As I know, it’s not uncommon to feel confusion as puberty threatens. And it’s not uncommon for the
SPEAKING of the funding crisis in the NHS… when I couldn’t hear the whirr of the electric toothbrush, I called my surgery. They said they didn’t do free hearing tests, but Specsavers did. The chain does indeed offer free hearing tests, then ‘great hearing guaranteed – or your money back’. We shouldn’t freak out about the privatisation creep. There’s no reason you should pay for my hearing aids. Co-funding in our NHS is already with us, so we’d all better get used to it. Sorry? What did you say? What? confusion to clear, either. I stopped having a power struggle with my mother (over dresses) after nature seized the driving wheel. In no time at all I wanted to wear very tight trousers and stilettos, totter up and down the King’s Road and pick up boys in pubs.
I am not so insensitive or stupid as to think that my experience means anything. I can’t generalise from it. I never felt I was born in the wrong body, and probably wasn’t ‘gender dysphoric’ in any clinical way at all.
But I mention my own feelings as a child as, for me, it brings us to the nub of what I think is a problem.
WITH full-on gender reassignment, ideally doctors have to start drug treatment before puberty kicks in, especially with boys, when faces thicken, facial hair sprouts, and they develop an Adam’s apple. ‘It’s so rewarding to watch these kids give birth to themselves,’ one surgeon from Boston said with paternal pride. Yes, he said ‘kids’.
As a society we are handing our children sovereignty over something as important as their sex when they’re still kids.
In the film, one person – called Lou – spoke of their regret at having a double mastectomy and taking puberty blockers as a teenager, saying the decision to transition haunts them to this day. I bet it does.
In the 1970s, it was another country. You could sit it out.
My mother must have thought: ‘She doesn’t want to wear dresses; she thinks she wants to be a boy. This too shall pass.’ And all I’m saying is: she was right.