Teen transsexuals

When do children have a right to decide their gender?

By Maria Russo

Aug 28, 1999 | Ina's story may be unusual but it's no longer guaranteed to shock. During an isolated childhood in rural Oklahoma, Ina knew she was a girl from her early years, even though her body seemed to be a boy's. "It was always clear to me that this boy identity and body were incorrect." She remembers a childhood spent "tending to my inner awareness of myself and avoiding other people a lot of the time."

Then puberty hit: "That was the hardest. My own body was staging a mutiny, even." At 16, after an eating disorder had brought her to several psychiatrists, Ina finally confessed her secret. The doctor gave her a book about gay and lesbian youth, which Ina found devastating. Having finally worked up the courage to talk about it, she was still misunderstood. She soon found another doctor who explained the particulars of "transitioning" from one sex to the other. But he wouldn't help her. Eighteen is the accepted age for beginning to transition, and she was just shy of 17. Synthetic hormones, the first step to altering the course of sexual development, became her holy grail. "I knew I couldn't be happy letting my body masculinize on and on. And so at 17 I graduated from high school and found hormones on the street."

Things turned out OK for Ina: She's now 24, post-op and a graduate student in American studies living in a small Oklahoma city. But the years she endured living as a burgeoning adult in the wrong body still seem like an unnecessary burden added to an already painful existence.

If Ina were 17 today and near a big city, she'd probably be able to find a doctor willing to make her an exception to the 18-year-old threshold for hormones. The treatment protocol of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, the standard-bearing organization for transgender medicine, allows exceptions in cases of "clear maturity." At the very least, Ina would be prescribed hormone blockers, which would stop the path of testosterone without giving the feminizing effects of estrogen. This way, in case she changed her mind, permanent alterations wouldn't have taken place. (Estrogen produces breast and hip development, while testosterone brings facial and chest hair and increased muscle mass.)

No one compiles official statistics on transgender youth, but those who work with them agree that their numbers are rising. In the last year, for example, the number of transgender people under 22 in the "gender reassignment" program at New York's Michael Callen-Audre Lorde Community Health Center has tripled. Partly this is the result of increased access to information. A kid today with "gender dysphoria," the catch-all term for disconnect between body and gender identity, will likely know about transsexualism from puberty or younger. Eighteen-year-old Christian, a college freshman in western Pennsylvania who was born female but is just starting to live as a male, is a typical example. At 16, after learning from the Jerry Springer show that there was a name for the way he felt, he "went online and looked up anything and everything about transsexuals." To his astonishment he found chat rooms filled with "people just like me." Recently he met his first fellow transsexual in person -- a 21-year-old he'd met in a chat room, who lives two hours away and has introduced him to a group of trans guys who meet regularly.

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