If you haven’t seen Louis Theroux’s documentary Transgender Kids broadcast on BBC2 on Sunday April 5, I highly recommend that you take the opportunity to watch it now on BBC iPlayer. I realize that it might not be an option for anyone outside of the UK, but hopefully as the show explores transgender children in California it will be available elsewhere, maybe even YouTube.
There are now a growing number of documentaries on this topic and in my Transgender Awareness Workshops I still use excerpts from the 2007 Barbara Walters ABC documentary – My Secret Self. Fortunately, it is still freely available on YouTube. Unfortunately, in the past, UK produced documentaries have not been produced well and are often insensitive to issues like proper pronouns. However, Transgender Kids is excellent.
Louis Theroux approaches the subject with great sensitivity and, in particular, gives transgender children a lot of space to express themselves without too much direction. Okay, for me the show had too much emphasis on surgery and that’s a huge topic that needs to be addressed. In the UK, there are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people who do not conform to gender, but fewer than 5,000 have applied for a gender recognition certificate to change their legal gender, and only about 15,000 have sought clinical support. So the vast majority of trans people remain secretive or have found a way to deal with their gender issues without medical or surgical treatment.
Unfortunately, it is clear that many trans people remain secretive because of fear. Charity PACE reported on a four-year study last year that nearly 50% of transgender children had attempted suicide compared to about 6% of all 16-24-year-olds. Research conducted in the US in 2007 shows that children who do not receive support from their parents are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than those who receive support. I hope that parents of transgender children who watch this documentary clearly see the value of supporting their children.
One of the key issues addressed on the show was age. Is a five-year-old old enough to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives? Reading a series of comments in a Guardian article about the show, it is clear that this is still a big problem for people, although what is also clear is that most people simply do not understand how they are treated. young people and, worse still, the majority of the commentators. they were referring to the journalist’s much less detailed article and had not actually seen the show itself.
The first important point to understand is that transgender children do not undergo hormonal or surgical treatment until they reach puberty. As we saw in the show, there are different degrees of “gender dysphoria”, which is the underlying condition in which a person experiences persistent discomfort or distress due to the feeling that there is a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. . We don’t yet know exactly what causes this, but there is growing evidence that it is the result of hormonal imbalances during fetal development.
Although the UK is not as advanced in treating transgender children as the US, there is a dedicated Gender Identity Service for all gender non-conforming children at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic in London and Leeds , which will begin treatment at the beginning of puberty. This treatment consists of administering hormonal blockers that suspend puberty. That means that children will not experience the immediate irreversible effects of puberty, which is known to be the main trigger for suicidal actions. Hormone blockers do not cause permanent changes. If the child stops treatment, he will continue with normal pubertal development.
But then it allows time for a full psychiatric evaluation to take place and for the child to continue living in his acquired gender until he is ready to begin permanent cross-gender hormone treatment at around 14 and surgery starting at about 14. 16, if so. the correct course of treatment. As we saw in the documentary, not all transgender children want a total gender reassignment.
I especially liked Louis’s final comment. “The choice of transition implies the possibility of social rejection and a life of commitment to medication, but it is also the opportunity to exercise the most fundamental right we have: the right to be ourselves. To know who we really are.”
Right now it seems that the only option we have is a rigid “male or female” binary despite mounting evidence that there are actually many different possibilities. What we need is a more fluid approach to gender and language that allows us more options. For me, the most interesting kid on the show was Cole / Crystal, who lives as a man and a woman depending on how he feels today.
