TransYouth in the news |
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A reader writes: “Last night on Aussie TV’s “Sunday Night” (Channel 7’s ‘60 Minutes’ look-a-like show), they did a story on transgendered children, and had a focus on Germany’s Kim Petras.”
While on the whole I felt the story was fairly positive, the reporter’s line of questioning in a couple of instances I felt was utterly pathetic. He trotted out the “toilet/bathroom” question again to Kim Petras (Ugh! C’mon dude - it’s 2009 not 1979!), and then followed that up with “What if ?? What if she changes her mind and wants to be a boy again ?” I wanted to throw rocks at the reporter! I had hoped that the media had moved on from scandalizing TS women (and particularly trans children), but yet again I was wrong and terribly disappointed.
You can see the video/story at the link above to the Sunday Night website. The video takes about 10 minutes. Also on that site is a poll about whether or not children should be allowed to ‘change sex’. To my surprise, a whopping 75% of the general populace that had voted said they should. Maybe the media is yet again lagging behind society ? Also worth reading is the father’s story about his daughter (relates to the girl in Melbourne spoken about in the video) - watch the video first though.
Also, an nice article about supportive parents in Time Out New York:
Experts would label Sean, now 5, gender-variant, though various other (less creepy sounding) terms exist: gender-atypical, gender-nonconforming, gender-independent. While in most of the country gender variance might be considered either an abomination to be treated or merely an embarrassment to be roundly ignored, here it’s considered endearing. (Ludicrously, gender identity disorder is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a mental illness; transgender and civil-rights advocates are lobbying to have it removed, just as homosexuality was deleted as a mental illness from the same manual in 1973.)
Read more: http://newyorkkids.timeout.com/articles/features/79610/cross-dressing-kids-and-gender-identity
Finally, this from TransYouth Family Allies’ Kim Pearson
TYFA Board Member and esteemed author Andrew Solomon recently spoke at “Let’s Breakthrough Together 2009,” at the Harvard Club in NYC where he shared the very moving stories of two of our TYFA families. I hope you will take the time to view this video and see why the work we do is so important. We continue to invest countless hours and resources supporting the two families mentioned and others like them...this is the work we do and we need your support.
Further information:
Transitioning early in life
http://www.tsroadmap.com/early/earlyindex.html
