‘Boys and Girls’
Independent ‘Life’ magazine, 13 July 2017
I could be a 42-year-old man. I could be walking around with a beard, with a deep voice and even, God forbid, with wedding tackle. The very thought of it chills me to the bone – in fact it makes me want to cry. Thankfully, I’m not a man; I’m a very happily married mother of two children and, these days, I’m very comfortable in my powerful femininity. But when I was a kid I was a misfit and I aggressively rejected my female identity.
I was born in 1974 and I was an obsessive tomboy from as far back as I can remember. Everywhere I went I was asked the ubiquitous question, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I never liked the question – I didn’t really feel like either at the time – but when pressed I would always answer, ‘A boy’. Although I was certainly considered a total freak while growing up in Blanchardstown in the 1980s most people just raised their eyebrows and let me get on with it. I was given the freedom to be a crazy mixed-up kid for a while – nobody suggested hormone therapy.
What concerns me is that had I been born 30 years later, hormone therapy would probably have been suggested – indeed if I was 12 today, I would certainly already be taking puberty blockers and I would be stalking internet sites requesting hormone therapy. I am fully sure that if I had been born 30 years later I would, without question, have transitioned from an unhappy female into a very unhappy male.
Looking back, I wasn’t comfortable with any aspect of my identity at the time; I was busy rejecting my deepest self. I eventually realised in my teenage years that I needed to learn to accept myself and that I had painted myself into a corner. I couldn’t quite figure out a way to get out of this self-created prison and so I remained boy/girl for quite some time before finally gaining the courage to ‘come out’ as the girl I had always been deep, deep down. Fortunately, I eventually learned the gift of self-acceptance and I am now all woman.
Today, in the US, children as young as seven or eight are allowed to take puberty blockers if they have their parent’s consent. The youngest child to come for treatment at the Gender Management Service in Boston Hospital was just four years old and the typical patient is about eight years old. Advocates of early gender transitioning argue that puberty is too challenging for transgender children and so they recommend puberty blockers to delay the growth of sexual organs and the production of hormones. And so a series of monthly injections or implants are imbedded in children’s arms so that the boys don’t develop facial hair, deep voices or Adam’s apples while the girls remain flat-chested and don’t menstruate.
The grand plan is that blockers give these kids time to reflect on their identity and time to mature emotionally so that they can figure out if they want to proceed with a permanent sex change when they are older. If the permissive approach continues to gain momentum, a girl who identifies as a tomboy will soon be automatically asked to decide at the age of eight whether she wants to take medication to delay puberty.
And yet, what about the kids who feel like misfits – like I once did – who struggle to identify their gender? The kids who struggle with every aspect of their identity? Growing up, growing hair and everything else that puberty involves can be weird, difficult and daunting for lots of kids. If these kids are questioned about whether they should go through puberty or whether they should avoid it by taking hormones to delay the onset of puberty, they might just choose to avoid puberty because they can’t handle anything at all happening to their body.
Transgender Regret
21 years ago Zahra Cooper was born biologically female in the Far North District of New Zealand. A tomboy all her life, she struggled to make friends and to find her place in the world. When she was 14, Zahra decided she was a lesbian but then, after seeking information on the Internet, she came to the conclusion that she was transgender. For some time Zahra struggled with her gender identity but eventually, in December 2015, having lived as a man for three years, Zahra began to take hormones so as to properly transition to male.
Eight months into treatment, Zahra tried to kill herself. Twice.
Following her suicide attempts Zahra was then diagnosed with borderline Autistic Spectrum Disorder and, as she says, ‘That’s when everything clicked. And that’s when I started doing some deep thinking.’
Zahra did some online research and realised that people with ASD often struggle with gender identity. After a month of reflection, Zahra decide she wanted to ‘detransition’ and revert to being a female. She decided that she was uncomfortable with her deeper voice, her facial hair and the other changes that are associated with gender transitioning. Zahra was then faced with the unhappy prospect of telling her transgender boyfriend, Tyson Kay, that she was going to ‘go back’.
Tyson, who was also born a female and was also transitioning into a male, was initially very upset by Zahra’s decision but the couple are now very happy and have since moved in together. Tyson isn’t bothered by the fact that Zahra, now a 21-year-old woman, was initially his boyfriend but is now his girlfriend – ‘I care about the person not the gender anyway, so it didn’t matter to me.’
Sadly, all is not completely rosy for Zahra and Tyson as the reversal has not been 100% effective. Zahra’s voice is deep and is likely to remain so, she also looks male and she will need surgery if she is to ever have breasts. As Zahra says, ‘…people think I’m a guy even though I dress female. I would love to be seen more as a female.’
The extraordinary high rate of attempted suicide among transgendered people is attributed to many different causes – being rejected by friends and family, feeling like an outcast in society and being part of a minority are all likely to contribute to feelings of depression and despair and yet, common sense dictates that there must be many people who had experiences similar to mine and Zahra’s.
Perhaps these kids never feel comfortable in their own skin or perhaps they wish to utterly reject themselves – and transitioning to another gender is a definitive way to do this? While the person transitions, there is a beguiling expectation of a new life where they can start all over again; forge a new identity, try out a new name, a new look, and a new community while simultaneously rejecting family and friends. This can be a very attractive prospect for many unhappy teenagers. Not only that but there is an entire movement that is delighted to support and befriend any lost and lonely soul who is finding it difficult to accept themselves as they are.
Although the transgender movement is gaining popularity so too is ‘transgender regret’ and perhaps we now need to slow down and give some serious thought and consideration to this subject. The Buddha tells us that ‘Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.’ Indeed, in my work as a psychotherapist, I find that self-acceptance and other-acceptance are the basis of almost all therapeutic healing.
Many people know what it is to be filled with self-loathing and regret – lots of small people fervently wish to be tall, bald people wish they had a head of hair and ugly people often wish they were good-looking. This might seem derisory to some but self-rejection is no laughing matter and can lead to depression and suicide.
The main debate on the issue of gender transitioning is at what age is it appropriate for a child to identify their gender? A completed bill of the Gender Recognition Act will be presented to the Oireachtas next year seeking to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to self-identify their gender. It will also include the position of people who are non-binary (an umbrella term that isn’t confined to just two genders) and the position of children younger than 16 years old. We need to consider should children who identify as the opposite gender be encouraged to start blockers at puberty and be allowed to transition with hormone therapy while they are still teenagers? Or should we force them to wait until they have gained enough life experience to be able to make a considered decision?
At the moment gender dysphoria is classified as a disorder that is estimated to affect approximately 0.05% - 1.2% of children every year however trans advocates and clinicians would prefer to move this issue out of the mental health field and instead regard it as a medical issue. And yet research shows us that most children grow out of gender dysphoria when they are adolescents. Not only that, but gender, just like sexuality, is on a continuum; some people are robustly transgender while others are less clear about where they fit on the scale. It is the less certain, more mixed-up people who perhaps need to tread more carefully than others.
Today, if we wish, any of us can identify as: transgender, non-binary/genderqueer, bigender, trigender, pangender, genderfree, genderfluid, gender neutral or plain old cisgender –when your gender matches the gender you were born with. All this is so removed from most people’s experience that we are at a loss to know how to even begin thinking about it yet think about it we must, as non-binary and gender fluidity are the future.
Already students in many schools and universities around the world can identify as ‘other’ instead of male or female and can choose to use the gender diverse title of ‘Mx’ instead of Mr. or Miss etc. No documentary evidence is required so presumably students can change their minds as often as they wish.
Kori Doty, a non-binary transgender person who identifies as neither male nor female, is a leading member of the Gender-Free ID Coalition. Kori Doty is also the parent of Searyl Doty, the eight-month old baby who has just recently been issued with a health card that describes the baby’s gender as ‘U’. The ‘U’ stands for ‘undetermined’ or ‘unassigned’ as the infant’s parent wishes to allow the child to discover their own gender.
Doty believes that a visual inspection at birth can’t accurately determine the gender of the baby. ‘When I was born, doctors looked at my genitals and made assumptions about who I would be, and those assignments followed me and followed my identification throughout my life.
‘Those assumptions were incorrect, and I ended up having to do a lot of adjustments since then.’ Doty argues that assigning gender at birth is a violation of a child’s human rights to freely express their gender. (However others argue that assigning a neutral gender at birth when the physical gender is evident is also a violation of a child’s human rights.)
Doty, who prefers to use the gender neutral pronoun ‘they’, explains, ‘I'm raising Searyl in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are, I'm recognising them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box’.
Doty is currently fighting to ensure that Searyl’s gender doesn’t appear on the birth certificate. Doty reckons that Searyl will choose ‘their’ identity at about the age of four or five. Although the province of British Columbia in Canada have recently acquiesced and issued the child with a health card with a ‘U’ for gender, they have so far refused to issue Searyl Doty with a gender neutral birth certificate.
Dr Daragh McDermott, a social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University, points out that the impact of raising a gender neutral child is not yet known. ‘It's hard to say whether being raised gender-neutral will have any immediate or long-term psychological consequences for a child, purely because to date there is little empirical research examining this topic.
‘That being said, the family setting is only one source of gender-specific information and as children grow, their self-identity as male, female or gender-neutral will be influenced by school, socialisation with other children and adults, as well as mass media. As a child grows they develop their own independent sense of self that will include their own individual gender identification.’
For many years, humans have grappled with the challenge to figure out what we should try to change and what we need to learn to accept. The Serenity Prayer famously encourages us to dig deep as we analyse our difficulties: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.’ Life is complicated anyway and transitioning gender or choosing to be gender neutral is fraught with complexity.
We are living in an experiment and, as the more permissive approach becomes more common, it will soon emerge whether this brings about further regret and complications or if it is a progressive solution to a difficult problem.
Transgender people wish to be identified as another gender however, although many happily transition, others are saddened to be forever identified as ‘transgender’. As one transgender person who regretted transitioning remarked, ‘I understood that people would always be able to recognise me as having transitioned. I just wanted to be male, but I was always going to be trans.’
Gender politics in sport
Caster Semenya, the 2016 Olympic gold medallist, from South Africa has drawn much public scrutiny about her gender – because she is very successful, because she is lesbian and, mostly, because she looks so incredibly male.
Following her victory in the 2009 World Championships, Semenya was subjected to gender testing and was proved to be female – although there has been much speculation about the leaking of these test and claims that she has an intersex trait. Semenya became very distressed by the intense scrutiny of the public about her gender and her apparently high testosterone levels and defended herself eloquently in the South African magazine YOU by saying, ‘God made me the way I am and I accept myself.’
Others expressed concern about Semenya’s testosterone levels as they argue that it gives her an unfair advantage. Eric Vilain, a medical geneticist, said in an interview about Semenya, ‘If we push this argument, anyone declaring a female gender can compete as a woman... We’re moving toward one big competition, and the very predictable result of that competition is that there will be no women winners.’
Already there was a public outcry earlier this year in the U.S. when Andraya Yearwood, a powerfully built 15-year-old transgender student who was born male but who identifies as female (and has yet to undergo any medical treatment at all towards transitioning from male to female), won two state titles competing as a female for her school in the 100m and 200m sprints.
Brian Calhoun, coach at Cromwell High School, is thrilled with Andraya’s performance, ‘I have a spectacular female athlete. There’s nothing more to say. To approach it in any other way might create some sort of issue or conversation.’
The International Olympic Committee agree with Calhoun’s attitude as last they year adopted a policy that removed the need for candidates to have undergone sex-reassignment surgery to compete. Potential candidates can now compete if they have started hormone replacement therapy; female-to-male athletes can take part ‘without restriction’ but male-to-female athletes need to show lower levels of testosterone.