Should teenagers who believe they are transgender be helped to change sex? And if so, what about the four-year-olds who feel the same way? Viv Groskop meets the parents and doctors in favour of intervention
'She was our first child," recalls Sarah (not her real name), a mother of two who lives in the south of England. "But from age three we knew something was wrong. She was very introverted, isolated. When she started school at four she came home and said she was a freak. It seemed a strange word for a four-year-old to use. She was always quite a sad little person."
Sarah's daughter was born and grew up as a boy. Now 19, she is far happier in a woman's body as a post-operative transsexual. It took two years for the family to get used to calling her "she". Her mother says her daughter experienced her childhood as mental torture, especially during puberty. "Looking back, we could never find any tape in the house. It was because she was taping her genitals up every day. She said to us later that she thought it would all go right for her at puberty, that her willy would drop off and she would grow breasts. She said she was going completely crazy because she knew in her head that she was a girl."
One day, when her daughter was 14, Sarah walked in on her in her bedroom. "She was there in front of the mirror with her genitals tucked away. She was very embarrassed. I said, 'I don't know what's happening here but if you want to talk to me, you can.' About 10 minutes later she came and lay on the bed next to me and said, 'I want to be a girl. I'm not a boy. My body is wrong. Everything is wrong.'" For Sarah, this was more than shocking: "I had watched programmes on transgender, I'm very interested in people, it's part of who I am to find out about these things ... But you never imagine it's going to happen to you."
Sarah sought help from her GP - who laughed. Eventually, her daughter got a referral to the one London clinic that deals with gender identity disorder in children and adolescents. But obtaining treatment on the NHS in her daughter's mid-teens was slow and difficult. Several suicide attempts followed and the family remortgaged their house to pay for private hormone treatment. Once Sarah's daughter was 18, they also paid for an operation abroad.
The plight of children with gender identity disorder has made headlines this year. In February an inquest was held into the death of Cameron McWilliams, a 10-year-old boy from Doncaster, who hanged himself. The court heard that he had asked permission to wear makeup and girls' underwear. "It was apparent he was unhappy and said he wanted to be a girl," his mother said. "He did like girls' things." Later the same month Lawrence King, 15, from Oxnard, California, who described himself as "gender non-conforming" and was a victim of school bullying, was shot to death in a science laboratory by another pupil.
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