Posted on 02/08/2008 10:12:20 AM PST by redrunner
The parents of an 8-year-old boy who wants to live and be treated as a girl have been working with the Douglas County School District to allow their child to attend school as a girl.
The child attended the unnamed school two years ago, and the family and the district have been talking since last fall about the child re-enrolling, said district spokeswoman Whei Wong.
"The discussion has been how best to do it," Wong said Thursday. The goal, she said, is "to ensure the kid feels safe physically and emotionally and other kids don't feel threatened in any way."
Wong said some parents have contacted school officials asking for clarification and direction. "Some parents are really concerned and freaked out about it."
A concerned parent, who asked not to be identified, told 9News, "I see this as being a very difficult situation to explain to my daughter . . . why someone would not want to be the gender they were born with."
A national nonprofit group, TransYouth Family Advocates, has provided assistance in handling the situation.
Transgender children, who are born as one sex and identify with the other, are not uncommon but are not understood by parents and society, TransYouth president Shannon Garcia said.
Parents "don't understand this is a health condition. They don't know why their children are like this, and they don't know where to find help," she said.
Society fears "what they don't understand," she said. "Gender identification and sexual orientation are two very different things."
Laura Thor, a Denver licensed clinical social worker, said parents of transgender children "are relying on the goodness and tolerance of the rest of the public to respond to this child favorably."
Schoolmates and their parents need help in becoming less uncomfortable with the child's looking different and being called by a different name, Thor said.
And I want to live like a rich person. OJ wants to be white. He should learn that he cannot have everything he wants.
If that's true ... if this is a boy being turned into a girl for political reasons, that is a ghastly thing, and all of the adults involved should be dealt with as criminals.
But I think it is wrong to pretend that we know what the real deal is, based solely on this article. We shouldn't automatically assume anything about the boy's condition simply because of who has taken up his cause.
My suspicion is that there's something real going on here. Whatever the motives and goals of the TYFA group, I seriously doubt that the parents are trying to score political points at their own kid's expense. They may be misled ... or they may have tried everything, and this seems like the most appropriate solution.
What I do not want to do, is simply dismiss for political reasons the possibility of there being something really different about this one kid.
You have that right. Very sad!!
This is terrible.
I hope kids aren’t mean to this child. It’s not the boy’s fault, it’s the parents for encouraging this. A child is not in a position of emotional maturity to make this kind of decision. By encouraging him, they’re really going to scar him.
My daughter sometimes pretends to be a puppy or a baby, but I don’t give her a collar or a pacifier and send her off to school.
As parents, we can’t control what a child does when they’re 18 and out of the house, but until then we have a responsibility to guide them, correct them, and encourage them in a positive direction.
I darn near spit a mouthful of Diet Coke on my monitor! LOL!!
Post of the Day!!!!
He needs to be Homoschooled.
/sarcasm
Absent any physiological problem, I don't understand why this kind of situation is not treated as delusion. Does the medical community indulge delusional people or do they try to ascertain why the person is in denial of reality and try to fix it?
I'm concerned that politics is interfering with treatment for mentally ill people. I have all the sympathy in the world for people who are ill. It can't be at all easy to not fit in your universe. I'm not even sure whether delusions can be well treated!
I'd feel a whole lot better if someone with knowledge and authority came forward and explained that delusions are stubborn things and in cases where people can function relatively normally, we've decided it's better to just go with it.
If the child wanted to ‘live as ‘ Attila the Hun, would they be working on a way to let him do it? How about if he wanted to ‘live as’ a chicken, a dog, a grandmother, a US Senator?
What madness is this to enable a MENTALLY ILL child to ‘live as’ anything he is NOT??
If you think you’re something you’re not- gender or species-wise, there is something mentally wrong with you.
The kid needs serious psychiatric help, not a way to enable his sickness.
He can’t be any worse than any of our current senators. Seriously though, he needs help, not to be encouraged in this nonsense.
I don’t want gross anyone else out but wait until ‘she’ learns to say pleasure herself. Then we’ll see how much she wants to say goodbye to Mr. Happy.
8 years old is too young. I’ve have met people that I honestly thought were in the wrong body but not at 8!
Again, I think you need to be careful about making sweeping generalizations. It may not be clear why a kid "wants to be" a girl or a boy -- it may be a delusion, or there may be some underlying cause that we don't recognize.
The goal should always be to do what's best for the kid -- though it may not be obvious what is best.... If you treat him for "delusions," you may actually end up doing him more harm than good.
Anyway, I think things like this are best handled on a case-by-case basis. They are rare enough, and different enough, that making any sort of global decision is probably not warranted.
Boy wants to return to school as a girl.
He's in 2nd grade!
Ditto.
First, is that the article doesn't indicate that he's anything but physically normal. They clearly call him a boy and don't make any mention of gender confusion at birth and that his parents made the wrong choice. I would expect them to do that to play the sympathy angle. And also this from the article, Transgender children, who are born as one sex and identify with the other,
It clearly calls him transgender, and defines it, not hermaphrodite.
Second, the article says this about him-The parents of an 8-year-old boy who wants to live and be treated as a girl... .
I says it's the boy's decision and it's what HE wants.
Last, any information about the parents is strangely missing. I would expect the media to really play it up if Dad was defending this decision.
As to the missing comments from the parents.... that's what makes me think there is something more to it than just what the kid "wants."
As usual, I think it is best not to form any firm opinion based on what this one news story says.
I guess we just interpret the clues differently. If it weren’t for specially created victim groups constantly pulling stuff like this, I’d be less suspicious. All it does is hurt the people who really do have problems.
Either way, the point is making an issue of it and trying to force everyone to accept this situation. The suggestion that they homeschool and move and re-enroll him/ her/whatever into another school where no one knows his history, is a good one.
I don’t see this succeeding and the one who’s going to suffer the most is the boy.
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