12 Year-Old Given Transsexual Sex Change Therapy
This is wrong. A boy decides he is a girl--a boy--and psychiatrists and doctors agree to get on with the hormones before he has even had a chance to experience puberty and perhaps come to different conclusions. The worry was that experiencing puberty would itself be traumatic for a boy who believed he is really a girl. (Surgery has to wait until 18, thank goodness.) And here's the kicker: Shades of Ashley's case: "Doctors admit that the treatment involves a risk, however, and that its effects on children as young as Kim are not fully understood." In other words, once again a child is being used in human experimentation.
Frankly, I think we are mucking up our children in so many ways, exposing them to concepts before they are really ready to understand and deal with them, treating them as if they are just diminutive adults instead of children, that we will never understand the lives we have harmed and the pain we have caused.
Yea, Yea. I know. I'm a dinosaur.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:26 PM
10 Comments
10 Comments:
I think that we're trying to give them all the options of an adult, with none of the responsibility.
Kinda cake-and-eat-it-too thing.
Now, if this kid -- heaven forbid-- shot somebody, we'd probably try him as a juvenile, because he wouldn't know any better. But when it comes to this, he's supposed to be an adult and have full knowledge?
Long live dinosaurs!
And sex change operations and therapy are wrong, even on adults. The horrific physical mutilation of the human body involved in male-to-female sex change surgery is so incredible that doctors should be prosecuted for doing it.
See, I'm even _more_ of a dinosaur. :-)
I have to disagree here. You're talking about the development of a human brain in the wrong body.
Okay. The default pattern for a baby to develop will be female, no matter whether the baby has XX or XY chromosomes. What turns a baby boy into a boy is this - during early pregnancy the mother's body produces two shocks of hormones that trigger "turn on" genes in the baby. The first one turns on the body-building gene, and the second one makes the baby's brain develop like a boy's brain.
Science has shown that baby boys and girls are *very* different from birth in how they handle and respond to stimuli. Girls focus on things differently than boys do. Ordinarily I'd cite my source, but there are a lot of them. I recommend AS NATURE MADE HIM, a true story about a boy who was rasied as a girl (and how that failed miserably) for an introduction to the notion, but there are a dozen websites out there as well with plenty of information.
What you have here is a child whose brain does not function like a boy's brain. That second burst of hormone didn't happen, and the baby ended up with a female brain in a male body.
You end up with kids who are violently traumatized as their bodies go through puberty, throwing them off balance because the body doesn't grow the way the brain knows it's supposed to. The suicide rate among transsexual adolesents is very high for this reason.
You cannot say out and out that hormone treatment in this case is bad, not without knowing all the facts: has the child attempted suicide or had suicidal thoughts? Does he inflict harm on himself. Is he having an impossible time dealing with his peers in an appropriate fashion? I'm not talking common teenage angst here, I'm talking full scale about-to-send-the-kid-to-an-asylum problems interacting with other kids because he's totally disfunctional.
Sex change operations SHOULD NOT be performed on any individual under 21 (I would say 25 because that's the earliest that all changes in the body finally settle down, but at 21 you're an adult in this country, so it's not really possible to stop folks after they're old enough to gamble). However, I'm not against the hormonal treatments IF conventional treatments (therapy, anti-depressants, etc) fail to help the child develop into a well-adjusted adult.
To put it bluntly, I am not crazy about a 12-year-old getting hormone treatement, but I'd prefer it to seeing his head on one side of the room and the contents of his brainpan on the other side. I've seen too many pictures of transsexual kids who've shot or hung themselves to be against anything that keeps these children alive.
jason, i think a century ago there was more of a sudden changeover from childhood to adulthood. People were treated like children and adults took responsibility for them until it was suddenly time for them to be adults. And we not only grew up sooner, but more completely. Now, by drawing out childhood into our twenties and thirties and beyond, we've sort of mucked up the distinction so that adults don't ever stop being children, and we don't see much difference between us and kids.
gee, at first i thought i was disagreeing with you, but now I see that you said the same thing i ended up saying: staying children causes us to treat real children as if they were adults.
Tabs, isn't it better to help the brain fit the body?
I recently met a young woman who was happy to reveal she was a "dyke" and also that she was about to start the process of becoming a man, and she was looking forward to marrying her girlfriend as man and woman. I felt terrible, but held my tongue, as she seemed very happy about it.
I was happy that she asked if I had any questions, and I did, and she was happy to tell me that she had been born intersexed, with XY chromosomes but without any sex organs, and had been turned into a girl early in life with some surgery and later on female hormones. The doctors and her parents felt this would be best for her. But she never felt right, and now is reversing all that and turning back into a man, basically just switching the hormones she had been taking and removing her breasts. So I went from thinking she was about to do something very regrettable to feeling great that she knew what she was doing and was making things right again.
But in this case, it strikes me as very different. Is this boy going to be a functioning adult male? Then it is very unconstitutional to sterilize him and make him into a girl. If on the otherhand he's intersexed and sterile already, then it's harder to figure out. I think it's best to avoid hormones and surgery though, and, for the record, officially go by the genetic sex. They can dress however they want, but the genetic sex should be recorded accurately.
Genetic sex (not just the XY vs XX but the whole genetic imprinting across the genome) determines who a person with no gonads will be able to ethically conceive with, should doctors come up with a way to make these people gametes. That would be medicine, restoring healthy functioning, and not be vain hubristic attempts at genetically engineering for the heck of it.
I'm with Lydia, long live dinosaurs like T Wes.
I wonder if complicated unnecessary things like this are driving up the cost of health insurance and sapping up "precious" resources.
Dear John,
Genetic sex vs. brain identity - that's why this is such a tough issue to decide ethically.
Making the brain fit the body would always be the best bet, but in some cases you're talking about totally re-wiring the poor baby's head!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, because I re-read your response a few times and I *think* that I know what you're trying to say, but it is very early for me and I may be misreading because I haven't had my coffee yet.
I think that one of your biggest concerns (and rightly so!) is what happens when this child grows up and wants to have a baby. You and I are both totally opposed to same-sex conception, so beleive me, this is a touchy issue for me, too. I see where you're going with following the genetic sex across the board, and that is an intelligent opinion.
This is a far-reaching issue. To be honest, the idea of "what about having kids when they grow up?" never really occurred to me. I've always been more concerned about, "what steps are being taken by the child's parents to ensure she grows up healty and happy and has the longest, best life possible?"
To that end, I haven't been opposed to hormonal treatment AFTER all conventional treatments (therapy, etc.) have been exhausted. I come right out and admit it: the best thing is to not screw up the way the kid is developing, because that can be extremely harmful to the child as she develops. But I can't get behind the "not at all" attitude.
I admit that there are a lot of consequences to either the "do nothing" or hormonal approaches, but John, sometimes stress and pain and intolerance and a body that feels totally, totally wrong can drive a poor kid crazy, and there's no way to make the brain fit better.
To All Dinosaurs:
Thank you for the lovely debate. I do disagree with some of the feelings on this topic, but I have enjoyed your responses, and I hope you never change.
Okay, I poked around on the internet a bit to see what there was out there on any scientific research about transsexuals, and there doesn't seem to be anything particularly conclusive. A lot of suggestive studies -- for example, men who have "become" women have brains more similar to brains of women than men, but no proof that this isn't somehow due to rewiring due to living as a woman; and no reason to think that whatever differences in brains there may be, that this has to carry over to a rejection of one's own physical body. The case of the boy who was raised as a girl isn't necessarily conclusive -- after all, he was actually a boy who felt he was a boy, not a girl who felt she was a boy.
What seems to be much more the case is that the individual's own strong conviction about "what they really are" is considered "proof" enough of the need for surgery.
The case of the 12 year old is troubling. In part it seems like sexual stereotypes are so strong that it's more acceptable for a boy to "become" a girl than to be an effeminate boy. And it seems likely that this boy, having been told by everyone that he's right to think he's a she and having started hormone therapy, has been brought to a point of no return. So if the transexuals are right that this situation is "being in the wrong body" in a very real sense, then fine. But I agree with the label that this is experimentation. (And even though there's no actual surgery, the longer this continues, the more difficulty he would have in "choosing" puberty as an adult.)
Betsy:
http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/brainsx.html
This is one of the better articles on the web that I've seen - most of the stuff I read comes from the enormous blue-bound books they have at the upper levels of the library (I mean medical and psychiatric journals, of course, but as an English Lit major I can't be seen fraternizing with the science geeks, now can I?).
This paragraph begins a passage that restates a lot of what you'll find in medical journals:
"At a few hours old girls are more sensitive than boys to touch. Tests between the sexes of tactile sensitivity in the hands and fingers produce differences so striking that sometimes male and female scores do not even overlap, the most sensitive boy feeling less than the least sensitive girl. When it comes to sound, infant females are much less tolerant - one researcher believes that they may "hear" noises as being twice as loud as do males. Baby girls become irritated and anxious about noise, pain or discomfort more readily that baby boys."
See, I don't read much on transsexuals after surgery because it doesn't interest me that much - most of them (I hate to say this) are so violently anti-Christian that they go out of their way to be offensive, and so I don't hang out on their websites. I've read their websites before to get more first-hand information, and while I find that they confirm a lot of what I've seen, they're not really giving me anything new, so they don't interest me.
What interests me is how the brain develops. I have my own neurotic behaviors so I like understanding the part my brain plays in how I respond to things.
That's why that snippit above is important to my opinion - the brain is hardwired from birth.
By the way, the case with the boy raised as a girl - that was a bunch of idiotic bullspit that should never have happened (I brought it up because it's kind of a starting place to work from as far as some of the arguments go).
Anyway, if a baby boy responds to stimuli like a baby girl does, and then grows up playing with dolls, and has feminine attitudes, there's a chance that his brain is wired like a her brain.
If the kid is severely traumatized by the onset of puberty to the point that allowing the changes will drive him to suicide, or make him feel so alienated that he would do himself some kind of harm, I'd rather that be avoided. Yes, many transsexuals survive puberty and grow into healthy adults, but many more don't live long enough to see what they become.
The kid was described (using my words) as being freaked out by the changes in his body. The body doesn't receive input the way his brain is trying to handle it and it's causing a wiring conflict.
Yes, it IS experimenting on the kid, and I will not say it isn't. Now, the doctors that he saw were split about how to handle the situation. Most said go ahead with the hormonal therapy, while a minority were against it.
IF the kid was as happy and well-adjusted as the article made him out to be, then he could have lived as a female without necessitating the hormonal therapy until he was older, but we don't know (from reading the limited article) just how severely traumatized by the onset of puberty Kim was.
Totally random - Why did he change his name to Kim? Isn't that a boy's name?
Anyway, if the child honestly found the changes too violent or traumatic to cope with, then give him the hormonal therapy! But I STRONGLY disagree that he should be allowed to have the surgery as young as 18, and I am agast that England was stupid enough to hurt a little 17-year-old by putting her through the surgery that young. 21, at the earliest, would be my suggestion, and 25 would be optimal, although I'm very, VERY leary of sex change surgery at all, period.
Using hormonal therapy to lessen the severeity of male hormones and help the brain and body better connect - I'm good with. Drastically altering and mutilating the body - I have to put up with it but I don't really like it.
Finally, the kid really isn't at the "point of no return" yet because until the operations take place, the body is still capable of being reprogrammed by changing the hormone treatment. Yes, breast-buds do appear and can develop, but that doesn't mean they can't be reduced or removed later on if Kim does decide that things went wrong, so long as the child hasn't gone through the surgery yet. Another good reason not to have it done, I say.
Still, I'm convinced that sometimes the brain gets wired wrong, and if the changes are too overwhelming, something should be done to soften the blow. Puberty is hard enough as it is without added difficulties.
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