When I was 7 years old, I became convinced that I wasn’t a human being. I was, in fact, a Genie, who had escaped from an alternate reality called “Cartoonland” just before I was “born.” My real name was Johnny the Genie. The name my parents had given me at birth was “Roger”; I figured out that my real name was Johnny because “Johnny” sounded like “Genie”. It is only because I was trapped in this reality that my magical Genie powers didn’t work. If I could find the portal that I got here through, I could go through it again, the other way, and get back to Cartoonland where I belonged. I was convinced that the portal between this reality and Cartoonland was a billboard in Minnesota. (I was born in Minnesota, but was living in California when I was 7.)
I continued to believe this for over 2 years.
So, should my parents have enrolled me in school under the name “Johnny” and told the teacher and the principal, in all seriousness, that I was a Genie trapped in a boy’s body? Should they have dressed me in clothing reminiscent of I Dream of Jeanie?
You’re not actually trying to equate transgenderism with thinking you are a cartoon Genie, are you?
Were you, to paraphrase the OP, “diagnosed with Genie Identity Disorder (GID) by a psychiatrist”? How do you equate the two? These parents had support of a psychiatrist, they weren’t just unilaterally coming to this decision.
i don’t know if you are being serious and honest tracer. if you did indeed believe and insist you were a cartoon character for two years i would think your parents would probably have sought some sort of professional help. was there any diagnosis??
if you are being disingenuous then perhaps you should try to get to know someone who identifies as transgender. it is not an easy life, and you seem to think that since your gender and genitals match that everyone else’s do as well. there is actually variation and diversity in the world. we are not clones. try to get out into the world a bit.
They sought professional help alright. But they didn’t believe in going to “mainstream” psychiatrists. They took me to a therapist who practiced, ahem, “Medical Orgone Therapy” according to the guidelines of The American College of Orgonomy. His diagnosis was that I was “orgastically impotent” and needed several months or even years of character-restructuring therapy before I could become a healthy “orgastically potent” individual again. (Funny, the so-called medical orgonomists seem to diagnose orgastic impotence in just about everybody.) My parents believed him. And he was a licensed M.D., which meant his word as a psychiatrist was as good as any “mainstream” psychiatrist’s was.
I shudder to think what would have happened if the American College of Orgonomy did view “Genie Identity Disorder” as a real condition…
So, tracer, your point (assuming you have one) is what? That you were fucked up as a child and unfortunately didn’t ever get much better (except for the whole Cartoonland thing)?
Again, I think the point needs to be made that I don’t think the parents have taken this issue lightly. For six years this child has known that something is terribly not right with the way he is.
There is the possibility that this boy does not have a gender identity crisis. However, would all of you doubting, junior Dr. Laura’s want to be the ones responsible for forcing this child to live his entire life as one, long, horrible, painful lie just so you could feel better about how nature works? Well, I’m sure his parents don’t either.
A friend of mine has a 5 year old boy that loves girl things. He will be starting kindergarten this year and they are hoping that he will outgrow it but I have serious doubts. Ever since he was a baby he has loved high heels, make-up, Barbie and his favorite color is pink. He wants to be a princess at Halloween. He askes for Barbie things for Christmas. He tells ladies things like “I like your outfit.” He used come to my house and hang out with me while I cooked supper. He’d ask if he could wear my lipstick. He’d want his nails painted but say he couldn’t cause “daddy would be mad.” He hasn’t yet shown any signs of “outgrowing” his obcession with “girlie” things. His mother jokes with me about it but I don’t think his father is terribly amused. They try to guide him toward more “gender appropriate” activities but it doesn’t work. At day care he’d rather play dress up and with the kitchen stuff than with the trucks and cars.
His mom and I talk about it occasionally. I told her with his love for fashion perhaps one day he will grow up to be a successful, famous fashion designer. He really does have an eye for it. Sometimes things just happen this way. If I hadn’t seen it for myself I might not believe it either. I also grew up with two people who are gay and it was pretty apparent from an early age that they were exactly who they are.
I think it a shame that the local social services would take a child out of a loving home when they so often ignore many others that are clearly in much more danger.
We pay such lip service to letting kids be themselves… in fact, if themselves are the slightest bit against the grain, they are encouraged to be as unlike themselves as is necessary to get people to put up with them, whether that means not wearing black or not wearing satin.
There was a (nonfiction) book published within the last six months or so concerning a pair of twins.
When they were born (both were boys), there was an accident during one of the circumcisions, and most of the penis was removed. The parents had to make a decision, and after consulting with their doctor, decided to remove the rest of the genitalia, perform some surgeries, and raise that child as a girl. They gave it a female name, performed some hormone treatments, and raised the child as a female.
The problem was, the child knew from a very early age that he wasn’t female. Despite the cues he was being given–his name, clothing, hair, appearance, treatment–he just never felt right.
Eventually he was told the truth, and suffered years of psychological horrors because of what he had undergone. Some time after reaching adulthood, he retook his male identity.
I think this goes to show that gender identity can be very powerful at a very young age, and can quite often conflict heavily with the cultural and family cues you are being given.
Now now, the seriousness of this child’s feminine identification is great enough without having to exaggerate.
(S)he is indeed six years old, but Drain Bead’s article gives no indication that (s)he started acting explicitly like a girl until age two. So really, this child has “only” known that something is terribly not right with the way (s)he is for four years.
These parents are very brave. I hope that in future years they will be remembered as trendsetters and pioneers in gender.
Interestingly enough, just last night I saw a show on the discovery channel called “Is it a boy or a girl?”. It was about gender roles. It talked about how your sex is much more fluid than most people know, and how it can actually change.
In the dominican republic, there are quite a few people who actually change sex when they hit puberty. These parents should be letting the child do what it wants. If it wants to be called a girl, let them. the pain of having our sexuallity repressed is something that is very terrible. Bettter to be open and deal with it now.
I commented in the other thread, and I’ll say it again here: I don’t think, whatever the decision, that it was best left up to a six year old to make. Regardless of the truth behind GID, the decision to raise him as boy or girl is not a fit one for a child who has no conception of what is in store.
I freely admit to having no personal inking of what this disorder might feel like. Would it be better to live a painful lie or a painful truth? Which, ultimately, will allow the child to be happiest? How does one weigh the pain of self-denial against the pain of ostracism and vilification? Either way, I don’t see a whole lot of loving acceptance coming from the community at large. I hope wherever this kid ends up, he gets to stay in one community. If he ends up moving around the country and has to face new rounds of societal condemnation everywhere he goes, that would be even more difficult.
Oh, wait, I think I’ve thought of a point I was making! (Can I retroactively have a point to make? )
Is it possible that the child wanted to be treated like a girl, not because he really honestly was a little transsexual, but because he felt that girls were more “special” than boys? Did he have older sisters which wielded power over him, or who got specific kinds of attention that he didn’t get but craved? The reason I came down with “Genie Identity Disorder” (ha! I love that name) was that being a Genie made me feel special, while being an ordinary little boy who could get beat up by the neighborhood kids made me feel inferior.
And how did the psychiatrist diagnose the child’s Gender Identity Disorder? What’s the protocol for diagnosing G.I.D. in someone who is only 5 years old? A decade ago, huge numbers of little kids were cajoled into telling their interrogators that they were sexually abused, because the interrogators asked biased, leading questions and the kids wanted to say the right things. How did the diagnosing psychiatrist in this case keep from asking leading questions?
It’s certainly true that ones gender identity, even from a very early age, is something that one feels very strongly about and would not be inclined to “fake” for the sake of attention. But there may be exceptions. Even adults have been convinced ther were transsexual, for whatever reason, only to later discover during the real-life trial in a few cases that they were really just confused. (One of my intersex friends, who knew a lot of pre-op TS’s, knew someone who fit into the “confused” category and decided he really wasn’t a woman in a man’s body after all.) Maybe the little boy sensed that his parents “really” wanted a girl, and tried to live up to their expectations. We just don’t have enough data about this case to be sure.
I feel the best thing the parents can do is to be supportive. In all likelyhood the attitude of the child will not change with age. Better she accept and deal with it now from supportive parents, rather than ones that try to stick her in a life he doesn’t belong in.
**
Exactly. Since the parents can’t be sure what will be worse. The best they can do is support the child. The urges don’t go away. That is why he needs the love and acceptance of the parents.
I agree with this. However, a part of the debate here stems from the fact that people are labeling this situation as absurd and ridiculous because of the gender switch in general. While it is true that those of us attempting to defend the parents in the OP do not know the full story (Was he molested at some point? Is his mother especially domineering? Does he have lots of female cousins? etc. ) those who are ridiculing the situation also do not have the full story. They have never interacted with this child to see how he/she really is. They don’t know how the child feels when he/she is referred to as the wrong sex. They don’t know how wrong it feels to have a penis rather than a vagina. They don’t know how disgusted the child may feel when looking at his/her own body and seing all the wrong parts.
Just as we can’t be sure that the kid really does have a gender identity crisis, neither can we be sure that he/she doesn’t.
From our private conevrsations, I was led to believe that what the couple did was under the auspicies of a treatment which this respected non-quack doctor gave as an option.
At this point, while the state might want to look at this doctor for the treatments (s)he is proscribing, the parents were simply doing what a medical professional told them to do. As such, I think that the parents are getting a bum rap here.
The issue becomes quite murky to me if there is no doctor and the parents were doing this on their own. I’m not sure where I would stand in such a case. But as outlined in this real case, I think it’s relatively cut and dried.
Yer pal,
Satan
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“proscribing” or “prescribing”?
(And non-quack or not, I still wanna know what the protocol is for diagnosing Gender Identity Disorder in a pre-pubescent child, and how it’s been tested.)
I think the parents were doing their best, seeking professional help, and as others mentioned, yanking the kid from a loving home won’t help him in any way.
This is not entirely on topic, but definitely related. It seems that people whose gender doesn’t match their sex are compelled to participate in the most stereotypical behavior of the gender they identify with. (I have also noticed this in some of the gay men I’ve known - they prance, giggle, and act hyperbolically girly. I haven’t known many lesbians, so I can’t really speak to that.)
I am a woman, I have never had any gender confusion, and if societal demands allowed me to eschew makeup and long hair, I’d do it in a hot second. I don’t wear high heels or skirts to work. So why does it seem transgendered folk feel the need to go overboard with gender cues? Is it that the media pay more attention to such people, so we don’t see the more moderate behavior? Is it overcompensation - when you have a penis, I guess you may feel long hair and plenty of makeup are required to counterbalance that. Any thoughts?
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